Can you clarify on Orbital Bombers?

[nas1m]

I always get frustrated by these not having any effect after deploying them.
Can you clarify on which conditions have to be met for them to have an effect (i.e. how many turns they have to survive, where they have to be to be able to fire (if that's the point), how far they have to travel on the combat map,... - I think you see my issue).

I think these definitely need clarification in their tooltips.
Also: Some in mission popup indicating that something has been damaged would be cool!

Finally: Assuming that I am not using them the wrong way, I think these are also in for a buff in terms of how many population they are able to kill off - given how hard it is to nurse them into having an effect at all (at least to me)...


The motivation for my gripe is mainly that these are (as I see it) the only way to potentially soften a planet up for ground invasion in terms of how much opposition the landing forces have to meet - which is a fairly essential strategy in my book that should not be that frustrating to pull off.

Mantised here.

[Histidine]

Some people (me, at least) have said before that a unit that makes you deliberately draw out the battle while it sits around and does its thing just doesn't work for TLF.

Two ideas that I just came up with:

1) Remove the "er" and just make it an Orbital Bomb.

2) Remove the power completely and turn orbital bombing into a specific mission type, like resistance fighter smuggling. The key advantage over #1 that I'm going for is you can't unload bombs at the start of the turn, withdraw, then come back and do it all over again.

[x4000]

These guys have always been a mess, conceptually.  They work, but every time we've tried to make them clearer that has not really helped a huge amount.  And as the two have you pointed out, there are some fundamental problems beyond clarity.

I'm going to completely redo these guys into just another ship, completely unrelated to bombing the planet at all.  I'll then add a dispatch that let's you do orbital bombardment in a different fashion.  I agree that bombing is an essential thing, but not in this fashion!

Thanks for bringing it up.

[nas1m]

Thanks for bringing it up.

You are very welcome. I am very much looking forward to something workable and clear here .

[x4000]

I can imagine!

[Jerebaldo1]

Oo,  if you do turn the bomber into another ship,  then why not a flagship bomber that's best against the largest ships (Ravens excepted).  Perhaps they could be given a slow,  heavy missile or gbu.

[x4000]

Thanks!

In 1.606:

* Added a new Hostile Action dispatch: Orbital Bombing.
** Basically this has the effect of one of the old Orbital Bomber's shots each solar day.

* The orbital bombers that can be deployed in combat no longer fire their bomb-weapon at the planet, but instead fire it at enemy ships.  It basically acts as a mini-nuke in terms of damage and aoe (but no environmental damage to the planet, etc).  The AI will also no longer bumrush player-controlled orbital bombers.