Airbase Placement / Bomber Defense

[Free_Radical]

Scenario: Your Asia. Opponent is USSR. At Def1, USSR starts a massive beam attack from north to south, travelling over his silo emplacements for covering fire; perhaps he also floods the bomber path with scout-fighters to styme your fighter counter-play.

Question: What is the best counter-move?

Comments: This is a tough one. If you put your airbases near the southern USSR border, your airbases will be quickly destroyed at Def1. Moreover, putting your airbases near the border puts all fighters/bombers within USSR silo kill zone as soon as they take off. Putting your airbases further back makes it harder for USSR to destroy them with nukes, but your fighters are still in silo kill zone when they get near his border, and now you have fuel issues. If USSR has good timing, his bombers will release nukes at the border or just over it, and then hi-tale back to base.

My technique, still a work in process, is to make sure I have a nuke or two in the air towards USSR silos ASAP after Def1 so that his silos are occupied with shooting down nukes, then I try and flood the airspace with fighters to counter the USSR bombers...this is a decent strategy, but the timing is key, and missing the timing means you get rained on by USSR nukes.

Placing Asia silos near USSR border is simply suici-siloing them (USSR seems them when you places them and a few nukes in the north can rain down on them with USSR silos remaining in AA fire mode...

More General Question: Please opine, generally, on the philosophy of airbase placement.

-- Free_Radical

[bert_the_turtle]

For the specific question, since Ace is on vacation, let me be the one to point you to the Star of India discussion: http://forums.introversion.co.uk/defcon ... php?t=5147
The image is broken, but there are links to recordings. The basic idea of the Star is that you protect India only and put your airbases close to the silos, where they can launch fighters at incoming bombers or to scout and are protected, and to leave your carriers close to India so they can help. Russia's defense is by nature weaker than India's, because Russia either has to put its silos where Asia can see them (and nuke them) or far in the north where they provide insufficient protection for the cities, and Asia can nuke the bulk of Russia with a full force of subs, while Russia only gets the eastern parts of Asia.

For the general question, the only rule I always follow is to keep my airbases out of the enemy radar range. I'm bad at multitasking myself, so I like them close to the silos so I don't have to watch for scouting fighters that may spot them all of the time.