@KurtGodel7 said:
The system sounds elegant in theory, but one issue that stands out even before any play testing is that if you’re the weaker power, there is zero incentive to build anything but fighters - bombers of any sort seem useless if you don’t have air superiority. And while there was eventually a point in the historical WW2 where Germany became desperate enough to adopt that as official production policy, that wasn’t the case for most of it - most powers were still trying to field both offensive and defensive capabilities simultaneously.
The Soviets never parked their Il-2 fleet out in Siberia to wait until the VVS had won air superiority - they used it, constantly, accepting the heavy losses that entailed. So a system that encourages players to do that is rewarding unrealistic behavior.
A few ideas on ways to address that:
A) Shrink your air theaters. Instead of one for the entire Eastern Front, imagine having about three different air zones there (north, center, south). More zones means fighter coverage is spread thinner, creating opportunities for the weaker side to gain local superiority - the Germans might prevail in two of the zones, but the Soviets could concentrate their forces to win control over the third one.
B) Allow fighters on escort missions to take hits meant for the bombers they’re protecting, and allow those bombers to carry out their strafing missions if they make it through even if their side has lost the battle for air superiority overall. Systems with all or nothing results (only the side that wins the air battle gets to bomb) naturally encourage unrealistic min-maxing style gameplay.
C) Use your unique tech system to give the Soviets some advantages that encourage a mixed air strategy instead of just spamming fighters - you could make their dive bomb bombers harder to shoot down, or you could make them cheap enough to be worth using aggressively even if the losses are heavy. You would also have to do that for any other cases where the system is optimizing for less interesting play.
A is probably the easiest route to test since it doesn’t involve any other changes to the system, you just play out a few test games and redraw the air zone boundaries between each to see which results in the most interesting game dynamics. B is the next most promising, it also changes up just one element, but that element is one of your system’s core attributes. C is probably a development trap where you’d end up having to constantly fiddle around with a bunch of different bespoke elements you’ve come up with to patch different issues.
