Aircrafts

[Noordung]

I wonder if you can somehow know how much HP does your aircrafts have? Or UFOs? I cant find it in game. Becouse i was thinking saracen with armour should be better than stiletto without armour.
And also if someting (areal laser) does 5 demage and aircraft have 8 armour than i doesnt do any demage?

[krilain]

A good question.

[Noordung]

With pure observation it seems that aircraft armours istn so good. I didnt see much difference anyway. Also trained pilots dont seem to be much better.
And question. When pilot is shot down, how much time does he need to come back to base?
Both of these are 2.5 version.

[krilain]

Me neither. Unless the aliens are so strong after a while, for fire power and speed, that the armour difference doesn't appear anymore. Speed makes the aliens able to shoot until death because no escape, and fire power makes any shots to be an episode of a lethal story.
That's difficult to test, but possible anyway. You would have to :

• send first a saracen or any just armoured normally
• let it be fought and shot down
• count the shots required for this
• reiterate and compute a mean
• start the same process with an armoured version of your ship

It would require a dedicated save slot to be sure to deal each time with exactly the same UFO. Moreover it requires a hangar ready to send either a unarmoured ship, or his armoured version.

Second version, easier, could be also to count the damages made to your Saracen even if it survives. With a correct save slot, you could send alternatively an armoured one, then an unarmoured. But here again, repeating is necessary, because there is often some misses when an UFO is firing.

[H-Hour]

We don't really have a proper aircraft armour model in the game. If I remember correctly from when I rebalanced the aircraft values, armour is subtracted from damage before it is applied. So if a weapon causes 20 damage and the aircraft is wearing 8 armour, it will do 12 damage.

This is applied across the board, which is why I say we don't really have a proper aircraft armour model. Armour will be pretty useless against high-damage weapons (missiles) and very effective against low-damage weapons (shiva/laser cannon). This is because they have different firing profiles: missiles do lots of damage in slow attacks; the others do their damage through small hits cumulatively over time. We can't make armour perform differently for different weapons, so it's either over- or under-powered.

If you're measuring effectiveness, it's important to notice that randomness is built into the combat through misses. You'll have to measure how many shots actually hit, not just how many shots are fired.

[Kiki]

It seems like a flaw in the game design, but in most cases I just let the ships land and take them after I kill all the bad guys. I have more alien shipyards then bases, and I still sell most of my ships. I only shoot ships down to stop base invasions, which are a pain. Even then all my bases have three lazer defence bases suronding them. My crafts have two particle beam cannons, and they only help ground base defense. I like to let my ground base defense soften the alien ships because 100% ships take to long take apart.

[FelixDrake]

Actually, I have found the helicopter gunships with armor and two targeting computers (with the obvious upgraded weaponry) are relatively good at shooting down fighters, or at least better than any other load out I have found.
The armor slows the airspeed, increasing(slightly) the time between when both ships start shooting at one another, and when the UFO closes to point blank, the game lags insanely, the UFO massively outmaneuvers you, and you get your face eaten.
Two helicopters, maybe even two saracens if that's yer poison of choice, or even one heli and your transport can take down a fighter with minimal chance of losing.
A single craft equipped as stated above still weighs in favorably against the fighter.

You can not outfight UFOs point blank without advanced craft. We all know this. Sure, sometimes you get lucky, but your chances even then come down to how damaged the UFO is when you get to point blank.
As such, the benefits of "going all in" on downing or reducing to a sliver of health that UFO fighter before it closes, including reducing your own velocity, seem to outweigh the obvious drawbacks.  Don't get me wrong, your helicopters spend a lot of time in the repair shop, but that is time they are not spending in a flaming wreckage strewn across the Russian countryside.