Description[]
The task of air defense is to protect your own troops and towers from enemy air attacks. While the improved version is usually the best by the other towers, it is different for the AA towers. While the Tier 2 AA is great against small, fast targets, the Tier 3 AA is especially good against huge targets and units flying close together.
Tier 1 Archie[]
"Spits bullets with a vengance. Enemy planes, beware!"
Tier 2 Flaming Onion[]
"A superior anti aircraft machine, despite its baffling name. Shoots down planes and nothing but"
Tier 3 The Eighty-Eight[]
"Eighty-eight tear shed by your enemies as their Tauben spiral down in flames."
History of AA development until WW1[]
Even before the First World War, air units were a problem for the military before there were even airplanes. Balloons were used as early as the 19th century to get an overview of the battlefield and to detect enemy units. They were also used to send messages from beleaguered cities to their own troops. The besiegers could not do anything about it.
To solve this problem, the Germans developed a so-called Ballonabwehrkanone (balloon-defense gun) during the Franco-German War of 1870/71. The reason was that the French had conducting regular balloon flights to get people out of the besieged Paris and communicate with military forces in the countryside. Ultimately, 66 balloons flew out of Paris during the siege, transporting 164 passengers, supplies, and roughly 2.5 million letters.
The Ballonabwehrkanone was a 37-millimeter breech-loading cannon mounted to the bed of a carriage so it could be readily wheeled into position and fired at balloons.
The weapon had a stock similar to a rifle butt and a folding sight attached to the receiver to aim at distant balloons. The Prussians employed the Ballon Kanone with moderate success, downing and capturing five French balloons and likely puncturing three more that were declared missing.
The development of anti-aircraft guns was then only continued in Germany until the beginning of WWI. However, the development was mainly against balloons and military airships, so this type of guns were also called BaK (Ballonabwehrkanone= Ballondefensecannon). This name was later changed to Flak (Flugabwehrkanone = Airdefense cannon) in May 1916.
In other countries it was not believed at the time that airplanes and airships could play an important role in military conflicts, but soon after the outbreak of war the French aviators, who conducted astonishingly accurate artillery strikes with the help of small reconnaissance planes, were taught otherwise. All armies therefore soon used their smaller guns up to about 75 mm against aircraft, which were mostly simply jacked up so that the tube pointed towards the sky.
However, when planes and airships were used to attack enemy troops and became faster and could fly higher, it was no longer enough to simply straighten normal large heavy cannons in the sky. This led to the development and use of the anti-aircraft gun.