What exactly is an Air Sweep?

[kamex]

Does it prevent future air attacks in the area from being intercepted or something?

Its always been a mystery to me. Can somebody explain?

 

[TPQ]

Does it prevent future air attacks in the area from being intercepted or something?

Its always been a mystery to me. Can somebody explain?

As far as I understand, it will get your fighters to engage enemy fighters, so you can send in your bombers without risking them being shot down.

 

[kamex]

Isn't that the same as intercept? :S

 

[ratatosk]

Intercept is a defensive mission, you intercept enemy bombers/air sweeps sent against your units or cities. Air Sweep is an offensive mission, making enemy fighters/anti-air/destroyers/cruisers/sams use their intercepts on your fighter instead of on your bombers.

 

[Pazyryk]

A sweep can also use up a defensive attack from an anti-air gun, which can't then defend against a subsequent air attack. I'm not absolutely sure but I think you are basically "soaking" up these defensive attacks on a unit-for-unit basis. So do air sweeps until there is no more air defense response on a given turn, then send bombers. If the AI has no air defense, then this is not needed (but a single sweep can be used to verify that they have no air defense).

 

[vexing]

it's an attack with no direct target, which will soak up one anti aircraft attack.

 

[JaGarLo]

In other words, your fighter takes the AA fire so your bombers can do their mission without being shot down. Cool.

 

[Monthar]

Deleted due to trolling

 

[vexing]

The fighter doesn't exactly absorb the AA defenses as others have said, because doing so would result in the fighter getting shot down or at least severely damaged. Instead it flies an evasive pattern through the enemy AA zones in the path you plan to send your bomber, thus when the AA fires it's defensive shots for the turn most of them miss due to the fighter's higher maneuverability. It may take several fighters to "clear" the path for the bombers.

One thing to keep in mind though, if attacking a city, the city itself can still fire at the bombers you send. The air sweep is only for getting units, not cities, to use up their AA shots.

this is incorrect in about every respect.

 

[Marginal]

How many tiles away can AA-guns and fighters intercept?

 

[vexing]

How many tiles away can AA-guns and fighters intercept?

it's based on their "range" attribute
aa gun and mobile sam 2
destroyer 2
missile cruiser 3
fighter 8
jet fighter 10

 

[Nyanko]

AFAIK Air Sweeps also damage AA units, such as fighters and SAMs when they intercept. So thats another use for it

 

[vexing]

AFAIK Air Sweeps also damage AA units, such as fighters and SAMs when they intercept. So thats another use for it

no, they do not.

 

[kurtkage]

Sweep will become much more useful if/when the AI starts putting fighters on intercept missions.

As it stands the only reason to use Sweep instead of simply Attacking the AA/SAM unit is that Sweep does not appear to incur as much damage to your fighter as a direct attack *I do not have concrete evidence of this, simply what I recall noticing in the past, need to test it more*. But sweep also inflicts no damage to the target so it feels kind of a wash to me because a normal attack will also "use up" an intercept from an AA unit, while also damaging it..

But again as I said, if there were enemy fighters on intercept sweep would make alot more sense as from what I've seen my intercept fighters don't tend to take damage when intercepting AI aircraft. I will see the AI do an attack run, see my intercept fighter go after them, then on my turn click the intercept fighter and see no damage to it.

 

[MadDjinn]

fighters get bonuses for Sweeps, and -50% damage for 'ranged attacks'. So, the sweep is by far the better choice.

Keep in mind that the sweep only works for the tile you choose. So, taking the range of interceptors into consideration, you can only be 'sure' that the one specific tile as been cleared. So it's not an 'all clear' for an area unless you can actually count all of the potential AA on the map.

 

[janat08]

I imagine if you're using fighters on carriers there's no point in promoting air sweeps since intercept is the default state for fighters (intercept=fortify), especially if you have "air repair" which heals you every turn after an action at which point taking the timeout every so often to stand on intercept won't hurt after "air sweeping" with attacking (as air sweeps don't do damage to intercepting fighters I imagine with the intercept=fortify).

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Please do not necro 6 year old threads. The game changed significantly after the date of the last post, so there is risk of reinforcing outdated information. Feel free to open a new thread on the same topic. This thread is closed.