About Medium bomb bay

[Juanisimo]

What is its supposed to be its effect during the Port Strike mission?


When reading the detail of the effect, it is mentioned that it applies "Ground Attack +3" during the Port Strike mission. But... What is the ground target attacked during Port Strike?

I thought it might be a typo, but in Plane Designer, Ground Attack and Naval Attack are listed separately.


Example with medium bomb bay:

Example with medium bomb bay and Torpedo:

 

[ETAIPOS]

As a side note, why is medium bomb bay so weak? you need 2 to get same ground attack as single CAS bomb bay/bomb locks

 

[blahmaster6k]

As a side note, why is medium bomb bay so weak? you need 2 to get same ground attack as single CAS bomb bay/bomb locks

If I had to guess it would be because they want medium bomb bays to mirror the stats that old TAC had, starting with interwar bombers.

The problem is that the current game lets you just put normal CAS and fighter weapons on a tactical bomber, so the best TAC build is to use "heavy fighters" with a single 2x LMG module in the first slot and then fill the rest with anti-tank cannons/small bomb bays/bomb locks. The medium bomb bay is so cost-inefficient for tactical bombing that it's better to just go with the LMG unless you're swimming in industry and don't care.

 

[SIRSTUPID]

If I had to guess it would be because they want medium bomb bays to mirror the stats that old TAC had, starting with interwar bombers.

The problem is that the current game lets you just put normal CAS and fighter weapons on a tactical bomber, so the best TAC build is to use "heavy fighters" with a single 2x LMG module in the first slot and then fill the rest with anti-tank cannons/small bomb bays/bomb locks. The medium bomb bay is so cost-inefficient for tactical bombing that it's better to just go with the LMG unless you're swimming in industry and don't care.

why just lmg. why not hmg?

 

[blahmaster6k]

why just lmg. why not hmg?

Because you get them for the cost, not the air combat capability. 2x LMG is the cheapest module in the game in that slot, costing only 1 IC. 2x HMG costs 1.5 IC. Ideally you have your bombers escorted by fighters the whole time, so you don't want/need to put any IC into anything but the bombing stat. If you don't have air superiority, you should be building fighters not bombers until you have air superiority.

 

[goodcigar]

The Plane Designer is just too simplistic to model reality properly imo. Here's an interesting WW2 aircraft channel I found today.

 

[Anaraxes]

When reading the detail of the effect, it is mentioned that it applies "Ground Attack +3" during the Port Strike mission. But... What is the ground target attacked during Port Strike?

The port itself can by damaged by a Port Strike, as well as the ships in that port.

 

[Juanisimo]

The port itself can by damaged by a Port Strike, as well as the ships in that port.

Thanks for answering!
But... If the effect of "Ground Attack +3" is to damage the port, why isn't it marked as Strat. Bombing? And more important than that, why don't the rest of the bomb bay have the same ground damage in Port Strike mission?

Example. Large bomb bay only deals naval damage. A weapon of this type should do much more damage to the port. Or does it damage the port without having ground damage? I didn't test it.

The same goes for the Small bomb bay:

I think there is a bug here. The Medium bomb bay should have Naval Damage +3 or +2 and was placed as Ground Damage. Just to be sure, I post it on this forum to discuss it.

 

[Anaraxes]

But... If the effect of "Ground Attack +3" is to damage the port, why isn't it marked as Strat. Bombing?

Port damage is a side effect of the Port Strike. Ports are indeed one of the possible strat bombing targets for the Strategic Bombing mission. But the "Port Strike" can also damage ports, even though they're not the main target of the strike. (That's the ships.) The planes would need some rating to be used in that calculation. "Naval attack" might not be appropriate, as that integer value is scaled for a different calculation used against ships rather than buildings.

The wiki notes that port damage can only occur if ships are actually in port to be attacked by Port Strike. Flying Port Strike in an airzone won't damage empty ports. (That's where the strat bombing comes in.) Just speculation on my part, but perhaps the rating is different from the Strat Bombing rating to reflect the notion that the port damage is just collateral from the main attack, whereas the TAC would be better at destroying the port if that were its intended target (using its STR rating).

Feel free to file a bug; the devs can then at least take a look at the numbers and verify that the mission has the desired effect.

 

[currylambchop]

I did some tests and I can confirm that the medium bomb bay doesn't do anything to increase effectiveness of port strike. Though I do have to double check if it increases the damage done to the port. However, I doubt this is the case because it seems to always do 1 level of damage in any successful port strike from my understanding.

EDIT: from further testing, I modded the game so that medium bomb bay added +20 ground attack to the port strike. In fact, it seems to do nothing to increase port damage, if not doing even less damage

 

[Juanisimo]

I did some tests and I can confirm that the medium bomb bay doesn't do anything to increase effectiveness of port strike. Though I do have to double check if it increases the damage done to the port. However, I doubt this is the case because it seems to always do 1 level of damage in any successful port strike from my understanding.

EDIT: from further testing, I modded the game so that medium bomb bay added +20 ground attack to the port strike. In fact, it seems to do nothing to increase port damage, if not doing even less damage

Thanks for the reply!

Your tests are interesting and support my assumption that the module has a bug. The correct thing is that it adds Naval damage during Port Strike mission, instead of Ground Damage +3.

I'm going to report a bug and hopefully we'll be lucky.