In the upcoming update, Gaijin has greatly strengthened bombers’ resistance to damage, making them nearly indestructible. I know that bombers in the game urgently need better survivability, but this should be limited to resistance against machine guns and cannons. In fact, bombers on the test server can now tank multiple missile hits, and can even survive being rammed by other aircraft; and as for machine guns and cannons, they can hardly kill a bomber at all. Gaijin has turned bombers into outright flying battleships — soaring high and impossible to destroy. As a player from mainland China, I’ll attach here some test videos from the mainland Chinese video platform bilibili showing the damage resistance of bombers on the test server. The video includes such absurd material as missiles finding it very difficult to shoot down bombers (including the high-power AIM-54 missile — even 6 AIM-54 hits cannot destroy a B-17) and a B-52 being able to directly ram and destroy a B-17 without taking any damage. This reminds me of the omnicrusher in Red Alert — it’s simply absurd beyond belief. Gaijin should adjust bombers’ damage resistance; the situation on the test server right now is just too ridiculous.
Here’s the main forum thread about that. Also, that F-14 video is more likely due to the phoenixes being bugged and detonating late than the bombers being too strong.
Honestly, considering the poor things will still be largely useless in winning games, this is exactly what the game needs.
Fighters get unrealistic situational awareness and aiming ability, giving them 20-50x greater shooting accuracy, thus bombers and bomber-derived attackers get correspondingly tankier damage models.
I kinda saw this coming sooner or later, because the number of new and interesting bombers the game has yet to add both in prop tiers and jet tiers is frankly ridiculous. Not just popular ones like the V-bombers, B-36, XB-35/YB-49, but also dozens upon dozens of prototypes and obscure ones. Snail smells money to be made, and thus is preparing the field to start dumping in missing bombers for every tree imaginable.
And I’m all for it - let the fighter mains whine, recognize chasing bombers ain’t worth it, go land on their goddamn runways, and actually USE their multirole capabilities to win games by CAS instead if the bombers climb to orbit. The game already has the means for people to adapt - it just requires Fighter Mains’ raging PvP boners to get blue-balled.
So, you want to be able to have an easier time shooting down a B-17 with a sidewinder from your F-14? Therefore you want to toss the bomber buff 85% of the community has been asking for over 4 years, right? This is so typical of the fighter mafia’s spoiled garbage.
Most maps these days are the hyper-symmetrical ones with lots of soft ground units. Light Pillboxes can be melted by any aviation weapon that isn’t a rifle-caliber gun (and even those will eventually kill them with concentrated fire). Only the oldschool AI tanks are a bit of a problem. Player-grade tanks are on some maps, but well over half of fighters carry bombs. Between ticket losses from bombers doing their thing and all the soft ground units, you won’t need to kill very many of the tougher tanks to win games.
Unfortunately yes this will happen. Much as I wish it wouldn’t. But neither of us can fix the average stupid player mentally insisting on winning by Dumb Fucking Deathmatch even though the ground units are right down there waiting to be killed.
I remember playing Sim the last time it was like that. But the mode’s already dead as far as I’m aware, or damn close to it. Already people can no longer select single missions from Air RB to go fly in Sim, where instead we have just EC.
Bombers will remain useless but tanky porcupines. But how long people will take to learn “I should just ignore him and go do the actual fucking objective” is unknown.
We all have suffered from the Bromans, the CommunistBalls, and the UnknownDistances of the community who lorded their “dogfighting skill” over everyone else and demanded nothing else matter but them because “how dare I abort this fun dogfight I am having to go save/kill some goddamn bot farmer or fucking spacebar warrior, or lose the match!” (xBromanx literally said that on the old forum).
Reasoning with such “Toxic Fighter Mains” or “Fighter Mafia” (pick your favorite term) is impossible, just like any equivalent attempts to reason with a Tank or Ship player who has a hate-boner for CAS. All the game can do is intentionally flip the board so that such stubborn folk now find their victim mentality eradicated and their stubbornness is now their liability, and eventually their tomb.
Not really, given how overly accurate the typical fighter is in shooting them thanks to Mouse Aim. Meanwhile Bomber gunners still artificially spray all over the place.
Personally I would make Bomber gunners have the same negligible spray as fighter-mounted equivalent weapons, but in exchange delete the AI controlled gunner logic entirely.
Then if the bomber is paying attention, they can get kills if the fighters approach from stupid directions. If the bomber is a bot-script or AFK, then the fighter easily slaughters them because they’re too asleep at the wheel to man their gunners. That could also be the way to help protect Sim from the bot-script horde.
Bombers are allowed to engage fighters directly if they want, or even chase them in some scenarios, so they can still impact matches heavily. Stuff like the Vautours, Canberras, Pe-3s, Pe-2s, Tu-2s A-20s, A-26s, B18/T18, and others all have offensive armament and they can be used to take down enemy aircraft. What are you supposed to do if one of those is trying to actively fight you?
And this change will entirely kill prop sim as bombers would be near impossible to take down, while still having plenty of impact on matches.
Exactly, what they can’t overcome with just a little skill or simple tactics, they resort to minority tantrum foot stomping and endless whining. All the while appealing to the suggestion mods to put a thumb on the scale. Never mind that 4 years of polls have shown that 85% of the community wants these buffs, they will either have their way or burn down the house.
