Feedback on US aircraft choices

[podcat]

Let's start with the Chain Lightning... What??? The number of Chain Lightnings produced? ONE. That would be fine if there were no other obvious choices, like with the Destroyer, but there IS an obvious choice. The P-61 Black Widow is an awesome late-war two-engine fighter that saw plenty of service, made the last US "kill" of the war, and is relatively well-known and highly admired. The Chain Lightning, on the other hand, barely exists.

When we picked the chain lightning the idea was to have separate night fighter variants of heavy fighters and we reserved the black widow for that. It makes a little less sense now that we gave up on that idea.

Then we have the medium bomber line. B-25 Mitchell is perfect and right where it belongs. The earlier choice of a B-23 Dragon is not so good. There were a whopping 38 of them built, and using it means you're ignoring the B-26 Marauder, which was used extensively in all theaters throughout the war, and had over 5,000 of them built! I know the year on the Dragon line says 1936 and the Marauder started life in 1940, but the Dragon wasn't built until 1939 either so that's hardly a good excuse to ignore a much more influential plane.

in this case we put more weight on the tech year than how commonly built the plane was.

Like I said, the Mitchell is great, but it's followed up by the XB-28. I probably know more than most people about WWII US planes and I had to look that one up. It has an "X" in the name for a reason. It was experimental and only two were ever built. Again, it would be fine to use an experimental plane if there were no decent alternatives, but again there are. The A-26 Invader was the late-war US multi-role medium bomber, and it was a darned good plane that saw service into the Korean War and had almost 2,500 of them built. Instead we have a late-war bomber that nobody has ever even heard of?

actually not sure why we didnt use the invader there. seems to be a better choice

I expect there to be much argumentation over the tech trees. There isn't always something relevant and people have their favourites.

 

[Darkrenown]

actually not sure why we didnt use the invader there. seems to be a better choice

Mostly because the XB-28 was based on the B-25 Mitchell, the preceding bomber in the tree - I like to stick to one development line where possible. That, and the Invader is a bit more ground-attacky than I was thinking of our TACs being.

 

[Darkrenown]

Sure, like someone said, any problem can probably be fixed with mods, and in this case I could do it myself, but I build digital art assets for a living so modding always makes me feel like I should be getting paid. I try to avoid it and hope the actual devs do it well in the first place.

I don't think it's a problem so much as a preference. I don't think the Invader is a better choice for Tac3, but I do think it'd make more sense to have the Black widow rather than the Chain Lightning now. On the other hand we have already made icons for the current planes - which is certainly not an insurmountable problem, but it is a consideration. We'll see what can be done.

 

[podcat]

P.S.
I know all those planes, except the bombers with no art.
What the hell is a wizzbang? Tornado? Etc?
Are these fictional aircraft?
I have not been able to find any info on these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_B-45_Tornado
wizzbang was made up and has been replaced