Aircraft Usage

[Ricky B]

With Low Visibility Air Effects, air units can become unavailable even if you don't use them, so in that case it's use 'em or lose 'em. The manual isn't all that clear about the air units becoming unavailable if you don't use them.
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I don't believe air units become unavailable due to the Low Vis Air Effects rule, although we might be talking apples and oranges. When it first came out, my testing showed the following:

Let's say you have 16 air units, all ready to use, with the current visibility translating to 25% availability under this rule, and the other conditions allow air usage. For this exercise let's set air availability to 0% which means once used, the units are gone for good. Without the rule, you would have all 16 air units available for use.

With the rule, you would have 4 units available. If you use all 4, the next turn will have 4 more available. The next has 4 more and finally 4 more, then no more if you use them each turn. And if you don't use any, you will always have just 4 available, although at least in the past the available ones could change from turn to turn, although that may have changed at some point as I have played at least one game where my one and only air unit was recon for many turns in a row.

So you don't have any become unavailable for a period of time, it just limits how many of your entire group of air units are available for that turn. And I just setup a test using Budapest to verify that is how it works currently.

Rick