I kill CVs with a buff fairly often, but at least I try to be historical about it. I use a single Ju88, load it with 4x500kg bombs, and divebomb from 15k (using the brakes, of course). Go STRAIGHT down to avoid the CV's manned 5", aim for the very bow of the ship, drop when you 1st see the auto-ack tracer appear, and immediately pull out. You'll hit dead amidships. If the CV's taken any damage already, you'll almost always sink it. And if all 4 bombs are direct hits, sometimes you can sink a cherry CV this way. I almost always survive the ack doing this, but low fighters usually get me as I'm trying to egress.
That said, I do think something must be done about the ability to level-bomb CVs. The problem is the unresponsiveness of the ship with the current control method, or the total lack of response if nobody's driving the boat, combined with the huge damage radius of bombs. Hell, once I sank 2 DEs with 1 of those monster Stuka bombs dropped 1/2 way between them.
* To make a CV more controllable, instead of giving it map coordinates, actually let the player use his joystick in real time. And don't let him do ANYTHING ELSE while he's in control, to keep the controlling player from flying away, hiding the CV, or whatever. Put his POV on top of the bridge so he can see in all directions and up, and make him stay there as long as he's in control.
* To prevent unmanned CVs getting vulched, give them some auto evasion.
* To prevent the shotgun 14x1000lb thing, change the way blast damage is figured when bombs hit the water. Like REALLY reduce both its power and its radius.
The other issue is the low-level suicide buff run. I don't know how to approach this, because buffs really did this sort of thing quite often. However, they did skip-bombing. I'd really like to see bombs skip off the water (and even the ground) instead of always instantly exploding--it would be a nice skill to learn, so your bombs skipped into the target instead of bouncing over it, stopping short, etc. But how, at the same time, to stop the current low-alt formation shotgun (which is also the bane of airfields and GV armies)?
How about this? Have something that checks the alt of the bombing plane before it applies bomb damage. If the plane is below some alt limit, and the bombs were dropped by a formation (or the last survivor of a formation), then they're all duds. IOW, it would force players to take only a single buff on such missions. Then they'd have a much higher chance of dying before dropping instead of having 2 spare planes to jump into, and they couldn't do nearly as much damage because only 1 plane at most could drop bombs.
