Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: TheManx on August 13, 2002, 01:09:56 AM
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I have to admit, that I don't often play bombers in Aces High but today I decided to check the bomber modelling out of curiousity after reading some of the excellent help posts by some of the bomber vets and I really enjoyed it.
In my test I took a formation of Bostons up to 20k, levelled out, set my bomb site according to advice I'd read on the forums and let loose on a port and then later an ammo factory and was surprised at the results. I actually hit what I'd aimed for. I'm not sure if HT has changed something in this new release, but bombing was very accurate tonight (as accurate as before the new formations were introduced). I'll probably fly bombers more often now that the new formations are put into place.
A big to those who posted the information on the web for curious newbies like myself to learn from. It surely made the transition an easier one.
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WTG Manx! I guess if you never used training wheels before, you enjoy riding the bike more :)
Gunner
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Originally posted by GunnerCAF
WTG Manx! I guess if you never used training wheels before, you enjoy riding the bike more :)
Gunner
:rolleyes:
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Bombing in AH does work!
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Now all we need is more to work at bombing. :p
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Now we need to stategic target that effect the game play to make bombing worth while. Like factories that are compact like in real life instead of spread out over a couple of miles.
DarkHawk
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Seems much easier to calibrate accurately now, believe it's been changed recently.
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It hasn't changed except for whats been in the readme files.
HiTech
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Hi Mates
Where are these "read me" files on bombing.
I had quit high level altogether because the norden just didn't work for me.
As a dedicated buff driver, someone please aim me in the right direction toward instructions for the norden that make sence.
Many thanks
Majors
249RAF
Oldest Yank in the RAF
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Despite occasional misses (my fault usually) its never been the ease of calibration/accuracy thing that's been holding me back from flying buffs more (and I love buffs), it's the alternating goofy/mysterious "share and share alike" buff damage modelling that still hasn't been fixed.
[Rude, start reading here]
Case in point. 3 ship B17 formation, I get attacked by a lone 109. He's good, knows what he's doing, nice forward quarter attack, but I wax him anyway. (Several seconds after he's tumbling behind me, his damage arrives. . .but that's another issue entirely). He takes a bite out of the tuckus of my lead plane, but it's still flyable, with one engine failing. A short while later, he ups again--again, a nice slashing attack, again I take him out, but he's shredded my lead plane. I bail out, my two remaining planes form up nicely. . .except they are both crawling along at just over 100 mph, nose down slightly to stop from stalling. I try shutting down and re-starting all engines, both collectively then individually--no effect. I check the flaps, adjust the trim manually, no freaking effect. My damage list shows nothing. I'm still on the verge of a stall, having to hold the nose down--and the mission is to all intents and purposes over.
And then the engines begin to shut down, one by one. . .
I bail from one plane, and then the engines begin to shut down on the last plane. . .
This is getting really old. Honestly, since I've been playing AH, I've never, ever encountered any aspect of the game that has made me seriously frustrated enough to consider abandoning one component of it entirely--until now.
I don't mind the difficulty of the bombing. I don't mind getting shot down by guys who know what they are doing (and there are a lot of them out there).
But if we're going to have these mysterious "mechanical failure" effects, let's have them for all planes, eh? Not just buffs. . .
[Rude, stop reading here]
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Hell, there are some great anti-buff pilots out there.
I had a guy in a Tempest Destroy (And I mean Literally explode) 2 of my 3 B-26's and damage the 3rd ALL IN ONE HEAD ON PASS!!!!!!!!!!
I could not believe this was possible, until the concept of Hispanos was explained to me from a squaddie.
Still seems tough to swallow, but I cannot back up my gripe with any historical data, so I have to go along with it.
I still think as soon as the plane your in is critically damaged (When there is nothing left to do but watch it crash) you should be automaticallyand INTSTANTLY be moved to the 2nd, or 3rd A/C of the group.
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Agree Muckmaw. And yes, I've had a couple of guys really shred my formation in a heavily armed plane. That said, there are still a lot of issues that need to be resolved--like the fact that damage lists don't seem to work when you jump to a new plane, the random engine shutdown (in my example from yesterday, I looked at the film, and don't see how the 109 pilot managed to hit every single engine in every one of my planes!) and so on.
At least the last patch seemed (for me at least) to have fixed the problem of losing vox in the middle of a bomb drop.
