How to use Scout Planes? (2024)

You set them on the air recon mission, then you should see enemy units popping up on the air zone on which your scout planes are on, even if you don’t have divisions on the border. You can even see enemy divisions that are far away from the border.

You can also see enemy ships, and their task forces if you have recon planes over an ocean.

You look on the map to see the information...

NeuGemi said:

You set them on the air recon mission, then you should see enemy units popping up on the air zone on which your scout planes are on, even if you don’t have divisions on the border. You can even see enemy divisions that are far away from the border.

You can also see enemy ships, and their task forces if you have recon planes over an ocean.

You look on the map to see the information...

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So you're saying there is no way to tell what information my Scout Planes are giving me?

Mahrabal said:

Do I need the new DLC to run the Air Recon mission? The mission is always greyed out on the list of options when I select an air wing.

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Yes.

Riekopo said:

So you're saying there is no way to tell what information my Scout Planes are giving me?

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??

I am saying that you look on the map to see what information they are giving you. Also right-clicking on a nation and looking in the intel ledger.

See this video for more information:

Edit: Why disagree? Can you be a bit more specific on what you don't understand?

NeuGemi said:

Yes.

??

I am saying that you look on the map to see what information they are giving you. Also right-clicking on a nation and looking in the intel ledger.

See this video for more information:

Edit: Why disagree? Can you be a bit more specific on what you don't understand?

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There are a billion things on the map. How am I supposed to know what is revealed by my Scout Planes? This is just another example of the game doing a terrible job at explaining itself and hiding important information. A problem which has severely plagued the game since day one.

I thought maybe there would be information about the Intel revealed by a Scout Plane in the Air Combat window but they're not in there at all. Completely missing from the UI. It really is crazy that nobody at Paradox thought it might be a good idea to show the player what exactly their Scout Plane is doing and what it has revealed.

Also, are Scout Planes just doomed to being Green experience level forever? Apparently they can't be trained. Does night affect Scout Planes at all? You would think that doing Recon at night would be much harder to find enemies.

You can see what intel your scout planes are giving you, though. Just go to the intel ledger of the country you’re spying on, the 20% bonus (once you’ve built it up) should put you over a threshold to get better intel on the enemy. You can also see on the map which units exactly they spot and can use that over time to work out a rough estimate of the enemies force on fronts you couldn’t normally see.

The air combat interface is tiny and limited, I’m not sure why you’d expect to see the more complicated information scout planes provide in it.

VoidStaresBack said:

You can see what intel your scout planes are giving you, though. Just go to the intel ledger of the country you’re spying on, the 20% bonus (once you’ve built it up) should put you over a threshold to get better intel on the enemy. You can also see on the map which units exactly they spot and can use that over time to work out a rough estimate of the enemies force on fronts you couldn’t normally see.

The air combat interface is tiny and limited, I’m not sure why you’d expect to see the more complicated information scout planes provide in it.

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No this is simply not correct. Going to the Intel screen just shows you the total Intel that you have on the enemy. It doesn't show you what Intel has been collected by your Scout Plane. An no it doesn't show you on the map exactly what the Scout Plane has spotted.

Riekopo said:

There are a billion things on the map. How am I supposed to know what is revealed by my Scout Planes? This is just another example of the game doing a terrible job at explaining itself and hiding important information. A problem which has severely plagued the game since day one.

I thought maybe there would be information about the Intel revealed by a Scout Plane in the Air Combat window but they're not in there at all. Completely missing from the UI. It really is crazy that nobody at Paradox thought it might be a good idea to show the player what exactly their Scout Plane is doing and what it has revealed.

Also, are Scout Planes just doomed to being Green experience level forever? Apparently they can't be trained. Does night affect Scout Planes at all? You would think that doing Recon at night would be much harder to find enemies.

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Again, look at your map. Those enemy ships and divisions you see? That's what your scout planes, radar, spies, and land and naval forces have detected for you. Don't see why it's so important to you to know which enemy units were detected by which of your assets.

Also I'm not even sure if the game tracks which units scout planes spot in the first place, like it does with ships, for example. I don't own LaR, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but think spy planes just give you an intel bonus in their assigned area.

Dude, the percentage of intel you gain on your ledger is there in a cursor-over.

No, there is not a list of what you see and what you don’t. I suppose if you cancelled the mission and some stuff disappeared that would tell you.

Riekopo said:

No this is simply not correct. Going to the Intel screen just shows you the total Intel that you have on the enemy. It doesn't show you what Intel has been collected by your Scout Plane. An no it doesn't show you on the map exactly what the Scout Plane has spotted.

