Why is bombardment so weak?

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Uncle_Joe

In theory, I agree. But this is a turn-based game. So enemy units arent moving and then stopping every time its my turn...there should be some abstraction of continuous movement. Which is I why I mentioned perhaps attacking Mobile/Tac Rsv/Local Rsv closer to the resolution of an Interdiction strike.

If you order a planned strike against a unit that's moving you'll be out of luck. It won't be there by the time the planes arrive.

Hence interdiction. Aircraft fly out and find their own targets. Of course, for this to work really well we should be able to set areas of operation for each air unit.

Another thing along these lines is aircraft flying Air Superiority missions often get 'knocked off' of their mission. They are still fine and I can put them back on mission at will, but its just a micromanagement hassle. Unless the unit is thrown into 'reorganizing' or somesuch, it shouldnt 'forget' its mission requiring the player to babysit them multiple times in a turn.

It's important that the other side (i.e. whoever's not currently playing their turn) can have his aircraft knocked on to rest.

[Uncle_Joe]

It's important that the other side (i.e. whoever's not currently playing their turn) can have his aircraft knocked on to rest.

Fine, then make it so that only the non-phasing player has this occur. Either that or have those planes (on both sides) be inaccessible for the rest of the turn. Currently all it is for the phasing player is an exercise in tedious micromanagement and mousework.

It depends on the scenario. Certain maps 'dilute' the impact of interdiction over a larger area. See for example Bob Cross' France 1944 scenarios versus various Normandy scenarios. Interdiction is much less effective in the former, largely due to the large size of the map.

Absolutely. As I said above, perhaps a look into the formulae that convert the airpower to interdiction level per scale needs to be looked at. It seems too effective at the lower end scales, but its feels fine at 25km/hex (except for the problem with it being drawn off by the first handful of units moved).

If you order a planned strike against a unit that's moving you'll be out of luck. It won't be there by the time the planes arrive.

Hence interdiction. Aircraft fly out and find their own targets. Of course, for this to work really well we should be able to set areas of operation for each air unit.

Yes, that is exactly the point. The PLAYER should have the ability to target certain units/armies/routes etc. That is not possible with the Interdiction routine, so it SHOULD be possible to launch effective strikes using the Bombardment routine instead.

What I'm saying is that since the player has no control over where Interdiction takes place, they should have SOME effective option that allows them to use their airpower where they want it. We dont have the game engine specifying where you can fire your artillery support or where your reinforcements go so why does it have to specify where your effective air power goes?

As mentioned, a good alternative solution would be to allow the player to designate certain areas for interdiction strikes for air units and then the AI controls exactly what is hit and when. That would be fine too.

Note that this is more of an issue at the larger scales where interdiction is already less effective. Having your only six or seven shots 'wasted' on non-critical areas of the map really dilutes air power. And having no other way to effectively order air strikes means that air power is dramatically underpowered...not because they cant kill anything, but because they just randomly kill whatever is moved earlier in the turn.

Part of the problem also results from not being able to specify defensive CAS. Again, the player is at the mercy of the AI to put it where it needs to be and not be 'drawn off' by utterly unimportant battles occuring earlier in the turn. And this problem is exaggerated because 'simpler' battles are resolved before more complex battles resulting in a much higher probability of 'wasted' airpower.

So, if you are on the defensive, you have effectively NO WAY of getting your airpower where you want it. All you can do is HOPE the AI puts it where you think it should go. If airstrikes were worth a damn you could actually pick some targets in threatened or important areas of the battlefield to attack. Currently that is a waste of time, readiness, and aircraft, leading to a situation where airpower feels ineffective overall (and again, not from lack of kills per se, but from lack of any form of cohesion).

To me, that is not a good model for the air engine. It has nothing to do with 'realism' and everything to do with implementation in the game system.

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: Uncle_Joe

It's important that the other side (i.e. whoever's not currently playing their turn) can have his aircraft knocked on to rest.

Fine, then make it so that only the non-phasing player has this occur. Either that or have those planes (on both sides) be inaccessible for the rest of the turn. Currently all it is for the phasing player is an exercise in tedious micromanagement and mousework.

I'm going to take a strong exception to this statement. It is not a tedious exercise in micromanagement. It is an essential exercise in micromanagement. If you leave air units on mission until they go into reorg, by default, then you are going to have your air units end up being utterly unusable by the second turn of the scenario, in many "busy" scenarios.

