Fights are unrelated to the HQ status.
Battles are very much affected by them. You don't see any large raid coming at all. Suddenly a base does flash... and you have not the slightest idea if any of that flashing bases all over is subject to a massive medium altitude bomber raid... until it's too late.
Players like me who are playing 'wargame' aspect of AH, and not just for any individual fights or even just kills, will be affected a lot by it.
Now that's actually still fine with me as a general principle... It's just that the balance is totally off. One of the most massive impacting gameplay impacts nowadays can easily be done by a single player, and often at virtually no risk.
On several maps you can fly your set of Lancs all the way NOE to HQ without even triggering a single alarm. When finally the HQ alert goes off, it's too late - NOE Lancs will be over it after just three minutes.
And at 50% city status HQ downtime will be 105 minutes. On a map like Fester, it takes 10 minutes for a goon to reach HQ and reduce downtime by 4 mins per drop... And now put into equation that there may be only as little as 10-20 players on a country at all.
Speaking of Fester, on this particular map (but there are similar ones) it's very difficult to defend not only against NOE, but even vs an altitude strat attack.
It's the balance that's broken. Very little effort for massive impact.