Idea: Make no changes to bombers

[uberge3k]

I don't want to clutter other threads with this, seeing as it comes up so frequently. so I'm creating the One Bomber Thread To Rule Them All™.

Several people are very vocal about bombers, thinking that they are OP due to bomber-first builds being effective on some maps. I'm here to present my point of view, and the reasoning behind it:

Bombers Are Fine.

The reason they are fine is that air-first is incredibly risky. On a small land map, you are sacrificing early land scouts and raiding units. This means that not only are your expansion engineers left helpless to your enemy's raiders, but you are unable to raid his expansion engies either. If that bomber fails, you have set yourself back by a huge amount.

But that bomber will kill all my engineers!

Yes, if all of your engineers are bunched up so they can be hit in one pass. But in practice that will never happen.

It is also possible to dodge, indefinitely, a bomber's bombs if you see them coming. Once you see the angle of approach of the bomber, you can infer it's likely target. Select any engineers along that line, and move them in a diagonal direction to the bomber's approach. Crude ASCII art displaying this:

--|-------
--|-------
--B-------
------E---
----/-----
--/-------

B is the bomber, E is your engineer.

But bombers will still kill all of my units and power before I can kill them!

The math doesn't add up to support this claim.

If you send an early t1 scout out (which everyone should be doing, by the way), you can usually see the bomber coming and have AA up in time to kill it before it even gets it's first hit in.

If you forgo scouting, you can still react to it in time. Remember that a single stationary T1 aa will stop anything less than ~4-5 bombers and create a nice no fly zone over your base, and costs 150 mass - or the price of three tanks. They build quick enough that your ACU can have one built as the bomber comes in for it's second pass. Even if it kills an engineer on both passes, you're still in the lead mass-wise - plus you have the advantage of having raiding units, and your enemy has no land units yet.

But bombers can double drop!

Double dropping is only effective vs stationary targets. Vs units it's useless if they're moving out of the way, and T1 engies will die to a single bomb so it's redundant.

The only way it could possible be useful would be to bomb someone's early pgens. I've yet to see this work as any high level player will have AA up before the bomber has enough time to kill any pgens. Remember that double dropping necessarily slows down the bomber, allowing any AA to shred it to pieces. It could only *maybe* be of benefit on the first pass, and since you cannot kill pgens in one pass it's a non-issue.

If, however, you're talking about bombing things that are in a line, then that's simply good micro in practice. Use your own micro to swiftly move your engies out of harm's way, and rush AA to kill the bomber. Then press your land advantage as hard as you can.

On <insert medium to large map> bomber rushing is risk free! I can't get my land units to his in time to press any advantage!

Not directly, no. But the goal isn't to kill his entire base - just to delay his expansion while expanding as much as possible yourself. Varga and Palms are good examples of this.

Due to the increased travel time on those maps, you also have a larger amount of time to scout his bomber first and get defenses up ahead of time.

This is no fun, I keep getting killed by bomber first and it's breaking the game.

If it truly were an "I-Win" button, why is it not used by everyone to instantly guarantee a win? Additionally, why did "bomber week" have so few replays submitted to it? If it really were as prevelant as some people make it out to be, the thread would've been overflowing with replays showing noobs beating pros thanks to the "Epic Awesome OP Bomber First of Unlimited Pwnage".

The answer is that it is an incredibly risky tactic that requires a large amount of skill to pull off successfully. If you try this vs a high level opponent, they can and will counter it, and you may be putting yourself at a disadvantage.

I've yet to see any "non-pro" players successfully use a bomber first build. Why? Because it's very easy to crash your eco and screw up the micro'ing of the bomber, giving his enemy a net advantage.

That leaves only one matchup available, and typically the group I see complaining about bomber-first... "pro" vs "noob". In which case, the latter party complains that the game is over too quickly. Well, I'm sorry, but if ZLO_RD or any other top player is playing RandomNoob#10051, the former is going to win no matter what tactic they use. Length of the game is irrelevant - and if there is some magical minimum amount of time that a game should last before it's "over" then I'm not aware of it, and if there is we should consider adding No Rush modifiers to ranked.