By having the units go into Rest status, it gives players the option to continue to push with them, by reassigning them active missions, or to take the advice of their unit commanders and...rest!

The non-phasing player already has these micromanagement decisions taken care of by the AI. If you pay attention to your Air Report when you're in a long turn, you'll notice that the enemy AS raises and lowers throughout the turn, as the AI reassigns "at rest" units to AS missions.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Uncle_Joe

Fine, then make it so that only the non-phasing player has this occur.

Well, it's also important if you're moving an air unit that friendly fighters can get knocked off for the duration.

Absolutely. As I said above, perhaps a look into the formulae that convert the airpower to interdiction level per scale needs to be looked at. It seems too effective at the lower end scales, but its feels fine at 25km/hex (except for the problem with it being drawn off by the first handful of units moved).

It's not the scale per se, but the area covered by the map. Obviously if aircraft are operating over 1/4 of the area they'll be able to spot a particular unit four times as often. I don't think changing the formula is really the solution, but if we can set areas of operation for individual air units that will solve it completely- along with various other complaints.

Again, the player is at the mercy of the AI

To be clear, he's at the mercy of the random number generator. There's no AI involved.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: JAMiAM

The non-phasing player already has these micromanagement decisions taken care of by the AI. If you pay attention to your Air Report when you're in a long turn, you'll notice that the enemy AS raises and lowers throughout the turn, as the AI reassigns "at rest" units to AS missions.

So far as I'm aware, it's an automatic switch (which occurs sometimes if there's an air attack on resting units)- not the PO making any decision.

[Uncle_Joe]

I'm going to take a strong exception to this statement. It is not a tedious exercise in micromanagement. It is an essential exercise in micromanagement. If you leave air units on mission until they go into reorg, by default, then you are going to have your air units end up being utterly unusable by the second turn of the scenario, in many "busy" scenarios.

By having the units go into Rest status, it gives players the option to continue to push with them, by reassigning them active missions, or to take the advice of their unit commanders and...rest!

The non-phasing player already has these micromanagement decisions taken care of by the AI. If you pay attention to your Air Report when you're in a long turn, you'll notice that the enemy AS raises and lowers throughout the turn, as the AI reassigns "at rest" units to AS missions.

Many times I see my Air Superiority aircraft 'lose' their mission and they are still just fine. After every interdiction strike by the opponent quite a few AS aircraft will be bumped back to rest, but they are still fine (certainly still quite mission capable). In a larger scenario, it just means you have to open the air report and manually move them all back on mission.

I understand what you are saying, but I still see it as something undesirable. Perhaps a button to 'lock' your planes onto mission until forced to reorganize might be a solution? The PO goes ape on airfield strikes so I'll likely not have access to a lot of planes the next turn anyways...I'd rather get mileage out of my AS aircraft on my turn.

Perhaps it just personal preference (and probably scenario dependent). But an option to 'lock' them on mission would be very helpful IMO. YMMV.

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: Uncle_Joe
Perhaps it just personal preference (and probably scenario dependent). But an option to 'lock' them on mission would be very helpful IMO. YMMV.

I'm all for options, when they can be easily implemented without breaking things.[:)]

[ralphtricky]

I'm going to post in the scenario design section what the difference is between Air Shock and PGM

[RyanCrierie]

Can I make some points here?

1.) I don't expect a squadron of light to medium aircraft (12 or so fighters or light bombers) to do much against a target before the precision munitions revolution of the late 1980s.

2.) However, a mass attack by a large amount of aircraft would inflict a large amount of damage. While the amount of casualties would be low compared to a ground assault, the unit shouldn't be capable of moving or doing anything after quite a lot of aircraft went over the unit's area of operations, and bombed, shot/strafed anything of importance; so it should be either reorganizing (yellow stripe) or routed (red stripe) after a really big air attack, even if very little casualties are caused.

3.) Carpet bombing should have a quality of it's own. It doesn't matter if you have WWII technology -- if you send a thousand B-17s to carpet bomb a specific area; with the shear tonnage of bombs raining down, the chances of virtually anything down there being hit will be very high.

