Thanks tjs282. Do you know whether a fortified flak unit behaves any differently than a sentry one? Will they both fire at enemy planes?
I think so. Flaks (and MobSAMs) don't have a D-value, do they? So fortifying them makes no difference to their AA-defensive capability.
You mention C3C. I remember that I used to see enemy armies. That must have been in an earlier version of the game. I wonder why they wiped those out? Made the AI too powerful?
No, I don't think it was deliberate. The AI could use Armies just fine in Vanilla and PtW, but Armies were not as powerful as they could/should have been (e.g. a 3-Cav Army having only 1 attack per turn, compared to using 3 individual Cavs for 3 attacks per turn), so they got seriously buffed for Conquests (A/D-bonus, +1MP vs slowest unit in Army, blitz, MP-free pillaging).
However, (Lanzelot thinks that) Firaxis forgot to adjust the AI's Army-use routines accordingly, and something came unstuck. So the C3C-AI can still build Armies, but it can't load them properly any more, because it can't find units to match what's already in the Army. We discussed it a little over
in this thread.
New question: what exactly does a fighter do when ordered to perform an 'air superiority' mission?
It means the Fighter has a 50%(?) probability of being scrambled against an incoming air-attacker during the following IBT(s), until you tell it to do something else instead, i.e. once you've set it to A-S, you shouldn't have to keep renewing that order on subsequent turns (provided you've de-selected the 'Cancel orders...' boxes in your Preferences!).
One interception is possible per Fighter per IBT, with the outcome of each interception determined by the pRNG (as for land and sea units), based on the Fighter's A-value vs. the incoming attacker's D-value, with no. of combat-rounds based on total HP. So usually an intercepting vFighter will win -- but not always, especially if it's being forced to make interception-runs on several successive IBTs, but is stationed in a city without an Airport, so isn't getting its HP fully-restored each turn.
(Without an Airport, a damaged air-unit has to be fortified to recover its HP -- at a rate of 1HP per turn, IIRC -- or you can Re-base it to an Airport-city to get fully repaired in 1T; but either way, you'd better already have another Fighter in your frontline city to do A-S duty, because you can't set a Fighter to A-S on the same turn as you Re-base it).
Also, Fighters on A-S missions only ever seem to get scrambled to defend cities, not the BFC-tiles -- so you might also want to station a Flak/MobSAM and an Inf/MechInf (in a Fortress?) on any vulnerable resource-tiles (and maybe also put a Radar Tower in the vicinity)...
And finally, since the AI knows where all your units are, it may choose not to risk its Bombers against cities where your Fighters are stationed in the first place...
