marsellus wrote:I wish there were some air recon units in the game. I don't understand why this part of equipment is completely forgotten.
Ever since the first PG came out I`ve thought about the observation/reconnaissance planes too. I could not find any reason for their existence in PG though and I still don`t see any use for them now. As I see it, these light observation planes tend to have short range, no extra observation abilities to a bomber/fighter, slow speed and very little weapons if any. So what you`d get in game would be generally a short ranged, low initiative, poor ground attack, basically defenseless air to air plane. Then there`s the fact that they would require extra slot spaces in your army and if these are given in game just with the recon aircraft in mind and then not used by some players, the balance of the missions might get trickier since some people would probably use the extra slots to get more armour or bombers.
The only advantage, if we could call it that, is that it would be cheaper than a regular bomber/fighter and would allow your other aircraft to do their specific jobs only. But that doesn`t go well in game either, because being such a pray for enemy fighters you`d either have to escort them with your own fighters(which incidentally means both wasting your fighters` missions on this and basically sending your fighters where you want to recon which you`re already doing currently anyway) or alternatively leave them unescorted and loose them fast(which means that you`d have to buy alot of them, which in turn means that the low cost aspect isn`t true either and you`d probably be better off using regular fighters which can defend themselves and have other uses too).
In addition to this there are many types of observation aircraft historically and you`d have a whole new line of equipment that the developers would need to create units for. Since they haven`t been able to cover the other classes so far I`m not sure it`s doable to have the air recon branch too.