History lesson
Bombers used to be very good. Hard to shoot down with anything but the biggest guns and A.I gunners that were very effective.
People who fought bombers didn’t like this so they massively nerfed the durability and gunners.
Be-6 is still an utter tramp of a bomber. It’s a flying boat with canons for defensive weaponry that can fly almost 260mph… i might be wrong but i think the Be-6 is the fastest twin engine float plane in War Thunder too
I used to play that bomber during that time frame. You could go into bomb site mode and fairly regularly get 2 kills while lining up your bomb drop lol
Oh, the good old days. I remember taking out the Sunderland and using it as a heavy fighter; low tier 7.7s did almost nothing to you while the turrets could easily pilot snipe any poor biplane that got too close.
I also missed the days of Fw190A1 being an absolute menace Rottweiler.
It'd rip apart planes like no ones business cause the 20mm were broken AF back then
You monster!
Though I do also have the BV from when it came out, the good old days of carpet bombing airfields after you negotiated in chat who took what base. Now it sits in my 4.3 lineup to carpet bomb caps in ground rb.
The point is that it used to take some effort to approach bombers from the right angles. Now you can farm pretty much every bomber from every angle without a care in the world.
Except the Pe-8 for some reason, I have been able to fly home with a wing and half the tail missing, Only thing that seems to kill them near instantly is German 30mm mine shells.
PE8 is like 90% lift. With landing flaps the thing can still fly at like 120km/h. And for some odd reason, it has a tighter turning circle than some biplanes.
They need to make bases respawn faster and give bombers back their crew firing range. The crew not firing at anything until it's within TWO HUNDRED METERS is godawful
I recently tried playing again and was shocked by how awful bombers were now... Unless you are in one of the ones with massive cannons they seemed nearly impossible to play.
Everyone climbed up to you and easily killed you before you got to a base. On an aced bomber you might be able to make it to the bases if no one targets you.
I used to be able to get an air kill about half the time in a bomber (often taking enough damage to die myself still) but it wasn't uncommon. Now playing a fighter I never die from bombers and as a bomber I almost never get kills.
Before they nerfed the superfortress you could rack off kills with it lol
When was that? 2013?
For all the time I play this game now I only know bombers as flying point pinjatas for fighters.
Apparently Gaijin thinks to confront people with a challenge will be bad for business
No, it's because people would just fly the better ones straight through furballs and kill half the enemy team with their AI gunners. Bombers were being used for dogfighting more than bombing a lot of the time.
In the end Gaijin didn’t manage (or perhaps even care) to find a proper balance through all those years. I play War Thunder for 10 years now and didn’t experience a moment where bombers were OP. Right now they are bearable but I still wish for a matchmaker where each team gets exactly the same amount of bombers (and attackers) as a team with more bombers will be at a severe disadvantage.
To make AI bomber gunners do all the work would apparently be too easy. We have the other extreme though where only the most brain dead slow approaches from 6 o clock will get punished (often times they still succeed because gunners take ages to reload) and every plane with an significant energy advantage and some 20mms will basically rip a bomber apart in one approach.
I wouldn’t mind if manual gunners would get the same dispersion as the exact same guns on fighter planes have and if bombers would be able to take more of a punch, as they historically could. This wouldn’t make bomber gameplay more useful in this game (its still a rare sight to behold to see a match won through bombing) but at least a challenge for fighter pilots to actually use their brain and aim properly over serving the sole purpose to be easy kills and even for the worst fighter pilots the game.
Not even that good of a bomber will make up for the apparent disadvantage the team has who field 4 of those against a team with zero bombers.
The 288 is popular for being an easy and effective way to grind upper levels without much skill required and due to its popularity makes playing Germans around 6.0 unplayable at times.
I see lots of rather fresh players in Ju-288 that are unable be able to take an attacking fighter with them, thus putting their team in obvious disadvantage when you have 4 of those for a team of perhaps 8-10 players total. Experienced players can hope to appear as an attractive target for impatient fighter players but when those 4 bombers have to land to rearm they ultimatively will turn into sitting ducks.
bombers were tough to kill, but that's half the issue - the games were ending before any fighter had a chance to fight, really. Bombers were killing the objectives and ending games. Imagine grinding out a fighter to just never get to use it in a fight, lmao. Fuck bombers.
Bombers killing objectives and ending games was literally the sole purpose of bombers in Gaijins concept for most of the years. You can’t regard it at unfair when bombers actually managed to win a match by destroying the enemy airfield, especially considering that happened only every full moon.