The other typical complaint in the above matchup is that it's "no fun". Playing pros when you are a noob is never "fun". When I was a noob I was repeatedly and effortlessly dispatched with the back of any of the then-current pro's hands. That's how you learn. You play the best to learn how they are the best, while iteratively improving your game by reducing the number of mistakes you make. Unfortunately there is no way to speed up this process or minimize it's unpleasantness. If you don't like it, then I would recommend avoiding playing those pros for now.

Well, I still think bomber first is lame. At least I have my Code Of Honor.
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/more-on-losing.html

In all seriousness, 1v1 is a competitive game. People will always try to use whatever is available to them in game to give themselves an advantage. As Pilot says, "if it's part of the game, use it. If it's OP, use it more!".

[FunkOff]

Bombers Are Fine.

The reason they are fine is that air-first is incredibly risky. On a small land map, you are sacrificing early land scouts and raiding units. This means that not only are your expansion engineers left helpless to your enemy's raiders, but you are unable to raid his expansion engies either. If that bomber fails, you have set yourself back by a huge amount.

I don't think 1400 energy and 80 mass is "a huge amount". That amount of mass is less than a basic land raiding party (2 mech marines and a scout is 82 mass) and that amount of energy is produced by two tech 1 pgens in a little over thirty seconds. It's not much... if it were, you'd never see people going Air Factory-->Bomber as a starting build order. The Jester is largely balanced because it takes 5000 energy and Air Factory-->Jester is certainly possible, but generally very detrimental.

But that bomber will kill all my engineers!

Yes, if all of your engineers are bunched up so they can be hit in one pass. But in practice that will never happen.

It is also possible to dodge, indefinitely, a bomber's bombs if you see them coming. Once you see the angle of approach of the bomber, you can infer it's likely target. Select any engineers along that line, and move them in a diagonal direction to the bomber's approach.

I agree that not bundling up engineers is ideal and that it's part of skill to manage your engineers to not all die in one pass. However, bombers have a radar range of 65. Engineers have a vision range of 18. It's impossible for an engineer to see a bomber, and therefore impossible to dodge, unless the bomber fails on the first pass. Land scouts can help, but the Seraphim Selen only has a radar range of 40 and on maps with water, the three factions without hover scouts cannot send such assistance to their engineers. Is it even possible to stop bombers from raiding your expanding engineers on roanoake's? Not really.

Even interceptors have such a tiny vision radius of 28 that you can know a bomber is there, because you saw it, but you can't shoot it because you can't find it and the bomber gets to escape... avoiding you with its superior detection range of over DOUBLE that of the interceptor. Even air scouts have a vision range of only 42 and can be dodged by bombers because of it.

But bombers will still kill all of my units and power before I can kill them!

The math doesn't add up to support this claim.

If you send an early t1 scout out (which everyone should be doing, by the way), you can usually see the bomber coming and have AA up in time to kill it before it even gets it's first hit in.

This is not simply not possible on any but the smallest land maps, like theta. For players who do the fastest possible bomber, which is Air Factory-->Bomber, you simply cannot scout it. Take, as an example, a 1v1 on the map high noon. Even if you build an early land scout and place it between your base and the enemy base, there is simply no requirement that the bomber rusher fly from his base directly to yours, if he takes another route that is only a little out of the way, he can completely avoid your detection (either by chance or simply because his bomber sees further than your land scouts) and thereby get a first bomb dropped before ever being detected.

If you forgo scouting, you can still react to it in time. Remember that a single stationary T1 aa will stop anything less than ~4-5 bombers and create a nice no fly zone over your base, and costs 150 mass - or the price of three tanks. They build quick enough that your ACU can have one built as the bomber comes in for it's second pass. Even if it kills an engineer on both passes, you're still in the lead mass-wise - plus you have the advantage of having raiding units, and your enemy has no land units yet.

