Okay, I missed this earlier in your post, so could you explain this to me? The Paradox Wiki makes no mention of it, so I'm curious now.
I'm not going off the equation but more of what I have observed from when I first starting playing two weeks after release in 2016 to now. Following this:
https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/index.php?title=Air_combat§ion=1 it doesn't shock me they don't have the equation for air-to-air combat because how janky the game has made it. I'll attempt to explain my reasoning over what I witnessed playing all these years.
Land based air-to-air combat used to never be this drastic mechanic where you could lose whole air wings due to upgrades until late war if you were using interwar or 1936 air frames, at least in SP. The 1936 air frames were viable to deploy for years until the more recent air frames on the old upgrade system produced better variants, e.g. stock 1940 fighters wouldn't overwhelm upgraded 1936 fighters until 1940 gets more upgrades. Range to me never felt like this big difference maker because when I would play as German or the UK, I always focused on speed, weapons, and agility first and I never had an issue. Range used to be a mechanic where you could deploy your air wings in an area and whether or not you had full coverage to gain air mission efficiency. Now with the release of patch 1.12, it really seems like air combat took in account of range because of the upgrade you could put on with fuel tanks. Doing research, meta aircraft all use fuel tanks. You can look it up and I discovered this playing recently with the Expert AI mod since the AI gets to use meta aircraft. Even fighting on your home country's air space, you can lose air superiority if your own fighters lack range among other issues, these issues stack up and you get whole air wings slaughtered if you don't have 1940 light air frames with upgrades in 1940.
This is where the problem really presents itself. Land based aircraft has always had more range than their carrier counterparts but carrier air wings would always win naval battles because of the naval combat mechanics at the time (something that changed with Man the Guns), would factor air power coming from carriers with higher weight than land based aircraft within range. This meant you could stomp the Italian fleet as the British in the Mediterranean if you have four carriers attached to your fleet there. Land based aircraft coming from Italy wouldn't have a large impact. This was how it was up until patch 1.5 with Waking the Tiger in 2018. Something happened with this release that nullified naval air power and land based aircraft could wipe out naval air wings quickly and would inflict ridiculous damage to a fleet. I even made a post on Paradox's forum documenting what I saw and it got a lot of traction, like a 50 page thread the last time I checked back in 2018. Paradox's attitude was that they recognized they broke it but didn't want to fix it because the next DLC would rework naval combat. I asked about just creating a hotfix since this was something that worked on release and should be fixed. I got a load of bullshit about screwing up development scheduling by writing a ticket and taking a programmer away from a task to fix something that would be reworked. Kind of a shitty attitude looking back but what can you expect from Neo-Paradox and the HOI4 team? From what I understood, this was briefly fixed and then broken again with Patch 1.12 because people started complaining naval air combat was broken again. I'm convinced this is from range since naval air wings don't have the same range but can get similar load outs.
That said, range isn't the end all stat, but when incorporated into light air frames with other upgrades, you can't beat them and range is now a difference maker. Unlike in World War 2 were older fighters could still be used through out the war, older fighters need to be replace ASAP. Just another ahistorical thing in a game that bills itself as a historical strategy game.
fuck my life dood playing EU4 just isn't the same anymore knowing what's coming.