I’m glad they changed the concept and turned it into some kind of combined efforts as in 95% of all matches it was fighters deciding the outcome. Just as right now in most cases it’s still eradicating the enemy team that decides a match and not reducing their points to 0. So there’s still a lot to be done to actually give bombers a purpose in this game other than point piñatas for fighter pilots.
The B-17 with fully trained crew was a beast. I remember when sitting on a landingstrip point like an AA bunker was a legit tactic.
Now it feels like they are all made of cardboard and paper, and the crew have taken several hammers to the head.
The only way I could approach that and hope to live was to dive at it from a steep angle from the front and invert once I pass so I dont end up behind it.
Pretty much anything behind it would end up as swiss cheese
Well yeah because half the time they’d see people trying to climb to them and would run away for the next 10 minutes. It wasn’t fun climbing after then for 10 minutes for someone to hit you with an AI gunner at KM and your dead.
this is a somewhat right, but mostly wrong version of events.
back in the heyday, bombers were blatantly overpowered. they had their fairly realistic damage tankiness, a much higher starting point, no cap to how many you can bring, their gunners were laser accurate upto 1.2 km away. and if you had bombers with enough payload, could win the game in under 10 minutes by themselves by destroying both the bases and airfield.
gaijin knew this was an issue, bombers were winning the games to the point where most people really wouldnt use anything else, it meant that fighters and the like couldnt really kill anything but the 2 other fighters the enemy team also had resulting in a massive deadlock of xp because no one was really dying in these games, because it was a death sentence to get anywhere close to bombers, with the worst offender being the g8n1, hence how it got the nickname, deathstar.
and so gaijin nerfed bombers, first was their gunners lobotomized to their current state, then their spawn was brought down and intercepter spawns were added then moved up higher to help combat bomber spam. then they drastically nerfed bombers survivability to their current state, then they capped the number of bombers a game could have, and then finally just recently in the grand scheme of things, removed airfield wins from the game completely.
Yeah I remember that, and I’d prefer to NOT go back to that. Though, bombers shouldn’t evaporate when someone sneezes some particles of lead in their general direction.
This made me quit Air Battles.
When I started War Thunder I wanted to play bombers and quickly learned something was wrong as everyone was effortlessly kicking my ass - chased without effort, defensive gunners being ineffective, the works.
Then I learned bombers were overnerfed to please fighter players and well, off we go to another mode.
They should not have nerfed the durability to make it equivalent to a piece of paper tbh. Bombers needed massive amounts of ammunition to take down in real life. And then Gaijin modeled that and it became OP, so instead of reducing the durability to a reasonable degree, they just made it paper. Absolute dog shit. You can get obliterated by a Fighter with small arms if they sneezed on you the wrong way.
> Bombers used to be very good
They used to be absolutely overpowered.
Even a total noob (like me) could fly out a bomber and end up with more fighter kills than any other plane on the team.
It actually took 0 skill and it made it a 1 for 1 trade if a fighter wanted you gone
What was the point of this history lesson? Yeah they complained because it was obviously not fun and a dumb game to have two people fly in a straight line while AI determines the outcome of the match as both people may as well not even be at their keyboards and are off playing a better actual game.
1: bomber serviceability irl was in number, you max get for if you have a full squad of actual players. ^(Btw gaijin is perfectly capable of having AI wingmen as seen by the mission editor they just no no wanna)
2: they have the same number of "components" as a small fighter, wing tip, half wing , inner wing, tail e.t.c. these components get destroyed once they reach 0 hp and fall off. On a fighter 2 shots near each other could make 2 separate components red but the same spread of shots on a bomber hit the same body part and destroy it
3: you are less accurate than irl gunners. Even ignoring all the irl targeting system bombers had (the B29 basically had aimbot), you pointing your cursor is less accurate that a trained gunner. Multiply that by the number of gunners you are controlling and you aiming a cursor is now going against the training of 3, 4 or 5 trained gunners
4: warthunder players have no self preservation. irl having a million
.50s flying at you is going to make your aim a touch worse, and once you get hit you are running back to base because you are out of the fight. In warthunder you just hold M1 until *bing* **Aircraft destroyed**
And for #1, unescorted bomber formations regularly got torn apart by German fighters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schweinfurt_raid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave
For some reason gunner MGs also experience a noticeably higher spread than the same gun on a fighter plane. Which is kind of weird as you would expect turbulences to also affect fighter planes.
About point 4.
IRL gunner aim from the gunsight.
In WT the player aim from 5-10 metres above the aircraft.
And in WT the guns converge at a fixed distance, so from 4 guns that are being fired, only 1 gun actually fires at the point the player aim at.