AA towers are strong AA, but are simply not effective vs bomber rushes in many ways. First, they are more expensive... 150 mass and 1500 energy is more expensive in both mass and energy than a bomber... counters are supposed to be less expensive, remember? Further, the towers cannot move and thereby cannot, in any way, protect engineers that are expanding. Lastly, because towers have a range of only 44 and bombers have a radar range of 65, bombers can simply detect and avoid them.

But bombers can double drop!

Double dropping is only effective vs stationary targets. Vs units it's useless if they're moving out of the way, and T1 engies will die to a single bomb so it's redundant.

Double dropping is NOT only effective vs stationary targets. Double dropping enables not just many drops on one target, but many drops in a (roughly) straight line. With 2 seraphim tech 1 bombers, it's easy to consistently destroy lines of pgens or tech 1 unit hordes in one pass. Yes, you can double drop with more than one bomber at a time. If somebody builds pgens in a line 40 pgens long, it's possible to kill EVERY ONE with 2 seraphim bombers in 1 pass. The 2 bombers first double drop on the first pgen in the line, doing 1000 damage, then drop once on every fourth pgen in the line. 500 damage from two bombers combined with 250 damage deathweapon from the pgen will cause the entire line to chain and be destroyed. Also, with 500 damage per drop, if you approach a formation of tech 1 units from the flank, you can carve out a wide, gaping hole in them because no tech 1 unit can survive 500 damage.

The only way it could possible be useful would be to bomb someone's early pgens. I've yet to see this work as any high level player will have AA up before the bomber has enough time to kill any pgens. Remember that double dropping necessarily slows down the bomber, allowing any AA to shred it to pieces. It could only *maybe* be of benefit on the first pass, and since you cannot kill pgens in one pass it's a non-issue.

Actually, speed is not what makes AA miss, it's acceleration. Aside from the Cybran mobile tech 1 AA, the other tech 1 mobile AA actually miss more shots when bombers slow down and speed up to double drop than they would if the bombers dropped normally and kept a consistent speed.

Also, using bombers in pairs allows killing pgens in 1 pass as I previously covered.

The answer is that it is an incredibly risky tactic that requires a large amount of skill to pull off successfully. If you try this vs a high level opponent, they can and will counter it, and you may be putting yourself at a disadvantage.

While I agree with you that bomber rushes are not free-win, they are far more effective than they should be and it doesn't take much skill to pull off successfully.

I pretty much agree with the rest of your post... or it's off topic... so that's what we've got. Bombers do too much damage too quickly because of double dropping and they can raid/avoid threats too well because because of the radar that they shouldn't even have.

Do you even remember why radar was given to bombers in the first place? It's not like bombers always had it, they didn't to begin with. The reason was because, in an earlier build, bombers would have this annoying behavior issue where they would stop attacking a target if they lost sight of it. Bomber vision radius is 32 but the engagement distance is 50, so if there were no other friendly units that could see, say, a tech 2 pgen that the bomber was attacking, after the first pass the bomber would fly 50 units away, lose sight, and then just stop and sit on the ground like a retard. The radar range of 65 was given to the bomber to "fix" this bug by preventing the bomber from losing intel on the thing it was attacking. However, this work-around proved to be unnecessary as one of the GPG programmers later added a script that allowed bombers to "remember" attack orders they were given... which is why you can send an air scout over the enemy base, target the ACU with a pack of bombers in your base, and the bombers will not stop their attack even after your air scout is shot down and you lose intel on the enemy ACU.

The radar is an unnecessary work-around to the problem that no longer exists and is OP. The double dropping is an unintended bug and is OP. Bombers need to have these two things fixed.

[TA4Life]

I have to agree that the bombers should not be nerfed in anyway. Realize and exploit the fact that the player going air first has absolutely no raiders and his engies are not protected. Engie dodging and a few mobile flaks is all you need.

