It’s about five times more expensive than the strongest fighter plane, but it has some very important functions that can’t be done by other aircrafts in HOI4. These functions are Paradrops and Air Supply. Let’s take a look at how these work in-game.
Transport Planes for Paradrops
One function of transport planes is being able to paradrop your paratrooper division into enemy territory. This function is very useful to capture enemy victory points from behind, and can quickly make them capitulate instead of slogging through entrenched enemies. To be able to paradrop, you must be able to satisfy two requirements: It’s certainly important to consider the effect of using transport planes for a successful paradrop. Each transport plane group can carry a weight of 2. Each infantry and artillery battalion has a weight of 0.5, and each support battalion has a weight of 0.1. That means you must think of the tradeoffs on your division design. A heavier division has more health and has better combat stats overall for longer fights behind enemy lines, and for bunkering in high victory point cities for the cost of more transport planes group needed. This strategy is useful for enemy cities with forts (e.g. Maginot Line). However, a lighter division can be spammed and will cost less to paradrop per transport plane group. It’s also possible to send one division per tile, which can disrupt enemy frontlines, encircle the enemy divisions from behind, and facilitate breakthroughs where frontlines are in a stalemate.
Transport Planes for Air Supply
If you have the Waking the Tiger DLC, another function of transport planes is being able to do air supply for ground divisions. Each transport plane you have designated for this mission contributes a maximum of 0.2 supply at 100% air efficiency. To be able to predict the amount of supply, you just need to multiply your air efficiency by 0.2. As shown in the image above, two transport plane groups are designated for air supply. Because there’s only 90% air efficiency, the total supply from the airdrop is 0.36 instead of the maximum of 0.4. This mission is very helpful for low supply areas (e.g. North Africa and Asia), along with provinces where the enemy has done scorched earth tactics (which destroys infrastructure and railway hubs). It’s also helpful for provinces where you want to concentrate your attack with heavy supply divisions (like tank divisions) and where the province supply is not enough to accommodate all the divisions. Also, it’s important to make sure you have air superiority over the regions where you’d like to do air supply, because your mission can be intercepted, or worse: you can lose transport plane groups due to enemy anti-air and fighters.
