Fighters always being on air superiority is an interesting idea, although it would make the air sup. mission and fortify states redundant. That is unless fortify doesn't count as air sup., which would make sense since it could be used for healing instead, but then you'd never have air units end their turns with unspent moves unless the turn was force-ended without all units moved. Skipping a unit's turn removes all its remaining moves.
I don't know if it's doable, but the way I envision it is like this: As long as there are fighters present in a city, they will always scramble to protect the city. No matter which orders they've been given. The exception would be if they have already made an
active move that turn, like Bombing, Precision Bombing, Reconnaissance, or Rebase. Then they are considered to be out of the city for that turn and not available for defense. Passive moves like Fortify, Sentry, and of course Air Superiority would make them eligible to defend. Even Skip Turn, I believe, because it's a passive move; they haven't really done anything that turn, even though it expends their movement. If there are no incoming airstrikes during the current turn, then they can heal etc. like normal. But the defense of the city takes precedense over everything else, including healing.
Can limit the number of escorts the AI assigns to its naval transports -- Normally the AI will assign between 1 and 3 escorts for each of its naval transports depending on the shield cost of the transport and the number of units it's carrying. Now you can reduce the upper limit from 3 to 2, 1, or even 0. This has the effect of freeing up the AI's naval power units to battle for control of the seas and bombard enemy shores. The catch is AI naval transports will not be as well defended.
Glad you are looking into this, that is another issue I've been wanting to fix.
But on that note, it would be nice if you also looked at the way the AI escorts artillery. The fact that the AI even uses artillery offensively at all is very nice, and enriches the game a lot. But the AI tends to use too many escorts for each artillery piece. It seems the goal is to have 2 defenders per 1 artillery. It's not uncommon to encounter stacks with 30 Artillery and 50-60 Infantry, making the stack very hard to defeat. Usually it will target one of your cities and keep pounding it forever, leaving it a pile of rubble. But while the AI could easily defeat the city if it had only detached a few of those Infantry to follow up and attack the defenders (to take advantage of them being redlined), the whole operation is often counterproductive for the AI. At the standard C3X setting, the AI will build 1:6 of its land army as artillery (20 vs 100). The escorts account for another 2:6, totalling 3:6, or half the army. That leaves too little room for other attack units to exploit the devastation caused by the artillery. Even the AIs own city defenses may be a bit lackluster because of it. Furthermore, if someone picks off a few of the stack defenders, the AI will tend to move the "surplus" artillery (which the AI now thinks isn't adequately defended) undefended out of the stack, as sitting ducks.
I think a lot of the artillery issues can be fixed like this: Reduce artillery production from 1:6 to about 1:8. And only keep 1 defender per artillery piece (can probably be achieved in a similar way as reducing naval escorts). This means only a quarter of the army will be tied up (1:8 + 1:8). And finally the AI shouldn't send "surplus" artillery pieces out of the stack, no matter how few defenders there are.
More Mass orders:
The Mass orders that are already activated (like Mass Fortify) are very nice, but it would be even better if you could also activate some of the remaining ones too. Like: Mass Skip Turn, Mass Wait, and maybe Mass Sentry too. Why: In a large stack of units, for example aircraft in a city, it is often not desirable to Fortify the entire stack. Because, first of all, you need to remember to wake them up again the next turn. And then you may not want to wake up every unit in the city, for example if there is a large number of city defenders you want to remain fortified, but you want the aircraft operable. Sometimes it makes more sense to Mass Skip Turn all remaining units, or make an entire stack Mass Wait, to move other units first.
Riots instead of flipping:
I believe there should be some kind of mechanism that reflects the difficulties of keeping newly conquered cities in check. However, I think that the current scheme of "Culture Flipping" is much to harsh and unrealistic. If you're unlucky, you could lose big chunks of your army or airforce, while also losing control of the city itself. I'm thinking maybe there could be a high chance of riots instead. Like there may sometimes be a riot after several turns of civil unrest in a city. The city stops being productive, there's a smokestack above it, buildings are destroyed etc. Possibly some population could get killed too, or some units get injured. But the city remains under your control, and no units are lost. Don't know if this last idea is achievable, just throwing it out there. I know a lot of Civers dislike the flipping mechanic, it would be nice to replace it with something more reasonable.