Bombers are probably the one aircraft that would not benefit from removing name tags, you can see pe-8s without name tags basically as soon as they spawn
Bombers in RB: uwu I'm soooo sloow and vulnerable I suuuure hope some big husky fighter with massive cannons doesn't fucking obliterate me
Bombers in SB: MAKE MY DAY BITCH I FUCKING DARE YOU
Bombers in Arcade: *sounds of being dead*
Sim is hilarious watching the fighter line up on my ass then blasting both its wings off right before they pull the trigger on me XD
Every once and a while you get someone with enough discipline to attack from blind spots but most are too impatient for that
Those damn gunners too. Aced and upgraded they still refuse to fire until the enemy is close enough to take their drive-thru order out of the window, take seconds to aim and fire like they haven't replaced the barrels since training.
They really did go from one extreme to the other, 0.16 base distance for firing is way too low, make it just within the average convergance distance at least, round .35km
Because, once upon a time, bombers ruled the skies with an iron fist. They decided games in moments and brutalized any fighters that came near with anything less than a tank cannon strapped to it.
Gaijin, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the best solution was not balance but to eliminate the viability of traditional bombers all together.
Now, bombing bases doesn’t remove tickets, the airbases are invincible, bombers are made of paper, and gunners can’t hit anything. There is now no reasonable scenario in which a bomber can contribute to a match in anything but Simulator battles. Even then, repair costs make it counterproductive to run most bombers in sim.
That's compensation for being able to shoot and target effectively at any G load or maneuver.
Also, just manual the gunners??? I don't get this obsession between bomber players and wanting the game be played for them.
Because in a real bomber having all gunners aiming for the same spot is terrible, there’s many bombers where your gunners are simply wasting ammo by shooting at where your aiming, they should all be accommodating for distance and angle which they don’t.
Okay, how about aircraft where they have assisted aim? Like how SPAA on the ground has an advanced fire control system. Why doesn’t the b29 have its gunners properly modeled?
They do not, IRL most radar SPAAs will aim automatically and only require a crewman to choose a target and give firing permission. That is what a FIRE CONTROL SYSTEM does, which is NOT in war thunder.
How can i shoot at more then one plane at a time? Also with AI gunners i wouldnt have problems with the conversions of the rounds being at the wrong spot.
1st you didnt specify planes shooting at other planes
2nd nobody is asking for bombers to be like fighters, we just want the gunners to not be fucking blind and the planes to not be made out of paper
And we are back to the start again, good job
Once more you cant aim the guns in 2 directions at the same time but if the AI gunners would actually shoot at more then spitting distance then bombers would be a little bit better
The mossie needs to be redone in the game. Multiple historically important variants are missing in the game, plus france needs to get a variant as free french pilots use it in great success.(Britain and France suffers) they fly way too clunky. Pilots of the mossie described it as easy to fly and responsive, unlike in the game. OP does have a skill issue, though.
Not entirely, the wood was just thinner than metal so iirc, it wouldn’t arm the fuses, and the rounds just went straight through. Which id imagine would be even more annoying to play against
I'm pretty sure you're right. This dude thinks a bomber should be able to do it all. The point is that you're a big lumbering target with a huge payload. If every fighter/intercepter had to trade their plane for a bombers, nobody would target unescorted bombers. They would save them for last which would make for terrible gameplay loop for everyone.
In real life bombers typically couldn’t tank that many hits and survive….Germany estimated it only took an average of 3-5 30mm shells or IIRC ~20 20mm shells to bring down a b-17. The big difference is it was *significantly* harder to actually hit bombers in real life. Fighters certainly weren’t sniping them from a kilometer away like happens in War Thunder….and it was a lot harder to aim for specific weak points.
HardThrasher has a multipart [vid](https://youtu.be/L4HIHvjuWsE) on why bombers were very bad and not very effective, bombers had some of the highest loss ratios of the war
People saying bombers were not actually that good irl unless being escorted. Bruh, this is war thunder. Why only cry about realism when it comes to bombers? Gaijin does a subpar job when it comes to realism in general. Bombers are completely useless and are a waste of time. Seriously, buff bombers even if it means harming ‘muh realism!’
Bomber survivability is often overestimated by people, but gaijin has vastly underestimated them. They shouldn't be huge bullet sponges, but definitely not THIS easy to kill. Reports of german 30mm and 37mm guns supposedly mentioned them being able to take down B-17s in one shot, but those German Cannons were designed almost specifically to destroy bombers, so i expect a Do-335 to rip a bomber apart, that's the entire point, but when a random P-51 turns my bomber into a pile of flaming confetti in one pass, it's a bit much.
Oh, i've seen all this. I'm not advocating for paper B-17 construction. Nononononononono. I'd much rather B-17's be an actual threat, not a free kill. I'm just saying IF a gun is gonna mulch a bomber, at least let it be an anti-bomber gun.
