Tier 1 bombers are underpowered

At the moment, no one will ever use tier 1 bombers after used them couple of times. Tier 2 bombers are good and they can actually break a defense, even against missile turrets. However both bombers are bit unefficient compared to tanks/bots, but sometimes you cannot break defense with tanks/bots. So you need other units/buildings and bombers would do it without using artillery/nukes.

FACT (based on pamatches wiki and my test in game). Couldnt use the address to pamatches wiki as I'm new user, meh

Bumblebee
-Metal cost 270
-HP 80
-Damage: 50 damage per bomb - 2 bombs per fly by - takes 8 seconds to turn - 12,5 dps - splash damage 50 and radius 2
-Energy: 1 000 energy per bomb - 200 energy/s (when attacking/constructing bombs) - storage for 5 (?) bombs
-Range 70
-Projectile Velocity 75
-Vision Radius 45
-Max speed 75
-Acceleration 45
-Braking rate 8
-Turning rate 45

Hornet
-Metal cost 1215
-HP 400
-Damage: 350 damage per bomb - 2 bombs per fly by - takes ~11,5 seconds to turn - 60 dps - splash ?
-Energy: 3 000 energy per bomb - 600 energy/s (when attacking/constructing bombs) - storage for 6,66 bombs
-Range 70
-Projectile Velocity 75
-Vision radius 200
-Max speed 75
-Acceleration 30
-Braking rate 8
-Turning rate 30

Biggest problems of Bumblebee is missile turrets/hummingbirds, hp, damage and energy cost per shot.

First missile turrets and hummingbirds. Turrets have so much health that it needs only 1 missile turret to interrupt 10-15 bumblebees or even more. Its nearly impossible to do any damage to buildings if there is 1 missile turret.
Hummingbirds one shots Bumblebees and that is way too unbalanced in my opinion. Even when Hummingbirds can be countered by your Hummingbirds, its still too easy to make like 20 Hummingbirds around your base and instantly destroy nearly any early air attacks. The thing why this is unbalanced is because they shoot missiles and they most of time hit unless its Firefly. Bumblebees barely can avoid those missiles. So its too easy to defend Bumblebees early game which leads to next steps.

Hitpoints and damage. To be able to do something with Bumblebees, they should get either hp, damage or hp+damage buff. I would say hp buff, damage is actually good but aiming issue may look like it doesnt do damage.

Damage. Bumblebee shoots first 2 bombs when it engages a target first time. Then it shoots 2 bombs about every 8 second (thats the time it takes to turn). That is 100 damage + 100 damage per 8s. So 10 Bumblebees should destroy a metal extractor/energy plant instantly at first pass and then it would take 8 seconds to destroy other metal extractors/energy plants if 10 Bumblebees are bombing them. It would take 8 seconds to destroy a factory at first pass and 16 seconds to destroy other factories if 10 bumblebees are bombing them. However, we can easily make 10 or even 15 Bumblebees, so the damage is in my opinion fine as without a defense they can actually cause alot of damage very fast.

Hitpoints. If Bumblebees would have 100 hp, it would make a difference. Since missiles hits nearly every time against Bumblebees, that extra 20 hp would prevent Hummingbirds to one shot them and missile towers would need to shoot 3 times instead of 2. I'm not sure is that even enough because, the metal cost vs damage caused probably wont be worth it if you lose alot of Bumblebees to single missile turret just to get one metal extractor.
Example if you got the metal extractor with 10 Bumblebees, but lost like 8 units, you lost 2160 metal and the enemy lost 300 + 7 metal/s unless its rebuilt. The enemy has 5 minutes time to rebuild the lost metal extractor to be even. So its barely not worth it as you cannot get control of that area just with bombers and enemy can easily go and rebuild it. It would be cool, if someone can test how many Bumblebees it takes to take down a single metal extractor when its protected by single missile turret. I bet even 10 Bumblebees cant destroy a metal extractor if its protected by one a missile turret, because most of them will be shot down before they can attack.

Energy cost per shot. I dont even know why this is in game. This makes tier 1 bombers very useless. Every Bumblebee (tier 1) uses 200 energy per second when they are attacking and every Hornet (tier 2) uses 600 energy per second when attacking. To keep 10 Bumblebees attacking efficiently, it needs 4 or 3 energy plants which costs 1800 metal or 1350 if you have more than 200 energy overflowing. So for early harassment its not very efficient to use Bumblebees. I havent actually tested Hornets for early harassment, but it may work, not sure.
It could work as the important thing is to be able to shoot before being destroyed. Hornets have 400 hp, 350 (?) damage per bomb and it takes about ~11,5s to turn for Hornet. That is exactly same hp and nearly same dps than for 5 Bumblebees, but Hornet would do more damage per fly by. 5 Bumblebees have overall 62,5 dps and 1 Hornet have about 60 dps. Energy cost for 1 Hornet is 600/s and for 5 Bumblebees its 1 000/s, so you dont need as many energy plants for Hornets than Bumblebees. Metal cost for 1 Hornet is 1215 and for 5 Bumblebees its 1350, not that much difference but the bigger difference is that Hornets needs advanced air factory which costs 3300 metal and air engineer which is 270 metal. But once built, Hornets could cause alot of damage because they are alot of tougher and cannot be shot down that quickly.
Also it would be fair if missile turrets would use energy per shot too or at least increase its metal cost.


