Saying the strat is broken barely does justice, it is completely hooped. From several standpoints it needs to be addressed, some of which are easy to remedy, others which are much more difficult. The easy part would be to increase the concentration of targets within a strat square, making carpet style bombing more useful. Honestly, calibrating forever so you can bomb from low alt and hit something is beyond what most players are willing to learn. Bombing is tough now, no doubt, and it takes practice and time. Making it a bit easier would be nice but I don't think fiddling with the bombsight is the way to go. I think it should really entail a massive increase in target size so even a newbie can take off and hit something in a target square even if his calibration was half-way decent. Now, that said, I do think a higher level of calibration skill should give better results.
ie. If you had a large town with rivers, bridges, railyards, factories, etc, all in close proximity, then anyone should be able to hit the town in general and get some building kills. A better bomber might be able to hit the factory district, knocking out more important factories, while a really good bomber pilot might be able to pick off the railyard... you get the idea.
Secondly, and this is much tougher, some way needs to be designed so bombing means something. The problem is, it can't mean too much and it shouldn't mean too little. We've been down both roads in AH in the last couple of years (I've been around a while). When it means too much, a single pilot can basically throw the balance off with a single suicidal move. Right now we have the opposite, strat targets are tough to get too when in enemy territory, and mean very little. It's a really tough balancing act and HTC I'm sure is still trying to figure out how to get something that is fair to everyone.
The only way I've considered it might work, would be to increase the size, and number of strat targets. That would put something in reach of all bomber pilots, while the more experienced ones would be able to inflict a higher level of damage because they could pick out specific areas of each city to bomb. Deep raids might offer a higher reward, but honestly I don't think everyone wants to fly a 2 hour round trip bomber sortie (with climb times). Also, you don't want to have to bring 5 guys along every time in order to actually be able to fight through a half dozen enemy fighters. Big raids, like you used to see from time to time, still might go for big return, and hit deep. Also, the larger the country, the more the infrastructure (strat) might mean, giving the underdogs a little boost from hitting targets. If there were 30+ strat targets/side, of varying sizes and types, then it would diversify what you could hit. Also, losing 1 or 2 might not make a big difference, but losing lots of them would. Finally, to keep people in bombers, make the strat targets stay down for longer, possibly hours. That way if a bomber pilot wanted to make a difference he would have to invest a couple of hours of attacks, for which the damage he did would last even longer.
Dunno, most of that is just a big brain dump, but I feel badly for bomber guys right now. I used to fly bombers a fair amount, certainly more than now, but I think most people would agree that in the current state they are more interesting, but less useful. Changing the bombsight wouldn't improve things, it would just focus you on hitting airfields, which is really a waste of bomber resources.
-Soda
The Assassins.