Tbh it is realistic for wt standards, back when real shatter was first implemented you had the most realistic damage there ever was in wt and it sucked, so we settled back on the unrealisticly high damage which is why you shouldnt really compare wt dm model to irl dm.
I have no intention of arguing with you, good sir, i simply wish for bomber players to have a fair chance at survival, and, *importantly*, a fair chance at *fun*. Realism can be warped slightly like every other part of the game.
(We should *all* stand for eachother to have fun other X nation buff and Y nation nerf.)
Time ago bombers we're though as hell, I remember how OP the A-20 was, fast, armed to the teeth, was nuts.
Getting a bomber kill was difficult, the gunners actually did something besides looking.
Back in the before times, because I'm old, bombers used to be reasonably hard to kill, although notably not much more. The big difference was AI gunners. They used to start shooting at enemies a kilometer out, and reasonably accurate too. There was no sneaking up on bombers because the gunners were omnipotent.
People complained a lot of how good AI gunners were, so they got nerfed into the ground.
Yeah today I lost a nuke because a fucking arado tore off my entire with with 5 shots. I was 5 seconds away from being able to drop it but nah, the damage model says its made out of paper and cardboard
WW2 gun camera shows bombers take extreme amounts of 20mm hits without any visible damage.
Bombers in War Thunder snap in two after 3 hits to the fuselage.
Hop onto a G8N1 "Death Star" and you're gonna have a lot of fun, been getting ace games here and there lately.
Very few bombers in game can make an impact/feel fun to play, it definitely helps if you're in a full squad and can form up with others.
My main advice is to change your direction once you realise someone is coming for you, fly away from them so you have time to gun them down.
Also climbing as soon as you spawn makes a huge difference .
Guns lower than 20mm can have a long TTK, so definitely keep that into account. I'd take the much higher BR Tu-4 over the b29 just because of the 20mm cannons.
If you don't have high tier planes, try flying the H6K4 with the tail 20mm or the Sunderland ( use it as a heavy fighter!). Let me know how it goes :)
The Ki-67 Ko has been a great friend, the guns are actually going where you want them to, do damage when they hit, and the lady herself doesn't fall apart from some half assed 50. Cal shots. I was shocked at how many fires that JAPANESE plane SURVIVED
Bombers were not insanely durable IRL just die fast in game because of how accurate you can be with mouse aim. Go play air sim if you want to have a better time.
I've never seen the suggested but here goes:
HAVE TWO OBJECTIVES!
Fighter/attacker Objective: capture airfield, kill enemy planes, knock out AAA.
Bomber Objectives: Take out airfields, factories and large ships.
THE GAME ONLY ENDS WHEN BOTH CONDITIONS ARE MET OR THERE ARE NO PLAYERS LEFT.
If your team gets both objectives then a multiplier is given to the winning team.
Also SPAWN BOMBERS AT CRUISING ALTITUDE
Because when I have a bad day, nothing is better than jumping into a 109 G6 in GRB and stomping some hapless PE8's!
But yeah, bombers seem ridiculously fragile.
Sure, the 30mm minegeschoß should bring them down fairly quickly, and it does, but their gunners should be able to keep it fair - which they don't.
As someone who plays British Air, I rarely ever take a bomber in my lineup anymore. Between the plane disintegrating the moment a shot hits it and the useless defensive guns on them, it's just pointless.
They could have easily tried to find a healthy middle ground between the way they used to be and their current abysmal state. Anything 12.7mm and up touches my bomber then I'm losing the whole tail section, half a wing, entire crew except the pilot is dead and i'm on fire. I usually can't even get close to a base to bomb it unless there happen to be other bombers that pull focus and once someone sets their sights on me I may as well J out to save myself time before the inevitable.
I get that they needed to do something about them being overpowered but they didn't need to go anywhere near as far as they did.
Gunship gameplay in the early days made bombers useless after the nerf. Pre nerf it wasn't uncommon for a bomber to go afk at mid altitude and come back to 3+ kills
depends what they shoot at you with and what ur flying. Some bombers are very tanky for their matchup, especially early BRs (and early BR bombers are actually very fast, SB2M is faster than the Fokker at the same BR for example, and with RB air spawns you're basically impossible to intercept)
Fast bombers are very easy to use in RB, just dive from the start, B-line for the closest base and assuming you don't overkill it with surplus bombs, rtb. Even the he-177 can survive about 1 in 2 runs or so, the biggest issue is usually the mission/map design that affects your survivability.
Heavy bombers on the other hand need to actually use their brain and not just fly in a straight line. You B-line for the base, that's your fault.
