Effectiveness of Tac Bombers patrolling vs. attacking

boojiboy wrote:

Is it more effective to have bombers patrol over enemy units or to do an attack run on those units?

Direct attacks against enemy aircraft stacks usually incur disproportionate damage ---- unless the enemy stack is grounded during its actual refueling time, when it is defenseless. Enemy aircraft units which have completed their refueling, but remain on the ground, will defend themselves at full strength.

Question: When a combined fighter/bomber stack is patrolling; if you overlay your own stack of fighters so there is only a slight overlap will the fighters only engage the wider patrolling fighters or do the bombers also get a defense?

m1tanker632 wrote:

Question: When a combined fighter/bomber stack is patrolling; if you overlay your own stack of fighters so there is only a slight overlap will the fighters only engage the wider patrolling fighters or do the bombers also get a defense?

The TACs will have the same patrol radius as the INTs and attack/defend as such.

DxC wrote:

The TACs will have the same patrol radius as the INTs and attack/defend as such.

Never mind. I misunderstood what DxC was trying to say ---- clarified by Vorlon below.

m1tanker632 wrote:

Question: When a combined fighter/bomber stack is patrolling; if you overlay your own stack of fighters so there is only a slight overlap will the fighters only engage the wider patrolling fighters or do the bombers also get a defense?

First: If your patrol circle overlaps with the enemy patrol circle even a little bit you get the same combat as being overlapped completely.

Second: with a combined stack all the planes have the same patrol radius, the same as the largest patrol radius in the group. So I like to use my naval bombers when it is convenient to make a group of tactical bombers and/or interceptors have a much larger patrol coverage zone.

So the patrol circle you see is the patrol circle for every plane in the stack, there are no variable size rings to keep track of.

VorlonFCW wrote:

Second: with a combined stack all the planes have the same patrol radius, the same as the largest patrol radius in the group.

If that is correct, I need to strike my response to DxC, as I misunderstood what he was trying to say.

MontanaBB wrote:

IF you combine fighter and bomber units in the same wing/stack, the bomber patrol radius will expand and be coterminous with the wider fighter patrol radius ---- is this correct?

Thank you all for the new knowledge. I found out the hard way that what you say is true. A couple of other aircraft ?s

I know a stack of 5 gives you the best damage ratio, but if I have 3 stacks of 5 superimposed, and an enemy attack thru them to the target with 20 are my 5 stacks going to get crushed because of shear numbers? Lastly, is it a good strat to have multiple stacks in the path of an attacker and then multiple stacks over the target, or add more stacks in the path?

thanks

m1tanker632 wrote:

Lastly, is it a good strat to have multiple stacks in the path of an attacker and then multiple stacks over the target, or add more stacks in the path?

Placing patrolling air units in the path of incoming attacking bombers will do nothing unless the attacking bombers happen to be in the patrol radius of your patrolling defenders when their 15-minute patrol ticker expires.

even when they come in with large supporting fighter? Also, Montana, if you got a second see my new post on Antarctic map strat...lol

I have say that my frustration with this game is never ending. I have been a half-dozen threads on aircraft and still cannot understand how this game figures who dies. I just had 4 stacks of 5 lvl 3 fighters patrolling over a single stack of 12 lvl 2 bombers and I have lost 10 fighters to 9 bobmers....why

m1tanker632 wrote:

I have say that my frustration with this game is never ending. I have been a half-dozen threads on aircraft and still cannot understand how this game figures who dies. I just had 4 stacks of 5 lvl 3 fighters patrolling over a single stack of 12 lvl 2 bombers and I have lost 10 fighters to 9 bobmers....why

Planes defend themselves on the ground remarkably well, which surprises many people, and planes are hard to kill as a general rule.

First look at the defense against planes stats for bombers. Bombers fight back remarkably well.

They defend with a 2.5

12 * 2.5 = 30

I don't know the SBDE off the top of my head for 12 in a stack, so lets say 50%, so 15 hp of damage per hour to your planes, per stack. Might be a bit more like 20, which would kill a interceptor per hour near enough. More if they were in a core province for the 15% home defense strength bonus.

For more exact math: lets assume they will defend with 20 hp damage per hour

divide by 4, so 5 damage per tick

5 interceptors per group

So one hp damage per interceptor per tick.

So 20 ticks (5 hours) and your interceptor is poof.

So what kind of damage would they do?

Level 3 interceptor

Will do 7.0 damage on attack.

5 units in a group, makes 35 damage per hour.

Divide that by 4 because patrols tick 4 times per hour at 25% strength

So 8.75 per tick

Divide that between 12 planes

.72 damage to each enemy bomber per tick.

Assuming a core province with the 15% shield bonus makes that .61 hp damage per tick.

Throw in x factor of 70% or less, and that drops below half a hit point per tick.

So a bomber with 25 hit points will need 50 ticks of the patrol in this case to die, so 12 hours roughly.

So I am not surprised that you lost more planes than your enemy did.

It is much better if you can get them to attack and you can defend with planes, or catch their planes refueling.

VorlonFCW wrote:

Planes defend themselves on the ground remarkably well, which surprises many people . . .

So in my case having 4 stacks of 5 fighters hurt me here? I assume the above calculations were for 1 stack of 5 fighters against 1 stack of 12 bombers. They were always in the air.

4 stacks of 5 is good

Yes I did the calculations for one stack, not 4.

It is just that the enemy having 12 in the stack gave them more units to share the damage with. Some people use the term to "soak up damage" by having extra units in a stack.

SO even though the SBDE limits how effective a large group of units is as a fighting force they still take a lot to kill.

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Now for everything I have said prior to this line in this entire thread I assumed the bombers were parked on the ground at an airbase.

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Now if the stack of 12 bombers was on patrol, your 4 stacks of 5 interceptors would have made confetti out of them when the bombers "ticked" their patrol attack with the right maneuver.

Currently the OCD micromanaging way if the bombers were on patrol would be to keep moving your interceptor groups a little bit and not letting them attack at the completion of their patrol tick because the bombers defend themselves so well. If you only have your planes there and let them defend from the bombers patrol tick your own planes take much less damage because the bombers offense on planes is low, and the interceptors defense from planes is so high. Their planes would be dropping like flies.

The stack of bombers would do it's patrol attack tick against all the units in it's radius.

So on a stack of 5 interceptors the bombers might have done up to 1.3 damage to each of your 20 fighters.

Every single stack of fighters would hit back with up to 8.75 damage, for a total of up to 35 damage returned to the bomber stack per tick. This would have been a very different outcome.

thanks for all of the good info.

MontanaBB wrote:

VorlonFCW wrote:

Planes defend themselves on the ground remarkably well, which surprises many people . . .

What is surprising to anyone who is unfamiliar with our in-game air unit dynamics is that they defend themselves equally as well on the ground as in the air ---- provided they are fully refueled when attacked. They are defenseless after they land and before they complete their refueling cycle, and their per-squadron hit points drop from 20, 25 or 30 to only 5 hit points per squadron while they are refueling or while they are in ground convoy mode.

Lawrence Czl wrote:

If you capture a province with planes and there are no ground units, the planes turn into a convoy. They do not defend in the air.

Clearly, aircraft units do not defend themselves when caught on the ground by enemy ground units.

The original question was about effectiveness of patrolling vs outright attacking.

That is also a question of time.

If you can strike 4x in 1 hour with 25%, but a direct attack costs your more than an hour, patrolling is time-wise more efficient in terms of dealt damage.