Tier 1 bombers are underpowered

Moved to balance. There was no balance sub when this topic was first started. Necro ftw.

This was my impression too, but thinking about it more, it just seems that engis have too little health now. Something like 4-5 shots from a dox kills them?

3 shots / 3 seconds. Personally I think they should be 100hp to be a little hardier but still one shot from bombers.

A commander could kill large ammounts of ground units by himself in both TA and Supcom, but he could not destroy air units in Supcom and had low accuracy in Ta.

In both games mentioned previously an air raid in the early game could do considerable damage if excuted properly and even kill the defending player if he did not bother doing anti air. In Pa 20 bombers can be destroyed by commander , without the defending player needing to build anti air. Of course bombers one shot engineers and few of these would get destroyed, but the cost of building bombers and air factories would be much more.

Additionaly bombers are only effective vs ground units as long as there is no anti air( not much is needed ). Therefore I come to conclusion t1 bombers are underpowered.

t1 bombers cost less than a fabber so if you kill just one fabber you have still destroyed more metal than you spent (As well as the advantage of costing them time in having to build/travel/queue up a replacement engineer).

Also just a single bomb on the commander costs 200 metal to repair when the t1 bomber only costs 180 so again, you only need 1 hit to win the confrontation. Commanders are also terrible at hitting air units.

Mobile AA isn't even that good against t1 bombers, bombers kill them in one hit and it takes 2 seconds for AA to kill a single bomber which is more than long enough to drop their bomb and destroy more metal than it cost to build the bomber.

Damging commander without the damaging the economy does not give you much. It's only wasted resources spent on bombers and air factories. Harass is supposed either weaken the opponent or win you the game. If you spent a lot of resources on bombers in early game then probably you are going to fall back in eco . If you don't damage his eco to much then what's the purpose of it?
Since you don't have enough resources to buil a lot of ground units and exploit the fact his commander is damaged.
Furthermore if commander drops 8 bombers in no time than how is he missing terribly?

I agree with you that it takes one bomb to destroy an anti air unit, but how are you going to target anti air units when their mixed with other ground units?

This is the type of forum post I like to see. People present valid reasoning and facts to get their points across. This is fun to read and consider. I congratulate everyone who posted on this thread.

Isn't this a logical fallacy? If you damage the commander so that the other player has to repair it for more metal than you spent on the attack force, then isn't this a net gain in resources for you? I would imagine it's also a waste of a fabber in the early game to have it stood repairing the comm.
Also, if you do enough damage and the opponent doesn't repair the comm, or forgets, it may make the comm weak to a single nuke strike, or tip the balance just enough to lose them the game to a targetted strike force.
I don't know whether this really makes a difference in reality, so it'd be good to hear opinions!

in a sandbox environment, yes the T1 mobile anti air can get 1 shot by the bomber. I have spammed enough T1 anti air to realize that there is no possible way to have 100 T1 bombers destroy 100 T1 anti air without the anti air winning. I usually have anti air laced into my tanks so in case one decides to micro and try to get the anti air, they have to find the icon and then click it. Which they might of missed another one.

In an army envrionment, T1 anti air is extremely good for dispatching T1 bombers. Hiding in plain sight.

in a 1 unit vs 1 unit environment, Bombers utilze speed and surprise to get the upper hand. Is this balanced? I'm not sure, it is a question of does it feel correct or if its an edge case.

T1 bombers are great for shutting down expansion, but I think their window of use in the game is pretty tiny. I disagree that T1 engineers should be hardier though, with defences and structures being cheap, raiding is about finding and killing engineers and they should be exposed when unprotected.

If the player repairs his commander than early air strike might be an option. However in this case it is less cost effective or not cost effective if some bombs miss their target like when commander is moving. Obviously repairing fabbers don't miss their target.

If the player does not repair his commander.
Read this step by step carefully:

After intial air strike defending player will build few anti air guns (not much is needed) to make further air strikes not possible. Ofcoure if the defending player scouts out more bombers coming then he will do more anti air turrets( which are cost effective to bombers).
If the defending player does not repair his commander he will be a head in resources than the opposing player after he dumped his resources into air factories and bombers which are no longer usefull due to cost effective anti air guns. Now the player which rushed air needs to make a transition investing his resources. The trouble is that the attacked player does not need to make a transition as his units are still viable. Furthermore his intial units equivalent to the bombers of the opposing player could be used to damage eco. While the player who used bombers failed to damage eco(he went for the commander instead). Due to this the defending player will have much bigger army as the game progresses and the player who rushed air will have more difficulty to exploit the fact his opponent has damaged commander. Plus later in the game when eco is bigger ,repairing commander has smaller impact on it.

OK so right now probably most of you agree t1 bombers are lacking something the question is what is it?

What I would is increase the helf, damage and the cost of t1 bombers to make them more viable.

What are your opinions on the matter?

I agree that bombers should have more health and do more damage. But they should have a larger turn radius and they shouldn't slow down in that weird way each time they try to drop a bomb. That gives them a really awkward, gamey feel. If that was implemented (and properly balanced..I leave discussion on the number crunching to other people ) they would feel more like real bombers (having to actually fly for a bit and then turn around before doing a second bombing run rather than doing their weird little turns above their target) and each hit would actually do something, making them feel more powerful. But they couldn't hit as often, making them not too op.

What he said ^^

I don't think you understand what the like button is for.

I did like it as well I just wanted to quote it to further enhance how much I agreed. :-D

^^
What he said.

Don't do that it's soooooo annoying.

I can't understand why they made bombers make this little akward turns above the target in Pa, since it was not in Ta neither Supcom.

It would be much better if bombers in Pa would behave like the ones from Ta and Supcom.

The bombers in supcom are terrible. Even with all the fixes from FAF, they are still pretty bad at dropping their bombs every run.