Direwolf’s Guide to Air in HOI4

Overview

This guide will easily and simply teach you how to use air forces, as it is something I and many of my friends were confused with when starting the game.

Introduction

Air Warfare in HOI4 is deploying air wings to air regions, in which they will conduct a role that changes stats for the wars and battles in that area. Air Warfare affects all types of combat, so it is very important, and it is absolutely neccesary to understand the mechanics if you want to succeed.

Air units use bases as a jumping point, allowing them to travel the map. Air units can ONLY deploy in or in a very near air region to the air base they are stationed at.

Air units are sorted into air wings, which is a force of aircraft between 1 to 1000 aircraft. If your air base is overrun, they will deploy to the nearest friendly air base.

Movement

Movement is the foundation of air warfare. As an example, I will use Italy, as it is already at war and spread over a sizeable area. Italy is at war with Ethiopia, and the first thing you may notice is the alert “Air wings with no mission” When clicked, it will bring you to a tab like this.

This shows air wings at an airbase, in this case, the Latium airbase, as seen at the top of the small box. The larger box to the right is titled Italy, which is the air region this air base is inside of. Unfortunately, we dont need these in Italy, as our soldiers are fighting in Ethiopia.

To move them to ethiopa we need to find an airbase in the area.

Here you can see the Eritrea airbase, with its own units. This airbase is right on the frontline of the Ethiopian War, so it would be a great place to move our other air units. To move them, make sure you have the original units selected, with a small gold line around them, and either right click into the small box of the away airbase, or physically right click the away airbase on the game screen.

The end product will be this, this means the air units are moving from Latium to Eritrea

And now they are here! We can see the large box has changed titles to East Africa, which is now the air region these wings are stationed in.

Missions

Now that we have them in the Eritrea airbase, we should probably deploy them in East Africa.
To do this, simply right click in the large “East Africa” box, which will turn up this result.
This means the units are now in the air, but they aren’t doing anything! To assign them a role, we simply check the boxes that designate what role we want them to play. Doing so looks like this:

You will immediately see your air units on the game map.

And that is it! That is how to move and use air units.

Additional Info and Air Reserves

But Direwolf, the air wings in reserve alert is still there!

As you can see, I still have air units in Italy itself. Now it is up to you to decide if you want to move them to Ethiopia, deploy them into Italy even though you arent fighting there, or to leave them and deal with the alert. Because the Ethiopia war is fairly easy and because no battles are near homeland Italy, I will deign to just leave the alerts alone.

There is still one more thing to address, and that is new aircraft. As you know, you create them in the production tab with military factories, but where do they go? You might see this alert while playing. This means you have built airplanes, but they arent being used anywhere. To right this, simply click on an airbase, and hit the glowing button with the arrow. You will see on the left all your unused airplanes. Click one of the arrows under the airplane type, and it will move that air asset to the left side. Click confirm and those airplanes will now be in the airbase you selected, and can be used as taught in the rest of the guide.

[link] will give you info on more indepth statistics and numbers.

Thanks for reading!