So you know Tater, we decided that maximum ranges of aircraft as seen in things like Wiki-pedia are generally for an unloaded plane. It's a different story to load a plane full of bomb and charges then fly 2500km
thus, planes with weapons will have less range than planes that search.
As far as the Zero fighter is concerned, I really don't think you would ever have seen this more than several hundred Kilometres for an airfield. And the game does not require fighter escorts for bombing historic land targets. I think a range of about 300-400km is ample for those. (even though it's range was far greater)
A lot of what you mentioned is between our teeth right now.
As to cloning the planes and bases, we wil not be using any of the traditional airbases and all planes used in our alpha tests are clones.
Your right about the airfields and placement also, it's pretty much going to have to be done by hand.
And Luke, I still don't know how the game decides these things should fly in pairs, for example. Even if I give a base, say, two sqaudrons with for example 20 planes each, it will still send individual planes. But if I assisgn 2 planes to a squadron, it may patrol with them both
The only way around this would be to create a lot more airbases... We are going to have to find some balance here on what is actually able to be done and what will take far to long and be far to complicated.