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Just a thought I had on the way home, while pondering the upcoming Cold War FoW mod, and thinking about assembling the 1:100 A10 I have somewhere - with the preponderance of AAA and SAM in a Soviet battlegroup, would NATO players ever bother with Air Support? I can imagine a local meta game of taking aircraft, having the opponent spam Shilka/Tunguska/SA13 etc after being on the wrong end of a Warthog visit, and then the NATO player not bothering again - in some ways I suppose how such systems were supposed to work in real life, they removed the air support issue from the equation - with corresponding lack of appearance on the tabletop!

Anyway, just interested in others thoughts!

One could argue the same about Soviet HinD helicopters. We'll see.

I don't think it's going to be as bad as you fear. The A-10 is a pretty tough beast. And there are countermeasures for many of the more potent anti-air systems. For example, if the game models Wild Weasel tactics, then taking radar-based anti-air measures (such as the first two systems you mention) could end up being a gamble.

Finally, as the rulebook notes when discussing air support and anti-air, we don't really care about what happens to the close support aircraft *after* it delivers the strike. If a SAM catches the launching craft seconds *after* it releases a ground-guided Hellfire missile, then there's no real effect on the game.