[2023] Should AA guns be rebalanced?

Reman said: At some point it got buffed so the '36 tech support AA gave almost the max 75% CAS damage reduction, and can shoot down planes by the dozens. It's completely absurd. The devs just... never bothered to look at it again for some reason.

Whether it was balanced badly before the air designer, I think now that aircraft costs are much higher and we can design planes with more armor, AA guns needs to be rebalanced in light of the changes we see in aircraft these days.

The balance causes ground attack design to favor cheaper planes (since you can't armor your planes up and make them resistant to enemy AA guns) while the design needs for things like fighters favors well armored and and armed aircraft that are more expensive (since air defense and air attack are both valuable). Like, there's not a good reason to use medium air frames for any kind of ground attack if the enemy has AA in their divisions because of the high cost of planes based on that air frame.

It's kind of weird considering that the Ju-87G was designed in part as a response to the Hs-129 being vulnerable to catching fire when getting hit.

EDIT: I should have said something like "the Ju-87G was more armored than the Hs-129" to make it clearer.  

Cavalry said: Well if cheaper planes is CAS vs TAC then it is like that a long time.

It means also generally cheaper planes even if you are just using smaller air frames.

That plane isn't bad, but the armor module has no impact on whether it dies from AA guns. So, from the perspective of losses to AA guns, it's wasted weight and cost.

Now, most planes don't operate in a vacuum. You have to consider survivability from air threats as well as AA threats. But if I'm running a set up where my CAS aren't interacting with enemy fighters very often (because I have a ton of my own fighters covering them in air superiority), then I would definitely want to forego the armor module. Maybe even put in non-standard materials module to reduce cost further.

On the other hand, if I'm running multi-role planes against the AI, I'm expecting the planes on ground attack to also be fighting in the skies. In that case, I really do need the armor modules.