This isn't a post to ask to make buffs more powerful. Nor is it about asking to make targets softer. It is a genuine thought about 'realism'.
Perhaps it should be titled "Carpet Bombing - the role in AH".
At the minute, a typical buff run in AH consists of the long flight out, line up on tgt, drop one salvo of bombs, and RTB.
I'm sure you've had a lot of buffers complain about this. I'm not about to. It's how it was. If you made 2 or 3 orbits of the target it was because you wanted to make damn sure you dropped on your target, because you only had one shot.
There does need to be some consideration here though. There needs to be merrit in carpet and area bombing, since these were also active methods. Perhaps the cities / factories / airfields need to have population and/or 'crew' counts.
Dropping a 1000lb bomb on a field wouldn't guarantee you a population reduction, but a random chance. The idea is that if you take 10 bombers up over a field, town or city and they drop salvos of 100lbers, then that 12,000lbs+ of bombs ought to have some effect. Readjust the downtimes to include this, and you introduce a little scope for surprise.
Other options? Instead of trying to remember the sum of craters on a runway, if the damage to a runway exceeds a given amount - close it and have a 'damaged runway model'? This should certainly exceed the damage required to close a hangar.
As a last note to this effect, it would be nice to see the bomb-affect radiuses expanded. I don't mean those carrying the primary damage, I mean the collateral damage. A 100lb bomb ought to do 100lbs of damage to a wider radius.
This would again support the introduction of carpet bombing as an aide to ground based (e.g. tanks) artillery; 'softening'.
Oliver
