GAME MANUAL - Steam

HEARTS OF IRON DARKEST HOURhovering your mouse over theairbase symbol. A tooltip willinform you of the maximumbase size and its currenteffective size, which will belower than the total base sizeif its runways are cratered.The tooltip does not indicatehow many wings are currentlyassigned to the base, however,so it may be moreconvenient to use the AirForce Hot Button to view a listof all bases and the number ofsquadrons that are stationedin each. New air bases andenlargements to existingbases are most easily orderedby right-clicking on theprovince and using the QuickBuild production ordermethod.There is one other veryspecial condition that relatesto air bases: if the province inwhich an air base is located isexperiencing a storm or ablizzard, any squadrons thatare based there will begrounded until the weatherhas dissipated.Whenconducting normal missions, asquadron is limited by itsmaximum range. A squadronis able to exceed this range inone special instance only:rebasing. A squadron mayrebase to any other base thatyou control, and this ishandled in exactly the sameway that long-distance navalrebasing is done, except that itmust be ordered through theorders box. The selected routemay only pass through seazones or air zones abovefriendly provinces, and onceyou exceed your normal flightrange, your organisation willdrop to nearly zero. This isimportant, because if you areattacked during the balance ofyour flight, you will almostcertainly be torn to shreds.Note: this long-distancerebasing actually represents acombination of air movementand commercial shipments ofpartially-disassembled aircraft,so it’s not quite as strange asit seems.Air Wing Deployment,Supply, Reinforcement andUpgrades.Air wings must be assigned toan air base, and are deployedfrom the force pool in thesame manner as other forcesare deployed, and they mustbe assigned to an air base.They also draw their supplyfrom their assigned air basejust as naval flotillas do. If thebase cannot be kept supplied,your wings will suffer fromthese shortages, althoughthey are barely able scrape upenough fuel to get into the air.Organisation will rapidly dropand they should be rebasedimmediately, if possible, sincethey will be almost useless forcombat purposes.Being out of supply alsoreduces the wing’s rate oforganisation recovery andupgrade, which will be furtherhampered if there are toomany wings assigned to abase that isn’t large enough tosupport them. Unlike navalforces, however, air wingsmay be fully upgraded to themost recent technologies ifsufficient IC is allocated toupgrades. This process willremove the old aircraft fromthe wing and replace themwith more recent modelswithout losing the experienceof the air crews. You willnormally only need to considerdisbanding a wing if you feelthat it is no longer useful andis tying up transport capacitythat could be better usedelsewhere.Combining Air Wings IntoSquadronsAir wings are combined anddivided into squadrons inexactly the same manner asland and sea units. If thereis a land unit present in theprovince, you will find iteasiest to click on the “stack”to cycle through it until anair unit is selected. Hold downthe Shift key and select thelocations of other wings ordrag a box around themsince the “held” selection ofthe first unit will filter allsubsequent selections to airunits only. You shouldn’tneed to do this very often asthe vast majority of the ordersyou give to your wings will bemissions.Basic AirMovementThe air system is somewhatdifferent than the land andnaval system, because thereis no “basic” movement orderfor a wing. If you right-click ona province, the Air Ordersmenu will automaticallyappear and the items listedwill be context-sensitive to thelocation you clicked and to thetype of wings that are in thesquadron. This might take alittle getting used to, but is dueto the basing restriction, in thatall movement must beginand end at a wing’s assignedair base.There is one very interestingdistinction that is worthkeeping in mind when you areissuing orders to squadrons:most of these are missionswhich will be flown against atarget area (a series ofprovinces within an areaof the map). The specificprovince chosen by your wingfor each sortie will be determinedautomatically basedon what your AI-controlledChief of the Air Forcedetermines to be the mostbeneficial target that willmaximise the damage,minimise the losses, and stillobey your orders.If you use the order box or the“Ctrl and right-click” method ofsetting the order, he will be incomplete control of theoperational assignments. Ifyou simply right-click on apossible target province andselect the mission from thedrop-down orders list, the firsttarget he will order thesquadron to strike will be145