And I know there are more pressing problems out there, with a lot of people still experiencing random dumps, etc. But if any other plane feature were this screwed up (imagine if the re-arm pad were this porked) you'd see people jumping up and down about it. I'm worried that the reason more people aren't doing it about the buffs is because most people who would have flown them have given up.
Makes me nostalgic for the pre-1.10 days where people were making those apocalypic pronouncements about how buffs would destroy the MA as we know it, ruin gameplay for everyone, put an end to furballing, etc. Remember those? Go back and have a look some time, it will make you weep.
What it led to instead, was the rise of the Tiffie. . .
Ah well, time to dust off me P51B.
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Pre Change
Same old stuff. We need change. I'm bored. When will we get change? I need change now!
Change
Yaa Hoo!!! It's here!! This is great! Thanks for the change.
Post Change
Hey, this is different. This isn't how it used to be. Wow, this sucks. I wish it was like it used to be.
You Are Here X
:)
Gunner
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Revvin,
Bombing doesn't work in any sort of useful way. Just because you and I can blow up stuff on a base with Lancs or 17s doesn't mean it isn't severly broken.
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Yes it does Karnak you've just got to let go of the past and forget all about that lazer accuracy of previous versions.
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I think what he's saying is regardless of whether you can hit the factories or not, there's no noticable reason to do so. Bombers have no effect on the game.
J_A_B
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J_A_B,
That's part of it. The other part is that bombers do far, far less damage on a time unit/person basis than Jabo aircraft do. Why ever use Lancs when P-38s will do 3 times the damage per hour?
Revin,
I am an advocate for the new bombing system and you'd have noticed this if you didn't simply stick your fingers in your ears and start shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" every time somebody says the bomber system needs work.
Hitting the target isn't the issue. As I said, I can hit things just fine. The problem is that there is never a good reason to take bombers and that bombers still have to do the incredibly gamey and redicules multiple pass roadkill.
I like the system, now I want targets that allow me to be useful while bombing in a historical manner. I want to drop all of my bombs in one pass, as was done in reality. Right now I waste the vast majority of my bombs if I use historical tactics. I hate the stupid loitering over the target crap.
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Karnak scores direct hits on all targets mentioned here.
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I want to drop all of my bombs in one pass, as was done in reality. Right now I waste the vast majority of my bombs if I use historical tactics. I hate the stupid loitering over the target crap.
You CAN drop all your bombs in one pass and have an effect even at a small field it's possible to take out two hangars in one pass. Do you realyl think every bomb dropped in WW2 was a direct hit?
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One good reason to use bombers over jabo is the ability for them to drop from safe altitudes and get home. Sure you can destroy the hangers with 3 p38's, but the fact remains that there is a high probability that you've lost all three fighters in doing that. It's possible that there isn't enough incentive put into the game to get home safe. Then maybe bombers will have their role back.
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Lol Manxer, I've yet to discover what the "safe altitude" is for buffing!
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Originally posted by muckmaw
Hell, there are some great anti-buff pilots out there.
I had a guy in a Tempest Destroy (And I mean Literally explode) 2 of my 3 B-26's and damage the 3rd ALL IN ONE HEAD ON PASS!!!!!!!!!!
I could not believe this was possible, until the concept of Hispanos was explained to me from a squaddie.
It's actually a bug, part of the buff damage model problems.
I don't know for sure, but I believe it works like this:
Ever noticed that sometimes when someone kills you, you hear more hits after you're back in the tower? Same thing, except you're still there to TAKE the damage.
Attacker fires 10 rounds into your lead buff. All of them hit a critical point on your plane, causing it to explode on the third round. Four five and six hit, causing the second buff which you're now in to explode, then seven eight and nine hit buff#3, and you're back in the tower.
To kill a buff formation, you dont need to spray across the whole formation, just put as many rounds as possible into the lead buff, forget the other two.
As for strat bombing,
Strat right now is totally broken. Bombing strat has absolutly no effect on the small maps(I think akdesert works) You can bomb a strat target, completly wipe it out, and it'll still show as 100%. That includes HQs, so no radar hitting. On akdesert, bombing another team's HQ will knock out your own radar. The sheer brokeness of the strat system really shows up on akdesert, where a field in an enemy zone, which should be getting no supplies, has no noticable rebuild difference from the fields owned by the zone owner. (There may be an ACTUAL difference in time, but nobody ever actually notices it)
Originally posted by Manxer
One good reason to use bombers over jabo is the ability for them to drop from safe altitudes and get home. Sure you can destroy the hangers with 3 p38's...
