The air war has become unwinnable and I’ve exhausted all avenues of research

[viik]

Manged to down one Cruiser at cost of 3 Phatom interceptors 1 Foxhound, in autoresolve.

[Dangermouth]

Cruiser you can do by the following (takes 3 foxhounds out though) :

 

Set them all to full speed and to head downwards at 90 degrees to where the cruiser is.

Set the bottom one to then head out and release its payload, let the others move down because the cruiser turns slowly.

Once 1 has been set, wait a couple of seconds, pause and set the second off. Then repeat for the third. As soon as the missiles are released, pause and set that plane to abort. That way you do actually hit with all 6 torpedos. The second time around repeat and you'll take it out. It isn't fun and it didn't give me any good research at the end of it. I've left the game for now and will return in a few months because it's just been very time consuming and the way the game is set you have to reload a lot (see ground missions, base missions, everything) or you just lose territory very quickly and then the game ends.

[Chris]

Just to reply to this thread (sorry about not replying earlier) - the air war in the last version of the game wasn't very well balanced at all. My plan was to do a big balance pass along with the hotfixes, which I did - but unfortunately those hotfixes never got released because of the loading bug that derailed our release schedule. So the improved balance never made it into the public builds.

I think the killer problem was that all the big ships from the Destroyer onwards had their main weapon set up to be a standard beam rather than a missile, which meant it couldn't be dodged. The result was that Destroyers (and any subsequent UFO) would just one-shot any of your jets at long range, so even if you did bring enough firepower to destroy one the losses you took were so crippling it was unsustainable.

I'm not saying the balance will be perfect in V11, but it won't be as bad as this :P