Slitherine

Although I have played Panzercorps for over a year it just struck me that surely Fighters/Bombers should have more than a two hex spotting range? I'm sure this has been argued about before, but if an AT unit behind a hill can 'see' two hexes away shouldn't an aircraft cover at least 6 hexes?

If you give aircrafts bigger spotting range you turn them into extreme powerful scouts. You example with 6 spotting range is plain insane. With this spotting range you may as well turn Fog of War totally off. Everything could be spotted with just a few planes. Even a more sensible view range of 3 or 4 on flying units will already trivialize scouting.

What is more intriguing is how this new scheme came about...

In the original Panzer General, when flying a plane through its flight path, all the terrain that was flown over would also be revealed.

I think the 110 in PG Forever had spotting 5. In conjunction with the flight path being revealed, two of these would cover most of the map. Quite handy, but way too powerful!

Consider this, a Fighter or Bomber will fly to his target either high enough to avoid interception, in which case it will not be able to see any details on the ground, or low enough to avoid detection, in which case the ground will most likely appear as a blur and thus it will not notice any details either.
At the target area the aircraft will probably loiter for a while. That's, at least in my opinion, why the Spotting Range is small and the flight path is not spotted at all.

Of course if we're talking about Recon aircraft, like the Fieseler Torch, things should be different.
As far as I remember there is only a Recon plane on the game, an allied one in Allied Corps if I remember correctly. And, of course, there's also Rudel 1.
In this cases Spotting Range is bigger. There's still the problem of not scouting the flight path but, since most of the time we will be scouting just a little ahead of our own ground forces, I can live with that.

I understand an increased spotting range making a mockery of Fog of War but experienced players make a mockery of it any way by knowing where the AI units are after playing a map a few times. Maybe for multi player it would be a gamebreaker but in the early war years at least it would give fighters a role (other than strafing for reducing suppression) after the minimal enemy air forces have been dealt with

Just call Rudel.

In PG I used my aircraft a lot for reconnaissance. There was no need of a land recon unit. In PzC the recon class unit seems to be to have grown the most in importance.