How to perform Carpet Bombing

Something that has been bothering me about TA, SupCom, FA and SupCom 2 is that you have aircraft units that are capable of carpet bombing your foes, and yet there was not a proper mechanic that was capable of perfroming carpet bombing properly.

Definition

The problem with the mechanics from the above games is that either you do a patrol move, or attack route that overflies your enemies base, it doesn't matter how many bombers you have, they will attack the first enemy structure thats in there LOS.

I thought GPG was close to solving this in SupCom2, whereby you hold down the RMB a highlighted red circle would appear, any enemy that was under that red circle would be marked for an attack. But as it turns out a line is drawn between these units (As if you performed an attack order queue with your selected units), so only one unit will be attack and destroyed before your units continue with the next.

Solution would be if you had a cordoned square or circle (Scalable with the amount of bombers in your wing), then you could set out the area of where the carpet bombing would take place.

No two bombers would attack the same patch of land, unless they are in a tight formation, in which case some of the payload would overlap. Obviously this kind of attack is indescriminate and many of the low armoured buildings and units would get destroyed whilst many of the stronger units would survive.

Also Flak would deter some player from having a tight formation, meaning they would opt for a loose formation, which consequently means a larger area for bombing, and less damage to a bases infrastructure as a result.

I love the concept as it was quite frustrating to have to micro your bombers to take out multiple targets at once. The only catch might be in later game if the higher tech bombers have a much larger/stronger blast, you can take out land forces very quickly which causes air to be disproportionately powerful.

If bombers were scaled down enough that the carpet bombing softened up the targets rather than destroying them outright in one pass it would open up new tactics for using them.

But then the bombers in TA were made out of paper and ducttape, they were easily shot down with tier 2 missile launchers, even more so when you get tier 3 flak cannons. If Uber can translate both the bombers power and fragility from TA rather than SupComs, then they are onestep closer to balancing the unit for this mechanic.

I think an improved version of SupCom2's system would work, whereby you select using a "paint select" sort of method, but rather than focus on killing one target at a time the bombers would try to inflict even damage on all targets.

R.U.S.E manages this pretty well.
If you are zoomed out and order your bombers to attack a stack of enemies they will pick one target each and bomb it.

In Zero-K you can draw lines of attack commands so that each bomber drop bombs on that line.
Sounds like "paint select" if I understood it correctly.

Another good way to bomb would be if you just could place where you wanted to bomb with each bomber without having to select and deselect each unit inbetween. Would work well with up to 20 bombers I guess.

Carpetbombing worked quite well in vanilla SupCom before they patched the bombers to use actual physics to drop their bombs before they reached their target. Then you could fly in a big formation and they would just drop their bombs when they were above an enemy.

Actual carpet bombing with most gamemechanics that I have seen in games would be quite inneffective as many bombs would be dropped where there are no targets. Most of the time you know where the enemy is and don't want to bomb the space inbetween enemies. You aren't bombing unseen infantry in a forest.

Bombers are still useful in TA, even though they are destroyed so easily. In fact, if you go on WarZone for a TA game right now, chances are there will be people bombing you; especially if you play vs the pros. The trick is to bomb very early (you can usually get a bomber out before defensive units/structures are even built, at the cost of some early economy), and later on in the game, either clear the path before hand, or send in large numbers of bombers.

Also, it's tier 1 missile launchers, tier 2 flak cannons. The commander doesn't count as a tier by himself (though he is powerful and has enough abilities to be so ).

TA's only tier 3s are the krogoth and the sea planes (not that they are any stronger than normal planes).

This is fine for situations where you only have information about the rough position of an enemy army (and no exact position information of individual enemy units).

Otherwise it's an inefficient thing to do, because you're better off bombing several enemy units in a precise manner with a number of bombers you have at your disposal (instead of possibly bombing empty space between the enemys). This would be where proper area commands come in. i.e. a command that would distribute attacking orders over your currently selected group of units (the bombers for instance). As you pointed out, Supreme Commander 2 did this the wrong way (queuing up attack orders on each individual enemy for the whole groups, instead of distributing attack orders over the enemy units). I really hope that PA will finally have different kinds of proper area commands in .