[Boz]

A pressing question on my mind is how a bombardment with high altitude bombers (for example the B-36) is handled.  Recently I tested the effect of 60 B-36s bombarding a 150 Rifle squad unit within a 5 kilometer hex. Time for turn was set to 6 hours.  Now the damage done was in the range of 5-20% of the enemy.  But I routinely lost upwards to a dozen bombers on the attack!  Does the computer consider all attacks ordered directly by the player to be carried out at low altitude where the infantry is capable of downing the bombers?   On a side note the casualties for the enemy seems quite small when considering the massive number of bombs ripping that area apart.  In later tests I checked the enemies’ readiness (usually knocked down to around 67% by the bombing) and saw how they responded to a follow up attack by a similar infantry force. This was in the same turn after the bombardment took up 30% of the turn. They were routinely capable of repulsing the enemy following the attack.  The effects of 1,200 some odd tons being delivered on this unit should leave survivors deaf, disorganized and not in the shape to fight.

[Uncle_Joe]

There is a bug in the AA routine in the current build that is causing a lot of excess air casualties. This will be corrected in the next patch.
 
As far as the effects...well, read the rest of the thread. There are those who believe that the effects of aircraft will be low (pointing to Kosovo or the 30 days of Desert Storm) and those who believe that the effects would be more dramatic (as evidenced in the Arab-Israeli wars or in certain aspects of WW2).
 
In the end, its not going to be resolved here. The basic gist is that if you think the effects are too low, increase either the Precision Guided Weapons modifier or else the Air Shock values to suit your tastes.
 
I'm still hoping for a 'fix' that makes Bombardments/Ground Support even remotely as effective as Interdiction strikes. Once those are more consistant, it makes a blanket change to the modifiers a much more palatable solutions unlike now where an increase to make the former worthwhile may well make the latter unbearable.

[RyanCrierie]

Well, when a B-36 bomb group of 30 B-36s shows up, stuff is going to die in massive quantities.

A single B-36 is capable of carrying
72 x 1,000 lb bombs for a total bombload of 72,000 lbs

What this means is, a three-aircraft line formation with 250 meters of space between each bomber can lay a 1,000 lb bomb onto the ground every 100 meters for 7.2 kilometers. In effect you have a giant carpet of bombs nearly a kilometer wide in effect marching onwards for 7 kilometers. Anything soft-skinned caught in the open during that carpet bombardment will die, and even units under armor or in fortifications will suffer heavily from the concussive blast effects.

[Industrial]

ORIGINAL: RyanCrierie

Well, when a B-36 bomb group of 30 B-36s shows up, stuff is going to die in massive quantities.

A single B-36 is capable of carrying
72 x 1,000 lb bombs for a total bombload of 72,000 lbs

What this means is, a three-aircraft line formation with 250 meters of space between each bomber can lay a 1,000 lb bomb onto the ground every 100 meters for 7.2 kilometers. In effect you have a giant carpet of bombs nearly a kilometer wide in effect marching onwards for 7 kilometers. Anything soft-skinned caught in the open during that carpet bombardment will die, and even units under armor or in fortifications will suffer heavily from the concussive blast effects.

I so agree, and just imagine a 7 day continous bombardment of a 25-mile front with over 1,5 million shells of various calibers, that should annihilate everything, nobody could survive this, and those few that will should be too shell shocked as to offer any resistance whatsoever! You should be able to advance without any resistance over that part of the front after such a massive bombardment, right?

Battle_of_the_Somme_(1916)

[Curtis Lemay]

During the Normandy campaign, the Allies used their heavy bomber commands several times. It only really worked once - Cobra. The bombardment on D-Day had almost no effect at all. And just before Cobra, they bombed their own lines by accident - killed an American general.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Boz

On a side note the casualties for the enemy seems quite small when considering the massive number of bombs ripping that area apart.

It's an area of 25 square kilometres. It really is quite easy to miss with bombs dropped from high altitude.

This was in the same turn after the bombardment took up 30% of the turn. They were routinely capable of repulsing the enemy following the attack.

Now try assigning the bombers directly to the attack.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: RyanCrierie

What this means is, a three-aircraft line formation with 250 meters of space between each bomber can lay a 1,000 lb bomb onto the ground every 100 meters for 7.2 kilometers.

So with 30 bombers this is an area of 7.5*7.2 kilometres, for a total of 54 square kilometres. Let's be generous and figure each of the 216 bombs dropped is deadly over an area of 25 square metres (since folks are going to be mostly lying in dips in the ground, behind trees, etc). This gives us a figure of 5,400 square metres, or 5.4 square kilometres. 10% of the area bombed. That's presuming that the defenders haven't dug holes for themselves in advance.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

The bombardment on D-Day had almost no effect at all.

