Think I'm playing the game wrong

[IggyDaDino]

Hello from the battlefield! I've been playing through the massive grand campaign and a number of scenarios just seem to be weird. I'd like to understand what I should be doing as it seems the devs made some assumptions. The game is absolutely wonderful but let me share and let's see if I can get some useful advice to enjoy the game more with less reloading...

I'm on Korsun pocket 1944. I scramble my 8 fighters to the SW portion of the map where I spotted the enemy's air squadron. So I intercept and do generally well. During turn 3's AI turn, 2 air defence guns appear out of thin air under my fighter and kill it (until I reload enough times to not die as I didn't feel this was fair).

That's the first one in a while I saw where the unit just directly spawns. I got the impression from the briefing it was mostly a defensive mission.

My deployed core consists of the following:
5 infantry (2 pioneers, 3 regulars/alpine)
6 tigers
6 Special unit tigers
4 18mm (largest gun arty)
2 wurfrahmen (infantry arty truck)
1 sig 38 (mobile arty)
3 12.8cm flaks (for this mission based on briefing warning of heavy air bombardment)
8 fighters all fw 190A
5 Junkers 88 dive bombers
1 He 177A level bomber

Now this mission had restricted amount of deployable units. I usually use the additional slots on more artillery and I tend to always take my mobile ones, a random recon tank, an antitank elefant. I feel very much on these later 1943 and beyond missions I need to bring extra artillery as too frequently the tanks need to peel infantry off squares and I use suppression to make this happen.

So my question is twofold, am I missing anything in core makeup? Is it just some of these missions have units that spawn on top of you/just out of vision and I just need to play out of defence more?

[IggyDaDino]

Cross post. For anyone that might read this forum--I went over to the slitherine board as for this game it appears far more active: slitherine dot com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=121&t=98402