A surrounded fighter escaped!

[kanniethexen]

Hi guys, I've been busy but finally did some testing to see if I could reproduce this. Well, it seems to be some some sort of bug with the spotting system during bad weather.

During rain/snow/sandstorms, planes can't attack each other, and they normally can't spot each other or anything on the ground. Ground units can spot airplanes, however. I knew that you could still be 'intercepted' if you accidently moved through another unseen airplane or if you moved to a hex next to it. This shows the plane you bumped into although you shouldn't be able to spot it with your aircraft. This seems to be a moment that the spotting isn't updated correctly, but it might be necessary game-wise to prevent two airplanes occupying the same hex or something, I don't know.

But if you wait another turn, that plane you bumped into turns invisble again if it is outside spotting range. Because your plane shouldn't be able to spot them, the aircraft dissappears from view. It should still be visible to ground units, so it won't dissappear when a ground unit is in spotting range. OK, but I have noticed something buggy when I replicated your situation (surrounding an airplane during bad weather)

1. If a surrounded airplane can't spot the planes next to it, it can move through them, but it will be stopped by any air unit it moves through that is next along its path. So any unit directly next to it is ignored, but anything more than one hex away will stop it again. I placed a ring of planes around a fighter, I could freely move through it unless I placed another bigger ring around it, it was stopped by those again.

2. Suppose one of your planes is surrounded, and you can see the other aircraft with one of your ground units, you cannot move through them. But if you move the ground unit away, the next turn the spotting is updated an even if your plane is still surrounded they won't be visible anymore, and you can move. So if you want to prevent a surounded AI plane from escaping, make sure the AI can spot all your planes with its own units. Vice versa, if you need to escape you need to move your ground unit out of spotting range (during bad weather spotting is 1 for ground units, so its easy to estimate).

I'm glad it is now regarded as a bug. I have tried again surrounding an enemy plane, 3 times in the Low Countries. Two times is was clear weather and indeed the enemy plane didn't escape. The third time I surrounded two enemy planes, one right, one left, with eight of my planes and it was raining. The enemy left enemy plane escaped again through my surrounding planes, but the right enemy plane moved were the left plane originally was and stopped. So your theory is right!