All excellent points, Karhu.Karhu III wrote:
Reason why Tac Bombers are so powerful in CoW is that they dont have weaknesses they had in WW 2.* There are no weather conditions preventing air support
* There is no night giving cover to units
* Attacked units dont get any bonus from terrain. For example hitting infantry in forest is harder than in plains.
* There is no logistics system so you dont have to worry about repair, fuel or ammo supply
I am a forum participant who regularly argues for greater realism in the COW game, but I also fully recognize that any war game based on the technology of a given era must balance greater realism with a certain amount of abstraction and simplification to make the game playable. I would support adding random weather elements to the game, which would either ground or greatly reduce the effectiveness of tactical bombers at various times. World War II era TBs, especially later generation aircraft, could have a devastating effect on enemy ground units, but they were still subject to bad weather. You only need to know a little history of the Allied western offensive after June 6, 1944 to understand how dramatic the impact of tactical air was on the Wehrmacht once Allied air superiority was established. The flip side, of course, was when bad weather grounded USAAF and RAF tactical air support, and ground battles became more evenly matched; see, e.g., the December 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes.
Most of the comments, arguments and discussion threads about "over-powered" tactical bombers ignore the obvious: the best defense against massed TB wings is a substantial combat air patrol ("CAP") of current-level fighters. This was true in 1945, and it's still true in 2016. In the context of the game, I have found that by embedding a minimum of 5 or 6 anti-aircraft regiments (preferably self-propelled AA, because I like to move fast) in my ground unit formations and maintaining a CAP of 10 to 15 fighter squadrons (in 2 or 3 5-squadron wings, in order to maximize defensive strength per the game's state-based damage efficiency concept), I can inflict disproportionate damage on attacking TBs. Sure, your ground units are still going to suffer some casualties, but most players who are over-reliant on massed TBs are rather unhappy when they start losing TB squadrons on a 1:1 or even 1:2 basis to the ground units they kill. TB squadrons are expensive to produce relative to the cost of most ground units, and thy are often hard to replace in the later stages of the game when oil supplies become scare on the commodities market.
Bottom line: fighters, properly deployed and supported by AA units on the ground, are how you increase the cost of tactical bomber attacks.
