Expensive Test Nav

Is that cannon turret worth it? And yeah, heavy mg s are hard to beat. Cannons twos are pretty okay, but they come late.

@123 Like, you wouldn't need to do an insane amount to make more weapons worth it, but it would take a refinement of paradox's abstraction to really fix the gun irregularity. I'm not fully sure of anything here, I was playing with the clay of a very agile, super expensive carrier fighter to use the effectiveness multipliers of carrier fighters to push forward a really expensive craft effectively. (Its like, a 1.5x multiplier to 10x depending on the mission, and no, I don't really remember which is which.) ___________ My concept for a gun rebalance is that nose mounted guns (what we rename the 1x can, or 2x MG's) get a greater % of the maximum attack, and a lower % of the agility penalty, so they are cheaper and more cost effective with some other bonuses. (Say like, 60-70% attack, and 80% weight and agility penalty, half IC cost.) - You are limited on nose guns on small airframes, especially on a single engine, and on early hulls. Late medium hulls can go almost fully in the nose. They are efficient, but scarce. - The other limiting factor is experience, nose guns are expensive to engineer into a plane, so they take way more Air XP to fit in. Experience leads to more cost efficient, agile, surviable planes. - Nose guns get small % defense bonuses, as enemy fighters have to be more cautious tactics when engaging a fighter wing that can accurately kill you at long range, needing to break off of kills that should have happened if they weren't interrupted. Your wingmen have an easier time saving you as their range improves. - Armor also tends to be near the pilot, so these guns are less likely to get shot, or at least they are polite enough to get shot and explode after the pilot is already dead. A % defense bonus is intrinsically a 1/x% reduction in casualties, similar to how agility works, funny enough. Wing guns would be best at killing and nose guns try to balance cost, survival, and killing power to be a better deal for better aircraft builders.

@Walsst so you have figured out a use for armored cars and ideas to rewamp planes. Now you have to just make line arty meta, as it was irl

@123 I actually wrote and tested a mod that tried this, everything worked except the primary mechanic. The UI reported everything was trying to work, but the final step didn't work. I had an operational depth mechanic where screening units (Infantry/mot/cav/anti-tank) multiplied the HP (strength) of artillery. So while artillery starts squishy, it buffs the tankyness of your infantry if you have a healthy mix of artillery and infantry. (Most inf lost like 3 Hp to compensate. Militia, irregulars, camels didn't lose HP, but had bad screening bonuses due to not being professional soldiers. Paratroopers were also unchanged. Other units like mot/bicycles/special forces had disproportionately good screen bonuses to make them interesting.) Line artillery had its combat width multiply its strength, so 3 width guns had 2.5 hp base to make this mechanic stronger/more meaningful. So your infantries tankiness was ~ the same with 1 arty, but it got better with more. (There were special debuffs to concentrated fire and large unit tactics that offset the irregularities in survivability here, nothing heavy handed, but enough of a base nerf to make these doctrines not extra overpowered. As they had an overly strong synergy with this system, I shifted it to be an anti-synergy by like 5% so they are good, but not overpowered.)