Bug in optional rules?

[Volcano Man]

IMHO the carpet bombers are too powerful in the alt_campaigns; we discussed this on a thread about a year ago. Not only are they too powerful, in the time frame of the game the ability to coordinate with recon and combined arms is a bit uncanny.

Happy New Year,

Marquo

Well, as I said before -- it depends on who you are playing against. I use carpet bombers and rarely hit anything useful. In reality, it is the enemy that determines how effective YOUR carpet bombers will be. If he doesn't stack tons of T mode units in densely concentrated areas then they simply won't be very effective, regardless of what you hit.

However, to me that argument about historical coordination makes no sense. The fact that you have a high probability of hitting nothing because of scatter (providing that you are not playing someone dishonest who is loading and saving the turn until they hit what they want), and the fact that you can hit your own units, means that they are, by their vary nature, DIFFICULT to coordinate as opposed to a surgical strike that can pin point a target unit and hex that is adjacent to your own units. That is the whole point of the carpet bomber mechanic. Also, I do not add more strategic bombers to the OOB, I only change the type to level bombers to prevent the surgical strike effect. So, I find it ironic to say that in the argument they do not have the historical level of coordination to carry out a coordinated carpet bomb attack against a wide area, yet they do have the ability to carry out a pin point close air support run in each hex in an area to conduct coordinated support for ground forces.

That said, it really boils down to how the whole air system works in general though -- and in the end if it is felt that there are too many bombers available then the best change probably lies in reducing the availability rate. Also, you have no real way to know if someone is cheating the level bombing mechanic other than to watch and see if they just happen to hit the nice fat juicy target that is surrounded by unoccupied hexes each turn. The very fact that this could happen again and again would represent impossible luck, especially since I can rarely manage to hit anything other than terrain. I recall my Compass '40 campaign as the Italians where I was very good at bombing the sea along the coast. Many dead fish surely washed up on shore because of my bombing runs. ;) All I can say to everyone is: don't give into the temptation to load/save when doing the bombing runs and don't play someone who you suspect is cheating. Those two things are what keeps carpet bombers from being too powerful.