That's really not true. The impact of the bombardment on the defenders of the beaches besides Omaha is quite clear when you look at the relative ease with which the Allies got off the beaches. Compare Dieppe.

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: Industrial

I so agree, and just imagine a 7 day continous bombardment of a 25-mile front with over 1,5 million shells of various calibers, that should annihilate everything, nobody could survive this, and those few that will should be too shell shocked as to offer any resistance whatsoever! You should be able to advance without any resistance over that part of the front after such a massive bombardment, right?

Battle_of_the_Somme_(1916)

LoL Stefan! You do sarcasm, so well![;)]

[PDiFolco]

ORIGINAL: Industrial

ORIGINAL: RyanCrierie

Well, when a B-36 bomb group of 30 B-36s shows up, stuff is going to die in massive quantities.

A single B-36 is capable of carrying
72 x 1,000 lb bombs for a total bombload of 72,000 lbs

What this means is, a three-aircraft line formation with 250 meters of space between each bomber can lay a 1,000 lb bomb onto the ground every 100 meters for 7.2 kilometers. In effect you have a giant carpet of bombs nearly a kilometer wide in effect marching onwards for 7 kilometers. Anything soft-skinned caught in the open during that carpet bombardment will die, and even units under armor or in fortifications will suffer heavily from the concussive blast effects.

I so agree, and just imagine a 7 day continous bombardment of a 25-mile front with over 1,5 million shells of various calibers, that should annihilate everything, nobody could survive this, and those few that will should be too shell shocked as to offer any resistance whatsoever! You should be able to advance without any resistance over that part of the front after such a massive bombardment, right?

Battle_of_the_Somme_(1916)

That's not the point : in 7 days there were *many* reinforcements, and what's the dead count ? Some squads lost as with our TOAW "bombings" ? Or rather some 10,000s ? [:'(]

[RyanCrierie]

I so agree, and just imagine a 7 day continous bombardment of a 25-mile front with over 1,5 million shells of various calibers, that should annihilate everything, nobody could survive this, and those few that will should be too shell shocked as to offer any resistance whatsoever! You should be able to advance without any resistance over that part of the front after such a massive bombardment, right?

1.) About a million of that 1.5 million shells were 18 pounder shrapnel shells, only about 0.5 million was HE, again, fired mainly from light guns. John Keegan in his analysis in "Face of Battle" estimates that only about 900 tons of HE were actually delivered in the preliminary bombardment.

2.) Dividing that 900 tons by seven days gives us a mere HE weight of 128.5 tons a day.

A carpet bomb attack by heavy bombers is going to deliver quite a lot of HE in about an hour or so.

It really is quite easy to miss with bombs dropped from high altitude.

Even with radar computing bombsights? The B-36's K-1 bomb/nav system could bomb at night from high altitudes (40,000+ feet) with better accuracy than former daylight bombing at much lower altitudes.

If you think this is impossible, look at the last raids of WWII by B-29s against the Shimotsuma oil refinery. Bombing by night, 78% of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aimpoint.

So with 30 bombers this is an area of 7.5*7.2 kilometres, for a total of 54 square kilometres. Let's be generous and figure each of the 216 bombs dropped is deadly over an area of 25 square metres (since folks are going to be mostly lying in dips in the ground, behind trees, etc). This gives us a figure of 5,400 square metres, or 5.4 square kilometres. 10% of the area bombed. That's presuming that the defenders haven't dug holes for themselves in advance.

1.) 30 B-36s x 72 1,000 lb bombs = 2,160 bombs.

Link

Minimum safe distance for the M117 750 lb Hi Drag bomb is 160m for protected troops, and 830m for unprotected troops. And we're dropping 1,000 lb bombs here. A tree also won't offer much protection from fragments from the bombs.

Recalculating with

2,160 bombs times 502.4 square meters (160m radius times 3.14) equals 1,085,184 square meters fragmented/blasted killed, or 1085 sq. km effectively churned over. That's pretty much enough damage to cover the target area of 54 square km 20 times over.

A much more important problem with TOAW3 is here:

Recently I tested the effect of 60 B-36s bombarding a 150 Rifle squad unit within a 5 kilometer hex. Time for turn was set to 6 hours. Now the damage done was in the range of 5-20% of the enemy. But I routinely lost upwards to a dozen bombers on the attack!

B-36s bombed from around 36,000 to 40,000+ feet. How is it that a rifle squad is going to be able to reach up to that altitude?