URGENT! Question about bombing an airfield with units on it.

Both. You will damage the units and the airfield. A level 1 airfield will probably become inoperable after the first attack, turning their planes into convoys.

If you are going to patrol instead of direct attack:

- if you want to damage the airfield, make sure your airplanes' dot is in the province and the patrol circle includes the airfield province center

- if you want to avoid damaging the airfield, make sure your airplanes' dot is in a neighboring province and the patrol circle includes the airfield province center

Thank you!

I would cry if you did to me what you just used as an example, lol

jubjub bird wrote:

if you want to avoid damaging the airfield, make sure your airplanes' dot is in a neighboring province and the patrol circle includes the airfield province center

I've tested it a few times and my conclusion has always been yes. I use it frequently when I want to destroy units but preserve buildings for capture.

You also need to have the province center in your patrol circle to do building damage.

I think a lot of players when doing the damage calculation forget about #2, the 20% +/- random factor applied to the damage dealt. From the wiki.

The combat calculation always follows these steps:

1. Sum up the damage potential of the army against each armor class.
2. Increase or reduce damage value with a random factor between -20% and +20%.
3. Lower the damage potential based on the army's damage efficiency.
4. Deal out damage value to enemy army (the order depends on the combat type).
5. Reduce the received damage value based on the enemy army's protection value.
6. Distribute reduced damage value to units in enemy army based on army composition.
7. Reduce hitpoints of units or destroy units based on amount of distributed damage.

DxC wrote:

jubjub bird wrote:

if you want to avoid damaging the airfield, make sure your airplanes' dot is in a neighboring province and the patrol circle includes the airfield province center

Jub is it 100% certain patrols don't do building damage unless their dot is in the province?

Danieliyoverde123 wrote:

they do, i use that often

Whatever is in the big blue patrol circle will be attacked, taking damage and giving damage back to the patrolling unit.

The center on the patrol circle, the small blue dot, is irrelevant.

z00mz00m wrote:

Whatever is in the big blue patrol circle will be attacked, taking damage and giving damage back to the patrolling unit.

The center on the patrol circle, the small blue dot, is irrelevant.

Not sure how that would work. The patrol circle is the patrol circle. I'm not aware of anything more special.

XD.

If the center of the patrol circle is in the province building and units will be damage, if not units in the patrol will be damage but no buildings

Correct.

This also means that your patrolling planes can only damage buildings in one province at a time, thankfully. Strategic bombers would be even stronger if they could wipe out all buildings in the patrol circle all at once.

Good to know. It isn't actually that surprising. Building damage is completely independent from troop damage. Since a patrol is usually covering more than one province, it has to pick one of them to target, so it makes sense to pick the center of the patrol. In principle they could randomly choose one, but the center point is a cleaner solution. I suppose this also means that if a patrol is covering only one province including it's center, but the patrol center is in the sea, then it won't damage buildings. That one might be worth testing though.

Correct, putting the patrol center / red dot outside the province borders means no damage to buildings, and that includes when the patrol center is over water (lakes included). I've tested that one too.

Maybe giving too much away here, but the patrol center is also what determines whether your planes get homeland bonuses, so make of that what you will.

Something I just tested and figured I'd report here, as it's tangentially related to this topic: attacking with a nuke leaves non-targeted provinces unharmed even if they're in the 50km radius, so, similarly to a patrolling plane, a direct nuke attack can't destroy buildings in multiple provinces at once.

nice work jub

That's good to know.

jubjub bird wrote:

Both. You will damage the units and the airfield. A level 1 airfield will probably become inoperable after the first attack, turning their planes into convoys.

If you are going to patrol instead of direct attack:

- if you want to damage the airfield, make sure your airplanes' dot is in the province and the patrol circle includes the airfield province center

- if you want to avoid damaging the airfield, make sure your airplanes' dot is in a neighboring province and the patrol circle includes the airfield province center

Thanks for the tip!

jubjub bird wrote:

Something I just tested and figured I'd report here, as it's tangentially related to this topic: attacking with a nuke leaves non-targeted provinces unharmed even if they're in the 50km radius, so, similarly to a patrolling plane, a direct nuke attack can't destroy buildings in multiple provinces at once.