Unit Suggestion - Air Recon Fleet

[Edwin P.]

Air Recon Fleet

Purpose: Spot enemy land and naval units.

Summary: This unit would allow either side to deploy limited number of reduced strength air fleets for the purpose of scouting out enemy positions.

Properties:

Cost: 200MPP

Cannot Intercept

Max Strength: 3 (Increases by 1 for every level in jet tech)

Spotting Range: 4 (Increases by 1 for every level in long range)

Attack Range: 2

[ May 02, 2004, 02:42 PM: Message edited by: Edwin P. ]

[jon_j_rambo]

this could work. But why so expensive?

[Edwin P.]

I was thinking that the expense should force players to make a choice - one combat ready airfleet or 2 Recon Air Fleets. You could reduce it to say 175 or 150MPP and still get the same effect. One also does not want to see these recon air units poping up everywhere and thus serverly curtailing the FOW that makes this game so enjoyable. In fact, one may even want to limit this unit to the AI in some games.

As with all suggestions the final cost should be left for play testing.

The key is that this unit is not a combat unit, its an intelligence unit. The Italians might use it to watch over the Med while the allies might assign one to Iceland.

[ May 02, 2004, 11:55 PM: Message edited by: Edwin P. ]

[Grapeshot]

Instead of of Recon unit, how about a tech. Once reasearched, your airfleets could be designated to recon for a turn. The higher in the recon tech, the farther range/greater information received by your air units set to recon. I imagine you wouldn't have a fleet of recon units, just recon units inside of a fighter corp.

[ev]

Air fleets as represented in SC are huge.

You only need a few planes to effectively recon a huge area. And, probably army commanders could request air recon during WWII even if they did not have a whole air fleet under their command. In fact, artillery spoters in the US and German armies sometimes flew in staff planes to observe enemy positons. And, I think some WWII battleships had small amphibian planes that could do limited recon. - I am pretty sure the Japs did.

Of course, the problem is that recon planes would not fair very well in the presence of enemy air combat units.

One way to incorporate air recon into SC would be to allow Land and Naval Units a somewhat longer viewing range, that would extend only into spaces that are outside of enemy air unit range. In other words, the presence of enemy air units would hinder air recon performed by the small service plances attached to the land and naval units.

The air recon range of Land and Naval units could be subject to tech research increase. Though, I doubt players would invest heavily in this kind of research.

[Komet-163]

Why have Recon Units when the game's simple yet effective Sight value works well enough since. e.g your infantary units only have of sight of say a hex beyound their current position, thats because recon teams are on foot and can only go so far, tank groups recon teams are usually mobile and have older and obsolete veichles that are only suitable for recon. air recon already takes place in that you can see 4 hex's into enemy territory provided your air fleet is near the front. So recon does take place in SC 1 and to complicate it would ruin the game's simplicity