Any thoughts? I'd like to use air too but at the moment its too unbalanced

Link to PA Matches wikis for you:

http://pamatches.com/wiki/units/air/bumblebee/
http://pamatches.com/wiki/units/air/hornet/

A few points to consider:

• I do not think that our anti-air arsenal is anywhere near complete. I'd be very surprised if missiles were the only form of AA we ended up with. See KNight's lovely mock-ups for other things which I strongly suspect we will be in the core game.
• The energy cost per shot is a not-yet-fine-tuned balancing mechanism. The idea is to limit bombers to doing one or two runs and then having to leg it to recoup. It definitely needs fleshing out, but I'd suggest limiting the effectiveness of early harassment by air is a good thing generally.
• I also believe bombers will eventually act more like the bombers in TA - i.e. instead of firing what is essentially a rocket at the moment, they will drop actual bombs, quite possibly in a carpet-like fashion.
• Uber have previously stated that they are aiming for Advanced units to not be a direct upgrade, but to be specialised into particular roles. It's my belief that the current units are mostly placeholders, because a straightforward T1/T2 setup is easier to do with fewer units, allowing us to playtest the game as it develops. I'd be surprised if we end up with a 'simply better' Advanced bomber in the final game.

Hope that can give you some food for thought

Thanks for the reply.

Good points and yeah, this is still beta and talking about balance may be silly. However in my opinion air game is fun to watch and actually play, its alot of faster and needs more micro management to succeess. Also in current planet sizes when you have long distances between bases, its hard to harass that much and early air harassment would do it well. Players actually should watch the sky with their fighters if missile towers wouldnt be instant win against Bumblebees. If they make another AA turret, the current missile turret needs something as an disadvantage.

I can understand if bombers were meant to fly once or two and then recharge bombs, but its not a good thing to give extra time for enemy to build up more defense while you are recharging. So when I have revealed my plan and cleared all fighters for my bombers, I want to stay them on the enemy base as long as I can to cause as much damage as I can. Or if its just metal extractors then the energy cost doesnt matter that much or not at all.

Anyway, lets see what they have in their mind but I really hope the current tier 1/early air wont stay in this form

Absolutely not

I wasn't chastising you for writing the post, and it's a well-thought out and reasoned critique. All I was doing was adding my own points to the discussion

I do agree that bombers are (mostly) useless at the moments. However you don't need a page of writing.

First thing is make the bomber hit the target 100% of the time. Second thing is to make sure bombers give themselves enough time to turn and line up there shot.

If bombers hit stuff people will start using them.

Pa-db.com is another good site for all the unit stats. Hopefully the bombers will carpet bomb, but similar to FA like you both mentioned with the recharge time or whatever they had and not TA with multibombing that could do too much damage if used by any player with a little skill.

The reason they are so nerfed is because uber seemed to be too afraid of making them OP after ants could no longer attack air.

Need carpet bombs asap, currently bombers are patheticly pathetic.

T1 bombers are good for wide space control and keeping your opponent on their toes, I've found. Harassing unguarded metal extractors and forcing your enemy to spread himself thin is tremendously useful - to say nothing of their defensive applications, intercepting tank formations that lack AA.

That said, I'll be interested to see them change. They don't currently do any form of AoE damage, right?

If you send them to attack metal extractors, they spend most of the time circling rather then attacking. A single missile tower or fighter can halt a small swarm of bombers.

They do currently have some aoe damage. You can take out 2 or 3 bots at the same time. However if the bots are moving the bomber misses and no aoe damage is dealt.

Ya when the unit is moving it's a pain... 100 T1 bombers sent at base with 5.. FIVE rocket defense turrets... Launch attack at C-man.. they just fly around him, not a single bomb is dropped they all shot down.. . No build air say for scouting.

Bomber targeting indeed needs fixing, just like general targeting.

The biggest problem is that bombers have an extremely difficult time hitting swarms of bots/tanks that are moving. Last I checked they often fly over without dropping any bombs at all, because their target moves out of their bombing path so they cancel the drop.

I'm not saying they should have 100% accuracy when dropping bombs on mobile ground units, but when I'm trying to harass a swarm of tanks they should just spew bombs everywhere instead of trying to pinpoint whatever unit they're currently targeting.

Bombers are waiting on a code change. They're tuned correctly (at least for first pass), but currently can't drop their payload as expected. Hoping to get the carpet bombing functionality in sooner rather than later.

That would be lovely .

Can't wait to see carpet bombing together with area commands in action. Gonna be lovely

I want bombers to be intelligent enough to automatically try to use their splash to the best. Meaning, when only give an general attack move or patrol command, they should target the middle of huge crowds when dropping bombs.

The main reason, which has been brought up, to why they are underpowered is because they don't have area commands, which are a confirmed feature.

Once we're able to set up carpet bombing runs, they'll be incredibly powerful. If not OP.

T1 bombers seriously need to be upgraded. Right now if you send 5-8 bombers at a lone commander, he will drop them in no time. This makes them not harmful for a player that does not even build any anti air in his base. Furthermore I don't know if I like the idea of commander having a great accuracy when shooting at air units. I know the game is still not released, but this is Gamma ,so I think core units like t1 bombers should be made useable.

T1 bombers one shot engineers and are useful for defending against t1 units.

If this wasn't the case, I would be worried, especially given how effectively the Commander SMOOSHES blobs of T1 land units (with Uber cannon).