Technically there were mods available for SupCom/FA that did just that as well, but they were Sim Mods and thus rarely usable in day to day public multiplayer.

Perhaps assigning bombers to a group, or having an EWACS plane within range, allows the bombers to communicate and share which units are being targeted to better distribute the payload. Small units are only allowed one bomber to target before the other bombers look elsewhere. Medium units get 2, really big ones get 3. If there are no more valid targets within x meters of the average position of the existing targets then the bombers pile in on the over-targeted units.

Why not use a system such as this:

A) Select a group of units, issue an order. The order is issued to all units.
B) When a group of units is selected, press Tab. This keeps the "group" selected, but commands now only apply to one unit with that group, that becomes "in-focus". Pressing tab repeatedly cycles the individual unit "in-focus" (Shift-tab to go back one unit). At any time, press ctrl-tab to return to issuing order to the whole group.

So this kind of carpet bombing would be done by selecting all bombers, attacking one structure in the base, then repeatedly pressing tab and right-clicking on a different structure. It cuts out on having to go and select a different unit each time, and avoids having to make the game choose targets for you (which could be frustrating in some situations, as there are many factors to take into account)

Hm, I think it would suffice, if you simply go into a "multiple target selection" mode or something like that. You select a group of bombers, go into multiple target selection mode, select several targets individually and then apply. The game then automatically distributes these targets over the selected units (and also queues them all up). You wouldn't have to go through each of your units individually again (with TAB in your example).

(What I often did in Supreme Commander is use some "Group Divider" mod to achieve the same in a more convenient fashion. I selected a group of bombers, hit e.g. Ctrl-Alt-6, which would then divide the bomber group into 6 sub-groups, which I then could quickly access with Alt-#.)

I was trying to avoid this automatic target selection, since in many cases it won't be adequate (I also have a personal dislike of games trying to be "too smart" by attempting to play for the players). If you have bombers scattered around the map and target a group of units, I'd like to select which bombers attack which targets, since otherwise bombers may fly over hostile AA on the way. Issuing orders via focus units within a group achieves this, without needing to change the view point, and without deselecting the group either. It can also be done just as fast as the random target selection method you described.

They aren't mutually exclusive ideas of course, but I don't see the need for the game to issue orders for you (and would prefer it didn't try, since it's never going to be 100%).

But that's not what happens anyway, the game would distribute the targets over your group equally, there is nothing "smart" involved here . And I would chose this method not because I think the game thinks it's smart and I don't have to decide anything, but because I specifically want this sort of distribution.

But that's a completely different problem, which does not have anything to do with area commands or similar solutions at all. No matter how you acquire a target for your units, why would you risk sending them over AA anyway. With your TAB solution, you would still have to manually look at which unit is currently selected. You might as well have left the "wrong" units out of your selection in the first place (for a particular attack). Neither your solution nor area commands are designed to assign targets for one group of units that is scattered all over the map.


Also another little problem with this "TAB" method is, that you would still have to do it very fast, if you want your units to attack at almost the same time (just as I would have to be fast with the Group Divider mod in SupCom/FA). A proper area command would not be executed until you are finished selecting (e.g. when releasing the mouse, while painting targets or when ending the multiple selection mode or however it is implemented).

That's true in some circumstances, but what if you select more targets than you have units, or if you have multiple types of units (say T1 and T2 bombers), how would it assigns the targets in those cases?

No problem. As I said, they aren't mutually exclusive, I'm not asking for it not to be included, as long as it's simple an alternative method of targetting.

Fair point, but if they do implement a mini map, you could highlight the selected units as well as the current focus unit (in some way as it stands out from the group), alleviating the issue of not knowing which one. Thinking more about this though I agree it's probably best to ignore this scenario.

