I managed to get to Democracy and just squeak to a couple of wonders, and also have way more cities; maybe a dozen more, that were pivotal in giving me a tech advantage, so i'm probably 6 or 7 or maybe a few more advances in front of the nearest AI.

As soon as I got to the Air Power section, I started building up a sizable airforce, on one land front that I was fighting on, and indeed, the improvements in the usefulness of airpower, making ground troops less useful are working.

I at the same time started building a carrier task force, to power project towards my other enemy. In the situation I am in now, my first carrier has arrived near the area, and knocked out some light ground 'resistance' on a coast, in passing.

The problem is, that you can't really approach coastal towns, by bomber, for instance, for fear of bombardment by relatively technologically inferior equipment; the battleship or destroyer.

Is it appropriate to have units have a (very decent) offense against a unit that hasn't even been invented yet? Kind of like giving Stealth Bomber 'CAN_BOMBARD_SPACE' or something. So why not remove that flag from the destroyer and battleship?

Their high movement rates make them phenominally dangerous to air units generally, in addition.

There are already appropriate countermeasures to air threats at sea- the carrier based fighter, and later the missile cruiser.

On land, you should build fighters, or slightly later, SAM Launchers.

The original Destroyer at Oil Refining will be designated Destroyer (DD) and have less movement rate, 5 or so sounds right, and no air bombard.

While from a factual and historical sense you are correct, there is a flaw;

Destroyers were retrofitted with AA guns only after the air threat to the navy was realized, months later in fact, and those were not combat operational until a year or more after the fact. Also, their attack potency against air targets was significantly less than their capability, for example to bombard naval or ground targets. CtP makes no distinction in attack power between bombarding air, surface or ground targets and so you can't really balance things well here.

Battleships, while they had and have good point defence weapons against air targets have never had good air standoff capability; naval designers did not want to dilute their dedicated surface strike/bombardment role. They are a capital ship, and have been escorted as such, throughout history.

Rather than giving the new destroyer the same GL string description (I.E. onscreen name,) I gave it a different one, specifically 'Destroyer GN'.

I included it in the primary and overflow backup naval defense sections of all appropriate fli's, giving the same weighting as the basic destroyer has in all cases.

I set the basic destroyer to go obsolete at Combined Arms (or actually Jet Propulsion... as it is in the advances file), removed its air bombard capability. Similarly, I removed the air bombard capability of the Battleship.

The new destroyer appears at Combined Arms too.

This way, you have to go along the same path to get to Missile Cruiser, at which point the Destroyer will go obsolete, although personally, I don't see why we can't have destroyers and cruisers running around. Is it merely because the AI isn't smart enough to handle this?

Anyway... I digress.

I loaded with the updated files just before the carrier group makes contact and 'power projects' and the whole tone changed.

Air units feel more like they should against the class of unit they are facing. Not totally overpowering... (considering the support costs)

As I was finishing playing for the night, the most advanced opponent (this one) had just developed flight... and interceptors.

It was a little challenging destroying that individual unit in a city with city walls; I did a little practice to find out what it took, but I had to diffuse the active air defense, using one interceptor, then attack (not bombard) with a couple of destroyers and three bombers. One destroyer was critically damaged. That was the only way to avoid a loss of a unit in attacking.

Defense with interceptors in cities and in plain old active defence mode looks just great... nicely balanced.

There is a big difference from fighting on your soil and fighting on someone elses; the computer, i'm sure is going to be generating decent numbers of fighter units to throw against me.

Another thought about aircraft in ctp- has anyone else noticed that the ai will sometimes fly its planes around until they run out of fuel and crash? I would like to keep the ai from wasting its planes like that, the only time I seem to have much trouble with its planes is when they are in a city I am attacking.

I am holding off updating to MedMod 4, because of the amount of time I have invested in the current game, and the fact its still relatively interesting. I've been saving very often, more than once a turn, so I can work through the best scenario for that turn. In total there are 619 saves, totaling 353 megs, up to this point; 2010.

I am considering writing up a history of a world... and discussion on the choices that were made and why.