The most effective aspect of the bomber is when it is controlled by someone like Zock or Voodoo, whose bomber micro is so good you know you will be losing units, this can create panic in some players.

If you can prevent this panic attack from happening and realize you were just given an opportunity you will be fine.

[uberge3k]

Bombers Are Fine.

The reason they are fine is that air-first is incredibly risky. On a small land map, you are sacrificing early land scouts and raiding units. This means that not only are your expansion engineers left helpless to your enemy's raiders, but you are unable to raid his expansion engies either. If that bomber fails, you have set yourself back by a huge amount.

I don't think 1400 energy and 80 mass is "a huge amount". That amount of mass is less than a basic land raiding party (2 mech marines and a scout is 82 mass) and that amount of energy is produced by two tech 1 pgens in a little over thirty seconds. It's not much... if it were, you'd never see people going Air Factory-->Bomber as a starting build order. The Jester is largely balanced because it takes 5000 energy and Air Factory-->Jester is certainly possible, but generally very detrimental.

You are neglecting the fact that you need to build a land factory first. Time is the most critical issue in those early raiding parties - if one player goes bomber first, and the other gets a LAB raiding party out, they can likely kill the bomber-first player's engies without being challenged. This is especially apparent on maps such as theta passage.

But that bomber will kill all my engineers!

Yes, if all of your engineers are bunched up so they can be hit in one pass. But in practice that will never happen.

It is also possible to dodge, indefinitely, a bomber's bombs if you see them coming. Once you see the angle of approach of the bomber, you can infer it's likely target. Select any engineers along that line, and move them in a diagonal direction to the bomber's approach.

I agree that not bundling up engineers is ideal and that it's part of skill to manage your engineers to not all die in one pass. However, bombers have a radar range of 65. Engineers have a vision range of 18. It's impossible for an engineer to see a bomber, and therefore impossible to dodge, unless the bomber fails on the first pass. Land scouts can help, but the Seraphim Selen only has a radar range of 40 and on maps with water, the three factions without hover scouts cannot send such assistance to their engineers. Is it even possible to stop bombers from raiding your expanding engineers on roanoake's? Not really.

On Roanoke you can have an int ready about the same time that a bomber is near your engies, due to the distances involved. Yes, the bomber may kill a single engineer, but you will then swiftly kill his bomber and stay ahead mass-wise.

As I stated in the first post, even assuming a worst case scenario of no scouting and the bomber getting it's first drop off, you can still counter it and stay ahead.

Even interceptors have such a tiny vision radius of 28 that you can know a bomber is there, because you saw it, but you can't shoot it because you can't find it and the bomber gets to escape... avoiding you with its superior detection range of over DOUBLE that of the interceptor. Even air scouts have a vision range of only 42 and can be dodged by bombers because of it.

I've yet to see this happen. If I see a bomber, I know the direction it's traveling in. I can either send the attack order now or send a move order to cut it off. If the bomber tries something tricky to evade it, it will take that much more time to reach a target - giving me more time to produce additional ints and AA if need be.

But bombers will still kill all of my units and power before I can kill them!

The math doesn't add up to support this claim.

If you send an early t1 scout out (which everyone should be doing, by the way), you can usually see the bomber coming and have AA up in time to kill it before it even gets it's first hit in.

This is not simply not possible on any but the smallest land maps, like theta. For players who do the fastest possible bomber, which is Air Factory-->Bomber, you simply cannot scout it. Take, as an example, a 1v1 on the map high noon. Even if you build an early land scout and place it between your base and the enemy base, there is simply no requirement that the bomber rusher fly from his base directly to yours, if he takes another route that is only a little out of the way, he can completely avoid your detection (either by chance or simply because his bomber sees further than your land scouts) and thereby get a first bomb dropped before ever being detected.

If your first bomber takes anything but the shortest path, you have even more time to produce raiders, scouts, engies, etc. By the time the bomber gets there, you are in an even better position as you can quickly rush a T1 aa with the additional engineers, or send those raiders out to kill his expansions.

