The best tip I can give bomber players is don’t play bombers, you’re just a free kill to fighters/interceptors and bombing gives no benefits whatsoever, gaijin made them completely inviable because fighter players are legitimately brain damaged
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This, I literally started playing this game to play the B-29 and when I got it yesterday I was shot down by three dudes simultaneously. I wasn’t surprised since I’ve been playing bombers all the way to get there, but it’s still sad. Bombers are paper, and need to be buffed full stop.
And don’t even get me started on the crew stuff. The AI gunners are absolutely trash, and this is coming from a person with 5’s in all categories except for Stamina (which is 3.5). My gunners die to wind, pass out whenever they feel like it, and don’t shoot at people until they’ve been trailing me for 20 seconds or more and have likely already shot me down.
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Correction to this, I actually had all 5’s in every stat except for number of gunners, which is at level 4 (which is higher than necessary for the B29). So essentially even with max AI gunners they won’t do anything to keep you from being shot down.
The key is to use manual gunners with autopilot off, so that you fly evasive whilst shooting. Your 0.50 cals hit, crit and kill tailchasing fighters up to 2.4 kilometers - if you fly very fast and the closing speed of the fighter is not really high, shots from his 0.50 cals create damage on your B-29 only at around 1.80 km…
Relying on ai gunners is expecting that the game is playing the game for you…
There’s a lot of “if the conditions for you are best as possible and worse as possible for him” here, though. A lot of bombers are not faster than fighters, and most fighters are going to be going faster than you. This is especially laughable since you mentioned the B29, which is famously one of the most overtiered and underpowered bombers of them all. The thing faces planes going 50% faster than it with climb rates multiple times it’s own.
The assumption that you will be able to even hit manual shots from the gunner positions is also a big one since they seem to be much less accurate than other guns. I am a fairly good shot both on console and PC and I have to be lucky for the gunner positions in manual mode to hit at all, let alone enough to take down a fighter.
And regardless, the plane is a bomber - it is supposed to have separate people doing the flying and gunning. Trying to say that a bomber pilot (the player) being expected to additionally use the manual guns is just being unfair towards bombers. Most fighters don’t have turrets, so they shouldn’t be used as a baseline for bomber gameplay.
In order to avoid repeating myself - just read this and you might find an example of how effective manual gunnery is:
And that your B-29 gunners are useless even in manual mode: Just watch the vid.
I just don’t see your point here, like is it supposed to disprove my point saying that someone who’s spent >900 days playing bombers knows how to play even abysmal weapons? I named myself SpeclistMain because I’ve done something similar for Battlefront II and the heavy sniper of the game, but that doesn’t mean most people will want to spend all that effort to make a weapon viable.
Additionally, the majority of the planes around the guy are going comically slow for the BR, in fact it’s the slowest I’ve seen 7.0-8.0 jets go, and they also all missed their shots. If one of those Arados or 262’s hit a single one of their shots it would’ve been over for the B29.
Reminds me of my good old days in the digital german squadron “StG2 Immelmann” … we played Il-2 Sturmovik 1946. Our largest formation consisted of more than 21 Ju-87 plus additional fighters as escort. We spend hours in formation flight with He-111 and Ju-88.
Thx for sharing the video.
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Dude - you claimed that you started to play wt to play the B-29.
Flying prop bombers comes with a trade-off. It boils down that you have to be more skilled than your average fighter opponent in order to play them successfully - and pilot skills and manual gunnery skills are the key.
I showed you a vid of a guy with far less experience than 900days able to dogfight multiple opponents whilst using manual gunners. The speed difference (except the first 2 passes of the Kikka) were low because he forced them to turn, just watch his speed and flight path - instead of running away he flew to them, preventing them from climbing and picking up speed.
They missed their shots because he was able to fly and shoot at the same time whilst minimizing their time to shoot due to his flight path and maximizing his time with guns on target. He kept his speed in the sweet spot area with best turning performance.
I met him 2 years ago - in a Halifax. Only because i climbed to 6-7 km whilst he was farming my fighter mates at around 2-3 km alt (iirc 6 or 7) i was able to kill him with a high speed pass near my rip speed of ~ 870 TAS.
So your points were simply debunked with a single vid - the my core message is the same: Gaijin doesn’t care about bombers, and you have to be better than the average fighter player to have some fun with them.
I thought the person in the video was the one with >900 days in bombers, that’s my mistake there I thought that’s what you were saying in the post in the other thread.
I still think while it would make sense that you would need more skill than a fighter pilot since you have to deal with being a much larger and slower target, the tools given to bombers should still make sense and be feasible. For example, even in prop bomber versus prop fighter interactions, the bombers will almost always be at a lower speed and/or altitude because the bomber start just isn’t high enough to negate the climb rates of the enemies (especially when you’re in a US bomber facing germany, the UK, or russia).
For prop bombers versus jet fighters, for the games in the B29 that I did attempt, I was always going toward the enemies like you suggest but they were always faster if not higher because they were in jets. Forcing them to turn doesn’t mean much if the jets just employ BnZ tactics, if anything you’re just making yourself a much bigger target by making your plane perpendicular to the ground.
And this all assumes that the enemies don’t get shots off on you, because most jets (and non-US props) use cannons, so you additionally have to get more bullets into them to fight them off. So for most engagements you’re slower, at either the same or lower altitude, you do less damage, and are a much bigger target, and have much less survivability. At the very least the altitude and survivability should be changed to make it both more fair to bombers and more realistic because a spawn altitude of 3000-6000m was the usual during WWII.
