Bomber...

[StrangeFLY]

You're saying it is "too powerful" and "almost worthless"?  

Is it a good balance for the Bomber to be an expensive ship that usually survives but the bomb itself to be a powerful yet vulnerable weapon?  Might be a good mix?

I think it is a good mix. The last 1.3 strat I had was won for me by the bomber,  the key to getting the bomb to hit is just as it was in 1.2 - distract the other team.

[appel]

Ok, maybe true. Hmm...maybe the bomber is well balanced now. At least I've been able to kill the bomb pretty often, and easily, but not the bomber. It was reverse in 1.2, hard to kill the bomb but the bomber was easily killed and too often it was killed on it's way.

Now I don't bother shooting at the bomber, maybe I get it down just 20% before it drops...and then I have to focus on the bomb.

[IceWendigo]

In my opinion, the objectives of Bomber/bomb balancing should be;

A) You should  have some advantage to building up your base tech.

So bombers should be powerful, its an end of tech tree weapon (the bay alone costs 100, a new bomber costs 75 and given the fact that it is virtualy useless defensively:
-1- bombers should be 'very' powerful against an enemy without proper anti-air defenses)

B) I think the basic idea is to have no one vehicle be the best at everything, this way you have strategic benefits to building a varity of ships to leverage specific strategies or counter the enemie's strategy.

So IMO,
-2- tanks and scouts should 'NOT be effective' at 'hitting/damaging'  bombers.
-3- TRT/Archer's  however should be 'very effective' at 'shooting down' bran new bombers.
-4- Lancers and Avengers should be 'moderatly effective' at 'hitting/damaging' bombers with their missiles.  

At this point my assessment is that
objective -1-
is not quite achieved because the bomb drops to slowly, its to easy to shoot down the bomb with a basic scout. on the other hand you can distract the other team, but I still think the bomb should fall just a tad faster (at least make it possible to shoot down but not easy)

objective -2-
seems to be achieved (it altitude and speed seem to make it tough for tanks to shoot at and this is good)

objective -3-
is somewhat achieved, but I think TRT/Archers should be a tad more effective then they are.

objective -4-
I have no idea if by loading the right type of missiles on  a Lancer or Avenger missile scout you can hit bombers as it is now, I'll have to test that and see what others that have actually tested it say.

[Avatar]

BZ has always had a "Unit/Counter Unit" sort of thing going.

SO, there should be a very effective Bomber, and an equally effective Anti-Bomber something, be it Building, Unit, Weapon...  Tactic and counter-Tactic go hand in hand.

I believe that's the idea behind TRT/Archer being the only units that auto-target Aircraft.  Proper use and placement of these should be proof against a Bomber attack, providing primary targets for a pre-Bomber Base Raid.  Note that I'm not suggesting that building one TRT and sticking it in the Bomber path should be enough to automatically take down the Bomber.  "Proper use and Placement" means human intervention to make them work properly...

The problem comes when the Bomber is improved beyond the ability of the anti-Bomber units to counter.  As long as that doesn't happen there's leeway for Bomber/Bomb changes galore...

-Av-