Matrix Games Forums

[font="Trebuchet MS"]Hi there bombin mates...
Currently in my 5th day in my glorious Oil long campaign I decided to start using the night to hit targets deep in Germany.

As the targets after night raids appear with zero damage, I don't know whether for daylight bombing your own bombers report target damage while night bombers cant obviously do so or if my bombers are failing miserably when bombing tru clouds or at night. I try sending some pathfinders as group leaders but that doesn't seem to help much if at all.

So I decided to send in the professional arsonists and converted one of my pathfinder groups to Mosquitos, and one of my b-24 groups to lancaster III and so...

Yesterday I organized a raid to penemunde at night with these two groups and...

the game reports again zero damage!

I will have some recon over the area today but I'm wondering if night bombing has been deactivated for oil long campaign (you don't have brit groups and I think they are supposed to operate anyways because all the german cities are in flames and my glorious bombing groups can smell victory from 25.000 feet above them).

Most probably the failure is on me so...

According to kaybay the way of night bombing is to send them mosquitoes 5 minutes before them bombers. I will try that also but so far I think it is pointless to bomb over clouds and or at night...the most damage I got so far was 2% with 4 bomber groups while bombin in the sun reports 100% damage with just 2 bombing groups. Thats efficiency!

If that was how it worked historical, I would have sacked Harris and the rest of the arson cabal and placed the radio's weather man in command of the effort to set Europe in flames.

It would have reported a lot more bang for the buck![/font]

Alas, Bomber Command (until 1942/43) had trouble bombing the correct town, let alone a particular factory. Google "Butt Report" and you'll see what I mean. Use Bomber Command to hit area targets only, and the 8th AF for "precision" strikes.

Mosquitos use the Oboe system for bombing targets, and the Oboe's range barely reaches to the Ruhr area.

A well-functioning Oboe allowed "precision" bombing comparable to what the daylight bombers did from above 20k ft, but the system was limited to one aircraft using it at a time. The later Gee-H did correct that with a more expensive equipment (up to 80), but proved to be quite unreliable (and it only arrived when the 8th AF already had destroyed many targets in Gee-H's/Oboe's range).

It's thus somewhat realistic that night bombers are useless against industry targets.

[font="Tahoma"]So in the night campaigns you can only bomb railroads in cities??? I think historically they devastated whole cities (with the factories included in them) but I don't think the sim simulates dispersion to hit other nearby targets.

Anyways I wont be testing that anytime soon. As I don't have any night fighters in my long oil campaign I had to send the bombers all alone and they are currently at 20 morale (last raid the cowards just turned tail in the middle of Germany minutes away from the target!). I wonder how much time it will take for them to reach 50 or so because I think the campaign is like 50 turns only.

How are you supposed to hit an engine factory at Berlin in daylight! I will have to destroy the Luftwaffe first and by then the campaign will be over!

Oh decisions decisions![:D][/font]

Night raids do devastate large areas of cities. If you turn the map to urban view you will see the cities accumulate destruction and fires during the raid.

Factories WITHIN urban areas can be effectively attacked at night, but its not the same as during the day. Your bombers wont be able to target an individual factory for example, but if you want to hit a factory in, lets say the eastern part of the city, then if you devestate that sector of city some damage will also occur to the factories in that area.

Berlin has several factories inside the urban area, I think Dortmund has a couple, can't remember the rest.

can you confirm that fires in game inflict damage on factories inside the urban area??? in my campaign most cities are in flames(not because of me, I suspect the game simulates night raids to happen between the player's turn) and many targets that I haven't hit have a lot of damage but I didn't know they were correlated

I haven't the short scenarios so can't answer for the oil campaign, but in the long campaign if you launch a night mission at a city and the city has factories in the urban area you are targeting then you will usually do some decent damage.

That's important though, factories need to be INSIDE the city limits, if they are close to a city, but outside the built up areas, then night targeting will be very poor, as usual

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Hi there Dobey...Yesterday I torched Amsterdam (Weren't those guys allies?? well sometimes you just cant avoid collateral...[;)]) just to test our predicament here...

[:D]Ho ho ho ho ho...oh boy! isn't it cool to have a fleet of bombers under [&o]my command???

I managed a a respectable damage with those godsend 4lb cluster incendiaries and blockbusters, around 30% city and 50% rail (hey! I noticed that if you send recon over the target after the attack the damage ratios are corrected so I'm guessing the games works by reporting the damage you get after the attack ala estimation of my glorious bomber crews)

There are like 2 factories next to the city (or as inside it as they come in the game I think)but sadly the fire seems to be burning in the opposite direction. I don't have any experience bombing cities, as in my campaign I don't have RAF bombing groups (I had to create one LAnC and one Halifax from 2 b17 groups), but I suppose the damage keeps going up, as well as the fire with each day so I'll keep monitoring it to see if the fire gets to them factories and see whether they take damage or not.
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