Your thoughts on air interception probability

[MatteM]

Well progress is moving forward on my "massive amount of content"-mod, which I intend to release sometime this fall, and I have reached the era or World War 1. I am in the process of adding all the aircraft of the era.

One thought I was having was the interception probability for fighters. In this time period, aircraft was
mostly effective in the role of scouting for enemy troops and guiding artillery, and it seems that fighters
mostly patrolled the skies over the front rather than acting as point defence - interceptors. Now the standard
value for interception probability for the vanilla-units is 100% but this would hardly be realistic for world
war 1 as there was no air defence network as such. I am adding lot's of new promotions as well, one of the
promotions for early fighters is "Ground observer corps" which will raise interception probability by a good amount, but what ought the standard probability be? I have set it now to 0.30, but I am thinking this is a bit low and might overpower the early bomber units. Do you think it would cripple the fighters and make it less fun?

Later models will of course have a higher number.

 

[ChaosSlayer]

Important note here: Interception from aircraft to aircraft doesn't mean automatic kill - it only means that these two will engage in a fight. The mission itself be interrupted, but who will win the fight is unknown.
In either case I set my values like that:

WW1 Biplane - intercept 50%
WW2 Fighter - intercept 75%
Cold War early Jets fighter - intercept 100%
Modern Jet fighter - intercept 100%, evade 25%

of course there are also promotions for Evade and Intercept.

 

[MatteM]

Ok, that sounds reasonable, I might adjust the probability upwards a bit, starting at 0.4 perhaps. Another thing I have noticed is that all air units seem to be able to air strike (though not bombard),
and as I gather it uses the "air strength"- value for calculating the air strike effect? Or am I missing something. Either way that makes the role of interceptor hard to design since their strength vs other air units is supposed to be high but not against ground units in the strike mode.

 

[ChaosSlayer]

well there are 2 possibilities:

a) give interceptor a combat bonus vs a bomber (i am not sure if this will actually work because air combat is different from normal combat)

b) give interceptor a penalty vs land/sea units (this one SHOULD work)

 

[MatteM]

Ok, I think I will try b) out, that is the <DomainMods> tag I gather?

Edit: I see that Firaxis has implemented this, they have a -50 DomainMod vs
Sea unit for bombers.