If you forgo scouting, you can still react to it in time. Remember that a single stationary T1 aa will stop anything less than ~4-5 bombers and create a nice no fly zone over your base, and costs 150 mass - or the price of three tanks. They build quick enough that your ACU can have one built as the bomber comes in for it's second pass. Even if it kills an engineer on both passes, you're still in the lead mass-wise - plus you have the advantage of having raiding units, and your enemy has no land units yet.

AA towers are strong AA, but are simply not effective vs bomber rushes in many ways. First, they are more expensive... 150 mass and 1500 energy is more expensive in both mass and energy than a bomber... counters are supposed to be less expensive, remember? Further, the towers cannot move and thereby cannot, in any way, protect engineers that are expanding. Lastly, because towers have a range of only 44 and bombers have a radar range of 65, bombers can simply detect and avoid them.

A T1 aa turret will kill a bomber as it passes, thus already nearly paying for itself. As I stated in the first post, it creates a nice no-fly zone over your base which you can leverage to ensure that you will not be camped while you produce air. You can also reclaim the AA tower as soon as you're done with it if you really, really want those 3 extra tanks.

Bombers do not distinguish between AA and other structures, so your argument of "they can simply detect and avoid them" is false. They would need to have visual on the AA tower, and thus would be shot down.

But bombers can double drop!

Double dropping is only effective vs stationary targets. Vs units it's useless if they're moving out of the way, and T1 engies will die to a single bomb so it's redundant.

Double dropping is NOT only effective vs stationary targets. Double dropping enables not just many drops on one target, but many drops in a (roughly) straight line. With 2 seraphim tech 1 bombers, it's easy to consistently destroy lines of pgens or tech 1 unit hordes in one pass. Yes, you can double drop with more than one bomber at a time. If somebody builds pgens in a line 40 pgens long, it's possible to kill EVERY ONE with 2 seraphim bombers in 1 pass. The 2 bombers first double drop on the first pgen in the line, doing 1000 damage, then drop once on every fourth pgen in the line. 500 damage from two bombers combined with 250 damage deathweapon from the pgen will cause the entire line to chain and be destroyed. Also, with 500 damage per drop, if you approach a formation of tech 1 units from the flank, you can carve out a wide, gaping hole in them because no tech 1 unit can survive 500 damage.

If you build a 40-line long row of pgens, and let 2 bombers through unchecked, and the player controlling those bombers has enough micro skill to kill them in one shot, he deserved to win anyway.

Same with units. By the time there are large armies involved, you should have ints ready to counter his bombers and radar coverage with your units.

The only way it could possible be useful would be to bomb someone's early pgens. I've yet to see this work as any high level player will have AA up before the bomber has enough time to kill any pgens. Remember that double dropping necessarily slows down the bomber, allowing any AA to shred it to pieces. It could only *maybe* be of benefit on the first pass, and since you cannot kill pgens in one pass it's a non-issue.

using bombers in pairs allows killing pgens in 1 pass as I previously covered.

I've yet to see a successful 2-bombers-first game. I doubt it's possible.

The answer is that it is an incredibly risky tactic that requires a large amount of skill to pull off successfully. If you try this vs a high level opponent, they can and will counter it, and you may be putting yourself at a disadvantage.

While I agree with you that bomber rushes are not free-win, they are far more effective than they should be and it doesn't take much skill to pull off successfully.

How do you define "what it should be"?

And, if it "doesn't take much skill", why doesn't everyone do so?

The data simply doesn't back up the idea that bombers are OP. If they were, we would have hundreds and hundreds of them. At the very least, more than two in the "bomber frenzy week" thread!

The radar is an unnecessary work-around to the problem that no longer exists and is OP. The double dropping is an unintended bug and is OP. Bombers need to have these two things fixed.

Citation needed.