In my example, I first selected a single attack command for the entire group (thus they all start moving towards it together), then started tabbing and selecting individual targets. This way, they end up at the target together.

Our ideas I think actually fill different roles - mine being giving multiple commands to different units without having to use a massive number of hotgroups or moving the camera, and yours being about what those commands are (in the case of attacking).

You could make the tabbing slightly more complex and useful by adding a few UI buttons on the group selection window that determines how the cycling is done when you press tab - by individual units (or stacks of 5, 10, 50 units); by hotgroups within the selection or separated by unit types.

Yeah, it's true, both things simply serve different purposes. I wouldn't want your idea excluded from the game either . Your idea in particular could also be done with a simple UI mod in FA I think.

What you are both suggesting is related to Homeworld-style unit selection summary which allows you to select a subset of your current selection.

This feature would cycle through the different types of units with Tab, but if you only had one type of units selected, pressing Tab would cycle through each individual unit.

Distributing targets across multiple attackers could also be solved with comprehensive area commands. However, sometimes there are things in the area you don't want to bother attacking. I see the Tab cycling described above as the alternative to the must faster area command.

So you could bind one button to cycling through sub-groups of units, which is what we already said Tab would do, and another button to cycle through different methods of grouping units.

With a master selection of units of the same type, the "grouping method" button would merely cycle through different quantities of units (25% chunks, 10% chunks, 5% chunks, etc). You could even customize the different quantities and grouping methods in a static way in your settings, similar to key bindings, to fit your style of play.

Uber devs probably won't have time to do every little thing we suggest in here, but it would be best if they kept this kind of thing in mind when building the AI so the modding capability could be there.

Balancing aircraft is difficult. In TA they were slow to build and pretty expensive. Assuming you had excellent micromanagement skills you could do immense damage with bombers in the early game, and hawk fighters in the late game but only by giving them your utmost attention. Anti air units were the primary means of protecting against land units which meant planes never got too overpowered even if you could offscreen and bomb multiple targets on a single run.

In the Supreme Commander games you had to build anti air units specifically for that task which gave planes a bit of a bump. They were still too expensive not to micromanage though. I'm not sure how you could make bombers cheap and disposible enough that you could stick them on patrol and not worry about them flying into enemy anti-air or picking the wrong targets while not making them overpowered if you chose your targets carefully.

It was amusing how TA multiplayer strategy changed so dramatically over the years. In the early 2000's everybody always treated the Big Bertha as a game winner most of the time. Then towards the mid-2000's people got in the habit of stockpiling bombers as a matter of course and the gameplay style in general became totally different. Barely anybody builds Big Berthas in competitive matches anymore.

I keep forgetting to mention this, but in the SupCom BlackOps Unleashed Mod(link in my sig) we implemented something we called "Split Targeting", basically you could take a group of bombers(or ANY unit) and queue up a bunch of attack targets. Then you hit Shift + G and all the attack targets would be evenly distributed amongst all the units automatically, so if you had 10 bombers and 5 targets, each target would have 2 bombers assigned to it.

Still technically not TRUE Carpet Bombing, but we like it because it allows you to achieve a similar(and arguably more efficient) effect without changing anything about how bombers work.

Mike

This feature is definitely easier to use for splitting up targets amongst a group of units than my sub-selection idea is. It would automatically distribute the bombers across multiple targets, perhaps based on strength of the target and capacity to inflict damage for the bomber.

Well it could use refinement. I imagine they're dealing with some engine limitations, but really the best way to go about it would be to be able to draw shapes on the map itself to decide what to attack. In my eyes, something of this scale should involve as little 'individual unit' interaction as possible. The only drawback (if I'm understanding it right) of their method is that you need to shift-attack-click everything you want to split up first. Not to say that that shouldn't be an option, but obviously if you wanted to bomb a lot of stuff that would involve a lot of clicking!