@Schulz said:
Or, you can scrap the coastal battery idea entirely and make the air units more cost effective against the ships.
In a normal TripleA type map, it would be, "I have more air than he has ships. Therefore I will kill his navy on my next turn!"
With Flames and Steel it's not quite so simple. There are two flavors of air unit: fighters and bombers. Several different types of fighters: fighters, heavy fighters, advanced fighters, early jets, and jets. Several different types of bombers: dive bombers, torpedo bombers, medium bombers, strategic bombers, flying wings, and Superfortresses.
Suppose that Germany had an idea of using air to sink the British fleet in the English Channel. During the "allocate bombers" phase it sends in torpedo bombers (the best choice for anti-naval), dive bombers, and even a couple medium bombers. This bomber allocation is revealed to the Allies before the "allocate fighters" phase. During "allocate fighters," all three of Germany, Britain, and America Atlantic allocate fighters to the upcoming battle.
Then there is a two round dogfight, where Axis and Allied fighters shoot at each other. After the dogfight, any Allied fighters which survived are now able to shoot at German bombers, using their interception value. German bombers shoot back, using their air defense value. Destroyed units are removed from play. Damaged bombers are considered aborted and do not get to fire at surface targets. But, any German bombers which weren't destroyed or aborted then get to fire at Britain's ships. British ships actually hit by bombers get to fire back. Those which weren't hit are considered too far away from the combat to participate. This lasts two combat rounds.
The Pearl Harbor attack consists of eight Japanese torpedo bombers attacking five American Pacific battleships, plus some other ships. America Pacific has little or no air defense against this. Those eight torpedo bombers hammer the Pearl Harbor fleet hard. Remember that battleships take five hits to kill! Japan loses 0 - 1 torpedo bomber in the attack. The fleet at Pearl gets hammered hard during the air phase, and then on Japan's turn the IJN comes in to finish it off.
In my play test games, Germany would sometimes build fighter type aircraft for its western front. But it stopped short of building bomber-type aircraft for that front, because the money for that was needed elsewhere. The fighters gave it reasonable defense against Allied strafing or strategic bombing raids. Germany would also need to defend Italy's West Mediterranean transports against Allied air. For that it had fighters in Madrid. Probably having a single battleship in that sea zone would have made sense also, in case any Allied bombers got past Germany's fighters. Germany should also have built a heavy fighter or two, because those have a better interception value than normal fighters.
