How to perform Carpet Bombing

First you coat the carpets in thermite, then you light them, then you very quickly kick them out of the plane . . .

I always was a bit of a fan of the strat bombers. Used well they could do some brutal surgical strikes. But it always bothered me a bit that carpet bombing just wasn't possible. Yes, yes, I know, Flames incoming *ducking* but hear me out for a minute.

Using shift-que to select multiple targets is not carpet bombing. This is just a surgical strike of multiple targets. Not to mention this tactic is also notorious for getting all your bombers horribly murdered as they slow down to turn.

To do proper carpet bombing, you have to be able to bomb an area and not need to select targets at all. You need to be able to use some sort of area selection system. I've heard good arguements for area select in other areas as well like reclaiming wreckage, or harvesting trees.

This is another good general purpose interface tool which I think is going to end up being pretty important given the scale that PA is shooting for.

As said earlier can't we just make it to where we cycle through units in a selected group and then if we have specific types of targets in mind we have an interface for it. Say I only want AA guns and related peices taken out. Select that for however many you want in the group and they place primary focus on AA. Same thing for tanks, production buildings, defensive structctures, launch sites etc.

I think that having the ability to designate an area for units to carpet bomb and then having them spread themselves evenly among the targets in the area would be the most straightforward way of handling it. Note that by 'evenly' I mean 'as close to equal distances apart as possible'.

Given that the purpose of this attack is to devastate an area, not take out specific targets, there's no real reason to have the ability to choose your targets in this mode. If you want your bombers to kill specific targets, it would be easier to tell small groups of bombers to hit those targets from the beginning.

True carpet bombing would be inefficient anyway. Don't waste bombs on empty space (, if you have the choice, that is).

I think the Method I described here is something you'd like, it builds off the "Existing" queuing system, doesn't change how bombers work, is more flexible across multiple applications and can be used for any unit attacking any type of target.

Mike

Yes, but with Shift+RMB targets (Lets say 50 moderately fortified targets), the ratio of losing bombers to bombs was 1:1, because the flak would of chewed through most of your units before they got to the 3rd/4th unit. With a carpet bombing selection tool, you could Shift(move)+(select bomb area)+(move to ally base), that way they are to go back to base as soon as they had performed just one bombing run. The ratio of losing bombers to bombs would be about 3:1.

Another idea would be if you could scale the area selection tool to a specific size (If you know the size of the base). If you had too many bombers for such a small area to bomb, then before the wing got to its destination, most of your bombers would slow down (to prevent bombers dropping bombs on other bombers of stacked aircraft), so that one wing consists of many waves of carpet boming bombers.

As pointed out though, the only time when most aircraft get destroyed is when they are slowing down to turn, either to attack the same target, or to attack another.

6animalmother9, check out my post above yours.

Mike

I Apologise, I didn't see the link before I posted. I like the idea. How difficult was it to implement?

Did it work just for bombers, or could you use the same code for multi-turreted units, to attack several units at once?

It wasn't our code, it was an older mod and at this point the modder's name has been lost to the depths of time.

I work for ANY unit, but did nothing special for units with multiple weapons because the game doesn't apply different attack commands for different weapons, all the code did was rearrange the existing attack commands.

Mike

One way of sloving the problem would just be to improve the attack-move command that supcom had. The problem with the supcom one, as said before, was that they all tended to attack the same thing, and furthermore, they always seemed to prioritize mass extractors, which are so cheap to build and have so much HP that it's not worth bombing them, players prefer to go for light units such as engineers or power generators

If a group of bombers was given an attack-move (or carpet bomb) order on an area, some little improved AI would allow them to split the most desirable targets (AA, light units etc) between them, making sure that they don't drop more bombs than are needed on any one target. If carpet bombing became a major feature, there could even be options for what to prioritize, units or AA or resources for example.

+1.

I want to be able to select bombers, then mark area, and let them take care of everything. No crazy micro-management.
Make it simple and efficient to create carpet bombings! And remember to give us various decent bombers for that role (from large fortresses with self-defence turrets dropping loads of small bombs through bombers dropping few larger bombs in a run, to medium bombers dropping single powerful explosive onto tanks or buildings, if possible - make them fly in a group of the same speed).

IMO
Carpet bombing should exist. It should be decently high powered but it would be weak to AA. And it should be T2 not T1.

If I'm not mistaken - the carpet bombers were T3 in original TA. And personally: I think that it's the place where they should be. Well-armored slow units capable of breaching hole in enemy defences or group of enemy units but easy to destroy with interceptors (fighters) or flak AA (though much more difficult to take down with mobile AAs or missile launchers? This should create some very interesting combat scenarios).

They have only confirmed 2 tech levels. So T2 is the highest T available. If there would be more tiers I would gladly push carpet bombing into a higher one.

Maybe you mean something else by 'carpet bomber', but the basic bomber in TA most certainly dropped several bombs in a line.

Well I think carpet bombing and attack-moving are sorta the same thing here, there's little point in defining a set area, just use an attack-move to set where you want the centre of the "carpet" to be, and they'll kill everything outwards of that, with bombers spreading their targets out between them?

Sure, if you want to waste your first bombing barrage on the T1 power plant by dropping 400,000 tons of bombs on it.

*Intelligently

EDIT: Actually no, my point made sense, if the P-Gen took 1/2 bombs, only two bombers would attack it, the rest would find other targets

Unless I missed something, you didn't suggest a change at all. You said attack-moving will mimic carpet bombing. Which it doesn't, it doesn't work for crap right now.

All of these problems with patrol, engineers, carpet bombing, spreading out attacks could all be solved by taking some hints from Spring and Zero-K and innovating some UI revolutions of their own. 'Move', 'Attack', 'Guard', 'Attack Move' and 'Patrol' haven't change at all in over 15 years, their methodology of execution is starting to show their age.

Well I apologise, I meant an improvement to an SC attack move, which as you said, doesn't work for crap =P

Just making it more intelligent would remove the need for an entire new order system, when one of the focuses of this game is keeping the UI very uncluttered