Investing in the Red Air Force is ALWAYS good.
Hi all! wall of text incoming:
In this sub I have always argued on why you should always invest in the Air force when playing as the Soviet Union, this post is pretty much a summary of my various arguments for it.
let me preface by saying that you can play HOWEVER you want, and the game is easy enough for pretty much any approach to be viable. But it is also the case that some ways are simply better than others.
in the case of the Soviet Air force I have regularly seen "advice" to "Abandon the Air" to focus entirely on your Infantry army and Tanks. While this is understandable advice for new players, so that they can focus on smaller parts of the game, I would say it has led to many players to never trying to make a Red Air force and therefore missing out on how much good Air power makes the game more fun.
Now, there are two main arguments I have seen against investing in the Air force, the first, and the easier to rebuke is the: "Horrible Soviet Air force debuffs"
Now let's go through these scary red numbers one by one:
- Air wing experience loss when killed: if you simply make good designs, you will never lose enough planes for this to matter.
- Ace generation chance: aces are good to have, but not having any doesn't hurt you at all.
- Air wing training experience gain: Planes have a very fast training time, and even then you can take a spirit of the air force to completely negate this.
- Air Accidents Chance: perhaps the only one that actually does something, however, once again you can negate this a lot by training only during the day, a spirit of the air force, and a chief of Air force. (and simply outproducing it of course)
- Night Operations Penalty: everyone gets a night penalty, you simply have a worse one, and as long as you dominate during the day, it won't matter.
- Bad weather penalty: Again, everyone has a penalty during bad weather, and if you dominate in normal weather, this won't hurt you. Plus, storms never last long.
- Air wing mission experience gain: straight up a buff.
So as you can see, none of these debuffs target the actual important stats for an Air war (those being Range, Air Attack and Air Defense) and therefore do NOT stop your Air force from dominating the skies.
The second argument that I have seen, is that you simply do not have enough of an industry to focus on All three of Tanks, Infantry and Planes.
Quite honestly this is a bit of a Skill Issue. The USSR gets one, if not the most powerful industry in game, if you manage your industry properly, you can easily have 150 mills by Barbarossa. Here's my industry from a quick and casual game I did a little bit ago:
My Civilian Industry by the beginning of the War
The Air Situation at the beginning
To be clear I messed up a lot during this game (it's been a while since I played pure vanilla), I civ greeded, and also tried to be entirely self sufficient for rubber, which also meant a slower rate of mil construction. and even then I don't think this Red Army is lacking in any department.
I forgot to take more screenshots, but Zhukov here has 11 divisions of 30 width mediums, and the Temporary Infantry gun deficit is due to another 100 divisions being in training.
The Status of the Air war after a couple of months - Ukraine
The Status of the Air war after a couple of months - Belarus
The Status of the Air war after a couple of months - The Baltics
and there you have it, in just a few month, the Hitlerite Air force has been decimated, I never put more than 30 mils on fighters, and at this point I had done none of the Air Focuses.
anyways, if you did read this far, thanks for taking your time, sorry for the long post, I just really suck at summarizing. and if I have gotten anything wrong or could Improve anything, please tell me!
TLDR; Fighters good.
some extra screenshots from this playthrough, including Zhukov vs Rommel (I also got the Achievement!) stockpiles, final borders.
Political Situation at war start
tank production by the end of 42'
infantry equipment done and dusted
