Some things that could be improved about air support

JaGarLo

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Feb 26, 2011
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261
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There (points with his finger)
Although air combat has improved in Civ5 I think there is room for improvement. Here are a couple of issues:

1. The game doesn't tell you how much damage is your air unit going to take. It appears as a "ranged attack" and therefore, it wouldn't take damage. However, even if there are no interceptions, your plane still gets hurt. It would be nice if you can predict the damage you're going to receive.

2. Using air units one at a time is kinda annoying. It gets worse if you (or an AI) are using WW1 air forces. Let us use them all of them together, just like in Civ4.

3. No limit air unit stack. I find it a bit OP having 10 bombers and 5 fighters in a city ready to destroy the enemy units/cities.

I got some ideas to improve air combat:

- Limit the number of air units you can put in a city, like 3 or 4 or something.

- Let us know how much damage is our unit going to take, if there is risk of interception, etc.

- Nerf the defense of AA units a bit.

- Allow us to see a tactical map that indicates how many times can your air units get intercepted for each title (but only with enemy units that are in our LOS!).

- Let us use all our bombers together.

- Allow the Atomic Bomb to be intercepted (if it still can't).

- Allow Nuclear Missiles to be intercepted (with SAM's or Jet Fighters).

That's all. What do you guys think? ;)

P.D.: I also see that when bombing cities, the less HP the city has, the less damage an air unit takes when attacking it. Maybe we could use that for melee units...?
 
Definitely agree with #1 not knowing you are going to take damage is significant

I think that interception should result in a combat ( where the interceptor and interceptee both take damage)

AA/SAM units should be more specialized (less good at ground combat better at interception)

Atomic bombs should be interceptable...I don't think nuclear missles should though. (But i think nuclear missiles should be revised so that you counter them with MAD... ie, they don't kill units.. Just totally destroy pop/buildings/tiles and cripple units... so the other person can retaliate with their full force)

I think the decreased damage bombers take from a low hp city is a bug.
 
How about fighters that will intercept bombers attacking cities??? That seems to have been removed and its quite annoying.
 
My fix for the wait time of large air engagements is to simply make the damage done/received track instantly, but then the animation takes its time to do its thing. Possibly even longer than now. The key is that you get to instantly move on to the next unit. This does two things:

1. Greatly streamlines this whole aspect of late-game warfare, which desperately needs it
2. As a bonus, if you're quick, you could get a whole fleet of air units attacking a city or a battle line and it would look awesome - a win win IMO.


Otherwise, I also agree that ground-to-air support could use some tweaking. They shouldn't be as strong in ground-to-ground engagements.

But honestly, this is a minor issue compared to AI warfare in general in this game. It has improved over the last couple years, but there are still some glaring flaws.
 
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