Air superiority: how it works

All numbers on this page are resolved at build time from the game's own common/defines/00_defines.lua — they cannot go stale.

What the number means

Air superiority is not a yes/no flag and it is not owned by a front. It is a per strategic air region number, recomputed from the planes each side actually has flying there. Everything else on this page reads that one number: the penalty on enemy divisions, whether your CAS reaches the battle, whether you may paradrop (0.7 of the sky required), how much intel a raid gets (0.5 scaling), and even naval detection (0.25).

Hold the sky over the region your army is fighting in. Holding it somewhere else is worth exactly nothing to that army.

How a region's superiority is computed

The game scales raw superiority by the size of the region, and the defines state the shape outright — 0.04 is documented as the air superiority scale being superiority divided by pixels times this value:

Two consequences fall straight out of that denominator. A big region needs proportionally more planes to reach the same percentage, which is why a wing that dominates a narrow region evaporates when moved to a wide one. And superiority is about plane count in the region, so an airbase stuffed past its capacity (each level carries 200 planes) is not buying more sky — it is buying accidents.

Planes not actively looking contribute less: wings off a search mission count at -0.5 for detection purposes.

The division penalty

This is the section most players come for. Enemy air superiority reaches down and hurts the divisions underneath it, through two separate defines:

Those are the maxima, reached only where the enemy owns the sky outright; a contested region scales the penalty down. The game's own comment on ENEMY_AIR_SUPERIORITY_IMPACT calls it the effect on defence due to enemy air superiority, and on the speed define the effect on speed — so the honest reading is that losing the sky makes your divisions both easier to kill and slower to move, and the movement half is why a retreat under hostile air turns into a rout.

Anti-air on the ground claws some of that defence back, with diminishing returns. More AA attack approaches 0.75 of the help available, and 625 sets how fast the curve gets there. Practically: the first AA in a division is the valuable one, and stacking AA far past that buys progressively less.

CAS in the land battle

Close air support is a separate mechanism from superiority, and it is gated by the battle, not by the region. Only 3 CAS or tactical bombers may enter a combat per point of enemy combat width there — so a narrow battle cannot absorb an air force no matter how many wings are parked nearby. This is the single most missed rule in air play: width buys air slots.

What arrives applies an air-support bonus on top of the ground fight, with base factor 0.25. The damage itself rolls dice — 2 for strength and 5 for organisation — scaled by 0.035 and 0.035 respectively, with 2 balancing bombing damage overall.

At night CAS nearly stops working: its damage is multiplied by 0.1 in land combats. A night attack is an attack made without your air force. Whether a region counts as day is itself a define — 0.5 is the maximum night coverage still treated as daytime.

Wings moved to a new region do not fight at full value immediately; CAS regains 0.888 of its efficiency per day, applied hourly.

Interdiction of supply gets one paragraph and no more: a non-motorised unit still has its supply disrupted at 0.02 of damage, and train damage is mitigated by disruption on the documented curve, with mitigation 6:

Winning the air battle

Superiority is an output. The input is planes shooting each other down, and two stats dominate.

Agility decides how much damage you avoid. Being more agile than the opponent reduces their damage to you by up to 0.45, and the agility ratio that feeds it is capped at a factor difference of 4 — past that, more agility is wasted. The stat itself caps at 100.

Speed works the other way: being faster raises your damage by up to 0.65. Agility is defensive, speed is offensive, and the two caps are not equal — which is the whole argument for fast heavy fighters over nimble light ones late in a war.

Damage is then scaled by 0.2 and 1, and no more than 3 planes may shoot at any one enemy plane, so numerical superiority stops paying beyond that ratio.

Disruption is the quiet one. Disrupted planes stop contributing, scaled by 4. A defending wing's disruption is driven by its defence and speed (0.5, 1, 0.5), while agility and attack feed disruption not at all (0 and 0 are both zero). Aces sit on top: a wing of 100 is the size ace bonuses are tuned for, and a smaller wing concentrates the bonus up to 2.

Seeing the enemy

You cannot shoot what you have not found, and detection is its own small set of contributions: radar in the area at 0.5, controlled provinces at 0.1, and your own aircraft present at 0.8 up to an effective count of 3000 planes. Night contributes -0.2.

Once something is detected, efficiency decides how many of your planes actually engage: base 0.1, radar contributing 0.7, with 0.1 of randomness on top. Radar appears in both halves, which is why it outperforms its build cost: it helps you find the enemy and then helps more of your wing show up to the fight.

Anti-air on the ground

State anti-air does not shoot down a meaningful number of planes; it denies superiority. Each level of the AA building normally removes one point of enemy air superiority, multiplied by 5. That multiplier is the entire reason AA buildings are worth a civilian factory over a contested industrial region: they attack the number that every penalty above reads from.

Hit chance and damage are balancing constants rather than player-facing levers: 0.07 converts targeting into a chance to hit, and 0.005 converts the equipment's anti-air attack stat into planes affected.

Holding the sky — checklist

1. Win the region your army is in, not the map — superiority is per air region and divides by region size (0.04); a wide region silently costs more planes for the same percentage.
2. Attack in daylight — CAS damage is multiplied by 0.1 at night, so a night push throws your air investment away.
3. Widen the battle if you want more CAS — only 3 planes join per point of enemy width, whatever is sitting on the airfield.
4. Put the first AA in the division, not the tenth — help approaches 0.75 on a curve shaped by 625; the returns diminish fast.
5. Build radar before more fighters — it pays twice, into detection chance (0.5) and into how much of your wing engages (0.7).
6. Do not chase agility past the cap — damage reduction stops at 0.45 and the ratio caps at a factor of 4; the speed ceiling (0.65) is higher.
7. Remember what superiority unlocks elsewhere — paradrops need 0.7 of the sky before the plan will run at all.