bomber balance

[Jihadjoe]

Ok, I'm gunna drop in to this.

In the last version (4.85), the problem we had was that fighters could not kill bombers in time to save the heavy cap they were escorting. Take the following situation as an example.

- Four fighters are escorting a battleship.

- Four hostile bombers attack said battleship.

- The fighters fail to kill the bombers in time to save the battleship because they are incapable of doing enough damage.


The above situation had nothing to do with bombers being able to use fighter guns. Nothing at all.It was to do with fighters being too weak in offensive terms. The way to cure that problem would have been to increase the projectile speed of fighter's guns making them more accurate, and thus killing the bombers faster, allowing the escort fighters to protect their cap.

Rather ironically, the current bomber guns, particularly the shieldbuster, have made bombers more effective against heavy caps. Those shieldbusters strip a battleship shield in almost no time at all. Since battleships are easy targets to hit, the projectile speed doesn't matter.

The new bomber guns give fighter escorts less of a chance to protect heavy caps.

However, these bombers guns are not fast enough in order to hit gunboats to any great effect. In order to hit a gunboat reliably, you have to get very close to it. This leaves you being a fantastic target for razors, missiles, solaris guns, regular guns, everything a gunboat can throw at you.

Gunboat vs bomber balance was already broken in favour of gunboats. Now it is worse.

Bomber vs heavy cap balance was already broken in favour of the bomber. Now it is worse.

What has this new bomber thing achieved? Nothing.

To top it off, it is no harder to supernova fighters or bombers. All you need is a fighter with you to drop their shield.


To clarify... The problem with the last version was not that bombers could indiscriminately kill fighters. If you got two pilots of equal skill, put one in a bomber and the other in a fighter, then the fighter would win, by fighting in a fashion which didn't give the bomber a chance to supernova him. Achieving this isn't hard... There are several million ways to fight which don't involved sitting infront of the business end of a supernova. You will never find me jousting a bomber unless I know it doesn't have the energy to fire a supernova.

The recent changes in bomber balance have addressed the issue of bombers killing fighters. This was never the issue. The problem was fighters being unable to kill bombers in time. That has been made more of a problem by making bombers more effective against heavy caps.

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