Rules 1.5 beta: overpowered defenders in air battles

Agreed, disruption can take care of the odds, forcing the enemy to attack with dispersed forces or spend another order token forming up. Worked this into 1.5.06

I really like the overall roll instead of the individual roll that we had before. It's more simple. I do not like the D3-1 though, feels a little counter-intuitive. I also liked in 1.5.04 that there was an off-chance that the entire CAP failed to intercept, giving more chances for small air group attacks.

I came up with the following changes to try:
"If 2 or more planes intercept, roll on the following table" This ensures that if you can only muster the scarce cover of a single flight, you will intercept and no roll is needed. This restores a bit of balance to low-aircover fleets. Real-life rationale behind this is that if you have only a few planes, you probably won't go off chasing contacts and keep close to your target. You keep visual contact, so communications failures is also less likely.

"If 2 or more planes intercept, roll on the following table:
1 = Comms failure, no flights intercept
2,3 = One flight intercepts
3,4 = Two flights intercept
6 = up to three flights intercept"

Rationale here is that when covering with a larger force, more communications problems are likely as history shows.

The outcome is 17% chance of no intercept, 83% chance of 1 or more flights, 50% chance of 2 or more flight and 17% chance of 3 flights. This makes a nice tradeoff in probabilities in my mind and works as sort of a soft-cap on air cover.

Analyzed the option of limiting the CAP to carrier size, but this runs into problems. The IJN runs carrier groups of two carriers while most other nations have 1 carrier groups. This would enable the IJN to put up a substantial bigger CAP than other nations. In the option above the CAP size is independent of the carrier group size.

I've made some more small changes in the 1.5.08 version to the carrier clash scenario, loiter rules and Hidden deployment rules based on my latest playtests. I do think that the attacker now certainly has an edge when he finds the opposing carrier first. The CAP rules also worked very well.