Anyone else find Close Air Support Useless?

[Anonymous_Jonze]

I find they never hit with their bombs and seem to machine gun random little bits of infantry instead of priority targets. Am I missing something here? It almost seems like a waste of points to bring air power to a battle in all of the ww2 games. Air support changed the battlefield in ww2 but I'd honestly take arty over air support anyday. 

[MikeyD]

I recall in one of the WWII titles (I forget which) Steve told scenario designers explicitly to leave air power out of 'official' scenarios. He considered close air support along the line of contact of ground forces to be a-historical, for the most part. He just included air power in WWII because CMSF modern war had got air power so he left it in as a sop to QB players just for fun. Was it game engine upgrade 3 when they removed the player control over aircraft targeting from WWII titles?

Modern war of course is very different, they've even included drones directly controlled by the ground troops.

Edited July 20, 2020 by MikeyD

[Hapless]

The AI doesn't care, but air power has immense psychological value against human opponents.

IIRC it gets significantly cheaper as 1944 goes on. By Final Blitzkrieg a strafing P-47 costs 30 points. That's not bad for 8 .50 cal MGs and 2400 rounds of ammo, but when you consider that you can buy ten of them and an FO for the cost of a Panther... quantity has a quality all of its own!

[Anonymous_Jonze]

18 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

I recall in one of the WWII titles (I forget which) Steve told scenario designers explicitly to leave air power out of 'official' scenarios. He considered close air support along the line of contact of ground forces to be a-historical, for the most part. He just included air power in WWII because CMSF modern war had got air power so he left it in as a sop to QB players just for fun. Was it game engine upgrade 3 when they removed the player control over aircraft targeting from WWII titles?

Modern war of course is very different, they've even included drones directly controlled by the ground troops.

Thanks for the reply! This makes sense to me. Close AIr Support for ground troops does seem like a strategy that probably wouldn't have come to full fruition by the time of 1944, so I can see the historical relevance for not making them obscenely powerful.

[Anonymous_Jonze]

7 minutes ago, Hapless said:

The AI doesn't care, but air power has immense psychological value against human opponents.

IIRC it gets significantly cheaper as 1944 goes on. By Final Blitzkrieg a strafing P-47 costs 30 points. That's not bad for 8 .50 cal MGs and 2400 rounds of ammo, but when you consider that you can buy ten of them and an FO for the cost of a Panther... quantity has a quality all of its own!

This is true. I think I watched one of your video's (based on your sn) where you absolutely pounded the Germans across a river in CMFB. It also requires the opponent to spend points on AA.

[com-intern]

I've been playing around with doing some "deep" battles. Imagine a pretty standard COY scale battle except the map is more battalion size or more. Aircraft within these style maps seem to be much more effective since there is an actual rear area. Whereas what you normally get is a knife fight battle where the difference between the front and rear area is maybe 100 meters of wood or a knoll.

[Bulletpoint]

On 7/20/2020 at 9:05 AM, Anonymous_Jonze said:

It also requires the opponent to spend points on AA.

Problem is, AA is pretty much useless.

I played a user-made scenario some time ago where the player gets more than 20 AA vehicles (three or four guns each) against only two attacking aircraft. I played the mission several times, and the average result was that after 30 minutes, one of the two planes had been shot down. And there was no notable decrease in the number of times the planes attacked or their accuracy.

That a strafing place costs 30 points seems to be a simple typo in the cost table, like when rocket artillery cost way less than they should.