There is no safe alt for bombers. Over 14k, the wind will screw with your drop, leaving you at an easy alt for fighters. It takes three buff formations to kill hangars, not just a single one. The buff formations have no option to cap the field, or to do anything but drop thier bombs and leave. It also takes them so long to get even to 14k, level out, and stabilize thier speed, that the p38s could be welll on thier way for a second sortie by the time the buffs are just getting there.
Plus, every bomber formation lost is three deaths, not one, and a bomber formation can take only slightly more damage than a lone bomber. (Try it sometime, a lone buff is better against fighters than a formation.)
With the exception of the cities(strat cities) a heavy jabo is faster, and can inflict more damage than a buff formation. Sure a fleet of buff drivers can kill a field. But the same fleet could get into p38s or 110s, kill the field, the town, and then cap the place waiting for a goon.
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There is no safe alt for bombers. Over 14k, the wind will screw with your drop, leaving you at an easy alt for fighters.
You can calibrate for the cross wind. Bombing above 14K is not that hard, just don't tell anyone this well kept secret :)
There may be no safe alt for bomber, but you don't find many fighters doing high speed passes from above at 28K.
Gunner
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GunnerCAF has it right, you can bomb from 28-30K and hit your targets.
Now lets see,... if we know all the tricks...
1 hour to climb to 28K and arrive on station.
15 min. to stabilize speed, calibrate and drop.
30 min. to return to base.
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1 hour 45 min. round trip for two FHs plus some collateral damage.
But wait. The front moved two sectors before we could do the drop.
30 min. to reach new target.
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2 hours 15 min. total, assuming you don't drop down to look for a fight.
If you brought a buddy or two, the timing was just right, you don't CTD, some alt monkey didn't pop you while you calibrated, then just maybe you stopped the fighters for 15 minutes.:rolleyes:
Last night in two 110G sorties, can't remember the base, I took the fuel down to 50%, killed the dar and got two kills while they tried to gang bang me. This in 20 minutes.:D
They had to drag me out of my Lancasters for squad night in 1.09. I still fly bombers once in a while, (two sorties x3 this tour) mainly because I'm good at it and they're still the best way to kill a CV. While I like bombers, I'll have to echo other post and say there's just no point to it. I'm glad you're having fun up there GunnerCAF, means you're not down on the deck waiting for my 110 and I like that.
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Originally posted by Easyscor
GunnerCAF has it right, you can
Last night in two 110G sorties, can't remember the base, I took the fuel down to 50%, killed the dar and got two kills while they tried to gang bang me. This in 20 minutes.:D
See, you should have been flying a faster plane all along!
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muhaha :)
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2 hours 15 min. total, assuming you don't drop down to look for a fight.
Every Lancaster should come with a free cot :)
Gunner
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As a dedicated buff driver, someone please aim me in the right direction toward instructions for the norden that make sence.
Majors, you might want to look at the web page I made on bombsight calibration (http://members.cox.net/srmalloy/AH/Bombing.html); the procedure seems to work pretty well for me when I don't have difficulties thrown at me by the terrain -- the ndisles terrain, for example, is hideously difficult to calibrate your sight when you're over water.
I have found that the order doesn't really matter; what I have taken to doing is, as soon as I get up to drop altitiude, I'll jump into the bombardier position, turn on calibration, pick the target to set target alt, and then exit calibration. That will ensure that I don't forget about doing it later and have to fumble the calibration at the last minute.
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Boston's don't take long to get to 20k. That's maybe why my bomb runs didn't seem so tedious. I highly recommend this plane for people who want to learn. Less time between frustration if you miss. I've also found, if an enemy is lower than me, there is almost no chance of him climbing up to get me before I finish my drop and head home.
Bombing is something in my opinion that should take a great deal of skill and planning to be good at. Shaping the ebb and flow of an arena should never be easy for a single bomber in my opinion. If he gets good enough at doing this since the update, then it came from working hard at learning how to become good at what he does. I think this is still a good opportunity to validate the skill side of bombing. The good one's will get a reputation for being good (very much like the existing fighters).