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If you hover over... I believe it’s the intel percentages themselves it’ll give you a detailed breakdown of how you get your intel, including from scout planes. Someone correct me if it’s in a different place though, I haven’t played in a couple weeks because I’m waiting for them to fix collab spam so my computer can run HOI past 1940.

Any units you spot that you couldn’t normally (so, any not adjacent to your troops or passing ships, or those of your allies) are the ones spotted by scout planes. Don’t send scout planes places you can already see, it wastes their unit detection potential and they can gather intel from anywhere over enemy territory. Put them over places that, for example, you want to naval invade to spot the troops they have to guard and the ones that could quickly respond to an invasion.

Example: I have 60% intel about Italy's air force. 2% comes from radar. 28% comes from my spy network (2 agents in Italy). 20% is from air recon (scout planes) and 10% is because of their fascist ideology.

If I remove my scout planes, I would have 40% intel in total.

Underneath the breakdown is a list of exactly what items I am aware of given a certain % of knowledge I have over Italy. The higher the percentage, the more I know about them.

There is no specific knowledge obtained from each of the categories (spies, radar, scout planes etc) but each one I have adds to the total picture. The more total intel I gain, the more knowledge I have.

Hope this helps.

Right, so it's as I feared a guessing game on exactly what Intel is being provided by the Scout Planes. So there is basically no way to figure out how many Scout Planes you need in a zone to maximize your Intel. There's no Intel statistic on the aircraft window. No information is provided on the Air Combat window for the zone they're in. Apparently they can't be trained either for some reason. And whether night has some effect on them or not is anyone's guess. Great.

This has been a problem with HOI4 since day one and it's really become aggravating - the way it hides important information. It's like pulling teeth trying to figure out what's going on. Advice for Paradox: If one developer on the HOI4 team designs a mechanic - another person should be assigned to figure out how to make that mechanic visible to the player.

Riekopo said:

Right, so it's as I feared a guessing game on exactly what Intel is being provided by the Scout Planes.

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Not really. I mean there's no specific intel gained from spies, or infiltrating their army, or radar coverage, etc. It all gets added together into a "total intel" percentage.

Riekopo said:

So there is basically no way to figure out how many Scout Planes you need in a zone to maximize your Intel.

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If memory serves, scout plane intel caps out at 20% of the total intel you can obtain. The more planes you fly over a state, the faster you will reach the maximum. I'm currently using 50 planes in the region and my intel is increasing by 0.05% a day. I reckon that once I've reached peak, I can probably maintain it by keeping 20 or so planes flying and I can move the remaining 30 planes to another country.

I do agree with you that the amount of information presented to the user (us) is lacking. I'm not saying they should provide us with the meta, as half the fun of these sort of games is figuring stuff out for ourselves, but sometimes we're so desperately short of basic information that it really is shooting in the dark.

Scout plans give both global intel about the country but also local intel such as how the divisions are positioned in the air zone they operate in. The more Aircrafts you have the more detailed the information seems to become, even if your global intel about the country change. How many Aircrafts you need per zone is not clear, but the more seems to give somewhat better information, like 2k did somewhat better than 1k but the difference was quite small. I don't think you need that many to get quite good information about the enemy division placement, like maybe a few hundreds per zone would be enough.

I tested as Germany against Poland, no matter how many Aircrafts I putted in the western Poland airzone, no information was provided about divisions in Eastern Poland, but as soon as I added Aircrafts to that zone I started to see the divisions in Eastern Poland.

Riekopo said:

No this is simply not correct. Going to the Intel screen just shows you the total Intel that you have on the enemy. It doesn't show you what Intel has been collected by your Scout Plane. An no it doesn't show you on the map exactly what the Scout Plane has spotted.

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For god's grace, just use the tooltip in the intel ledger for the 4 Intel Branches for a given country. That tooltip gives all info in how the intel comes into being and what it gives as info...

Try to be a bit more agreeable if you're in need of help, will you?

Riekopo said:

Right, so it's as I feared a guessing game on exactly what Intel is being provided by the Scout Planes. So there is basically no way to figure out how many Scout Planes you need in a zone to maximize your Intel. There's no Intel statistic on the aircraft window. No information is provided on the Air Combat window for the zone they're in. Apparently they can't be trained either for some reason. And whether night has some effect on them or not is anyone's guess. Great.

This has been a problem with HOI4 since day one and it's really become aggravating - the way it hides important information. It's like pulling teeth trying to figure out what's going on. Advice for Paradox: If one developer on the HOI4 team designs a mechanic - another person should be assigned to figure out how to make that mechanic visible to the player.

Click to expand...

Actually, the tooltip does say how much intel scouts give and how much per day they add. That sort of gives away how many you need...