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Although agree in general with the need of strengthening bomber game play - imho the spawn altitude is fine right now; we have around 3.500 for tactical bombers and 4.500 meters for strategic bombers. On certain maps with higher ground level both have 1.000 meters more.
The question is always what kind of bomber you fly and if you are willing to climb or not. You see every 50 or 60 games a B-17 used correctly - those guys climbed above the 6.500 meters mark when their conceptual advantage of turbo-superchargers makes them comparably fast and the closing speed of enemy fighters is rather low.
I recommend that you take your time and get used to certain maps and enemy fighter approaches in order to be better prepared. I recommend the B-18B as a medium bomber with very good climb and speed and “ok” defensive guns. I flew 11 missions today and lost just 1 plane due to own stupidity - whilst scoring 6 kills, 2 with gunners, 1 with bombing and 3 with the single offensive 13.2 mm cannon.
Imho you can beat almost every enemy fighter above 7-8 km - as long as they don’t outclimb you to a large margin and come in too fast.
So just the P-47 D-28 and the I-225 are actually serious threats - you outrun all japs and most German fighters above 8km - or their closing speed is too slow; so they can decide to fly straight and get peppered from 2.5km or they fly evasive and they can’t get into their gun range. XP-50s can be annoying, but if you spot them early enough they have to tailchase you - with all consequences.
In order to see how difficult it is to catch a B-18B - you might can have a look at the replay of my last match - i got chased by a 109 with gun pods and he had no realistic chance to even hit me. I lost this match cause i missed the 2 109s when i bombed the enemy runway and i realized too late that there was just 1 enemy left - my fault, but nobody is perfect…
The fragility issue is currently nerfed by real shatter 3.0 - but here i also agree that the damage from one or two cannon shells seems highly unrealistic.
Have a good one!
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This is the exact point of of the topic, if bombers are so broken they can’t be played then it’s long past due to buff them. ALL of them. ESPECIALLY American ones, and lower the BR of the B29 to 6.0 where it should be.
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Be careful with those BR changes because it can cause even more trouble in GRB.
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Ground realistic? Not to be off topic, but lets face it, the tank tech tree needs a MAJOR huge BR overhaul, starting with USA vs USSR vs Germany … but that is outside the scope of this discussion.
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After years of playing, I think a different set map should come for the bombers…
The maps are predictable, everyone knows where all the airports are, all the bases… You fly to the center of the map and sooner or later all players are enlightened with markers…
Players have no sense of flying in formation - 3 bombers in a box, it’s just about getting to the target before the others and before the opponent…
If the players were able to come to an agreement in the chat, then maybe it would be possible, but in the chat there is mostly nonsense and swearing…
The US bombers are the best, the British are the worst, even in reality they flew at night and they knew why…
Either you fly very high and hopefully no fighter will come for you, or you sneak near the ground like an explorer and also believe in luck…
The simulator has the greatest application and effectiveness, but experienced players cannot be easily fooled…
I was thinking that bombers with glide bombs might make sense… e.g.
Fritz x + He 177
V1+ He 111
Aeronca GB 1;4;5 - B 17
HS 293 - Do 217
Comet KS 1 + Tu 4
And other gliding bombs that are being developed to this day (they are now very popular on the Ukrainian-Russian border) …
Otherwise, overall, it seems to me that bombers are in the game only because they are well-known planes, they have no other meaning and, above all, sophistication in the game so far…
they should ideally be weaker but aint noone gonna say that except the bravest of us (me)
Fighter mafia killed bombers yrs ago…
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It’s absurd seeing how dumb are the arguments of fighter mains in this comment section.
Yes, bombers in War Thunder (and many Strike Aircraft too) are far too fragile compared to what they were IRL. A B-17 IRL could tank multiple 20mm Minengeshoß rounds without even flinching, whereas the B-17s ingame will have their tail completely sawed off if a few 7.92mm machine gun rounds hit it. I’m not saying Bombers should be capable of tanking 100 20mm rounds or 20 30mm rounds, but taking down bombers should not boil down to “hold W (or whatever button you use for WEP) until you are 500m away from a bomber’s rear, then hold Mouse1 until he dies”.
The defensive gunners were also nerfed beyond uselessness, they only begin to function if an enemy aircraft is closer than 200m, and that is provided you have a lvl75 ACE crew.
The fighter mains bitched that they could not simply kill bombers without activating their braincells, so they cried in the forums until bombers turned into the pitiful shadow of their former selves.
Edit: lots of spelling corrections, originally made this post on my Android phone with its tiny keyboard, but now fixed all the horrendous spelling mistakes thanks to the power of a proper computer keyboard and Grammarly.
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The defensive gunners were also nerfed beyond uselessness, they only begin to function if an enemy aircraft is closer than 200m, and that is provided you have a lvl75 ACE crew.
This is probably the biggest nonsense in the game that exists…
In reality, there were so-called death zones for fighters that attacked bombers…
To give you an idea, for the He-111 or Ju-88 it was around 500-600 meters, for the B-29 it was around 1000 meters. The death zone, meant that was the effective range of the bomber’s on-board gunners…
Effective range, of course not absolute 100% kill…
The 210 meters for the gunner’s automatic fire, especially when the bombers fly alone in the game, is complete nonsense…
But of course, imagine that shooting down bombers wouldn’t be such an easy kill as it is at the moment …
I can already hear the cries and wails of the players who play fighters…
Everyone wants to be like Hartmann or Kozhedub, bomber pilots and gunners are mostly unknown…
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This is actually not correct - i explained this in another thread:
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