As I have said multiple times, there is no data to back up the supposed OPness of bombers, radar or not. If there were, the entirety of the top positions in the leaderboards would be filled with players who got there by doing nothing but going bomber first. They aren't. The "bomber frenzy" replay thread would be overflowing. It didn't. You have no facts to back up your claims; only conjecture inferred from unit blueprints.

Additionally, there is simply no way to divine what GPG intended with the bomber reload time. It's entirely possible, however unlikely you may consider it, that it was designed from the start to be an advantage that could be used. The fact is that it is not a bug, as it does exactly what it should in the script: have a short reload time that enables multiple drops. If the script said "bomber reload time: 10 seconds", yet they were able to fire faster than that, then it would be a bug. That players have discovered that with proper micro you can enable a bomber to drop multiple times is the very definition of emergent behavior, not a bug.

Is said emergent behavior detrimental to the game? No. You can quote numbers from unit blueprints all day, but the data from real games simply does not back it up.

[Pavese]

If your bomber did any good, he sucessfully denied my expansion, forced me to cancel any raiding party i had queued to build at least 2 t1aa and by the time i recovered from this you have a landfab as well.

Early Land-raid is not nearly as effective as early bomber.

[FunkOff]

So why do bombers need radar? Bombers are the only mobile unit in the game that is not a ship and not a scout to have radar. Bomber should not have radar the same way tanks should not have AA.

[Gowerly]

raiding parties die to your ACU going out early to protect your expansion and you have little to no way to discern whether your raiding party will die to it or not. I've yet to see a flying bomber killed by an ACU outside of the opening movie.

[Ze_PilOt]

It's true that radar is a left-over of a failed attempt to fix bombers during FA-beta.

But that doesn't mean it's a good idea of removing it.

Even I'm more inclined towards the removal of it, this has to be tested extensively

[uberge3k]

If your bomber did any good, he sucessfully denied my expansion, forced me to cancel any raiding party i had queued to build at least 2 t1aa and by the time i recovered from this you have a landfab as well.

Early Land-raid is not nearly as effective as early bomber.

By the time the bomber gets there, you have at least one raiding party ready. If you don't want to cancel further queue'd units, make stationary T1 aa as I outlined above.

So why do bombers need radar? Bombers are the only mobile unit in the game that is not a ship and not a scout to have radar. Bomber should not have radar the same way tanks should not have AA.

How else can you easily queue attacks for the bombers? If you take away their radar, if I go air first I'll just attack-ground on the first pass where I know your stuff is likely to be - it will make bombers marginally less effective, but add a whole new layer of micro on top of them for no reason other than to discourage bombers being used for their intended purpose: bombing things.

Comparing intel to AA is madness. Radar does not shoot.

raiding parties die to your ACU going out early to protect your expansion and you have little to no way to discern whether your raiding party will die to it or not. I've yet to see a flying bomber killed by an ACU outside of the opening movie.

Your ACU can only be one place at a time, and can only protect your very first expansions. Even on the smallest, easiest-to-protect map such as Theta, you're still only protecting your first four mex's and a hydro. All the other expansions are open and ripe for the raiding - you simply cannot send engies out there until your land fac is up and you have units of your own to protect them with. By that time you're assuredly behind.

[FunkOff]

How else can you easily queue attacks for the bombers? If you take away their radar, if I go air first I'll just attack-ground on the first pass where I know your stuff is likely to be - it will make bombers marginally less effective, but add a whole new layer of micro on top of them for no reason other than to discourage bombers being used for their intended purpose: bombing things.

You could say that about any unit.... how can you que its attacks without radar? Also, you would not be able to consistently kill engineers or even power generators by blindly attacking ground. Further, your last point about radar making bombers good for bombing things could also apply to mobile artillery and tactical missile launchers: Do you think these should also have radar so they are more effective at bombing/shooting things without any support units? If you think artillery should require stationary radar or scouts, then so should bombers.

Comparing intel to AA is madness. Radar does not shoot.

Fine, then give tanks stealth.