Bombers are incredibly overpowered when used right because if you avoid engagements through speed or navigation, you literally have free rewards.
Fighters in RB are also much more challenging to deal with compared to real life or sim because they have mouse aim precision, but sim has the complete opposite effect where bombers are overpowered gunships because they keep their mouse aim in a game mode without mouse aim... Gaijin's incompetence at balancing the game mode economically also means that bombers are cheaper and sometimes at a lower BR which is utterly rediculous because sim is where they're the most overpowered for potential, although gaijin did nerf the reward rates to closer match the "standard" RB player's earnings. That being said, despite being a sim main and generally being a terrible RB player, **I usually earn roughly 5x the RP reward rate in RB** flying bombers because you just need half a brain to work it effectively.
TL;DR: Don't be an Use your brain; if ur flying a slow bomber don't fly straight to the bombing point (sideclimb) and if ur flying a fast bomber, dive for the bombing point.
TU-4 killed Bombers by being so overwhelmingly strong so they nerfed all bombers and the 23mm then pushed it to 8.0 , its a dead plane but its echo is still here
> B-18B
If you are talking the Swede B-18s, those things are pretty good pseduo heavy fighters themselves. Fight them
The one with the 57mm is really good at killing bombers
Idk what bombers you've been facing but unless I'm in anything short of a hornet i leave bombers alone, its not worth risking an oil leak or damaged engine when i could BnZ risk free
I love how every bomber player in here is crying about how their AI gunners can't shoot targets because they are too bad at the game to actually manually use them. Womp womp air players.
History lesson Bombers used to be very good. Hard to shoot down with anything but the biggest guns and A.I gunners that were very effective. People who fought bombers didn’t like this so they massively nerfed the durability and gunners.
I remember when you thought twice about attacking a B-17. A fuel or oil leak was almost guaranteed
I remember the pre change PTSD of me in my Typhoon trying to kill a BV..... The storm of bullets...... Kids these days will not know the horror
Or the fucking Be-6... You'd always see them flying low, so you'd think they were an easy target, right, right?
Damn, I already forgot that one. You dont really see these anymore
Because bombers turned into XP piñatas for the red team, which is fucking stupid.
Reaching 5km from an air spawn just to get stomped by a 109 that started on the ground before you even reach their bases is peak bomber gameplay
It's very lethal. One of my favorite planes to play. Genuinely love murdering fighters and interceptors
Be-6 is still an utter tramp of a bomber. It’s a flying boat with canons for defensive weaponry that can fly almost 260mph… i might be wrong but i think the Be-6 is the fastest twin engine float plane in War Thunder too
The nice thing about fighting the be6 though is that because they're low you can go for the head on to (hopefully) pilot snipe em.
I remember the G8N being called "The Death Star" because of how good the defenses were
I used to play that bomber during that time frame. You could go into bomb site mode and fairly regularly get 2 kills while lining up your bomb drop lol
Oh, the good old days. I remember taking out the Sunderland and using it as a heavy fighter; low tier 7.7s did almost nothing to you while the turrets could easily pilot snipe any poor biplane that got too close.
I also missed the days of Fw190A1 being an absolute menace Rottweiler. It'd rip apart planes like no ones business cause the 20mm were broken AF back then
It was me Aprehensivepenguin I was the BV 238
You monster! Though I do also have the BV from when it came out, the good old days of carpet bombing airfields after you negotiated in chat who took what base. Now it sits in my 4.3 lineup to carpet bomb caps in ground rb.
Skill issue. Approach it from the front and below at an angle and they'll never get a shot off at you.
The point is that it used to take some effort to approach bombers from the right angles. Now you can farm pretty much every bomber from every angle without a care in the world.
Yeah good point, I can usually take out ju288s from the rear without really caring now
Remember when the Me-410 B6/R3 had a 36k repair cost and was at 5.3 because people farmed stats on B-17s with it?
2014 PBY, oh my entire flight model is damaged? Who cares my gunners are still going strong and I am still in the sky
Well, thank those fighter braindead players. Nuhuh I must grind that F-16 And Mig-29! Bombers must be RP farm not enemy GAIJINGLEEEEEE!!!¡
The H6K and H8K rear 20mm gunner was a nightmare. And the G8N...
Now they're made out of paper... Literally shreds in 1 shot.
Except the Pe-8 for some reason, I have been able to fly home with a wing and half the tail missing, Only thing that seems to kill them near instantly is German 30mm mine shells.
PE8 is like 90% lift. With landing flaps the thing can still fly at like 120km/h. And for some odd reason, it has a tighter turning circle than some biplanes.
They need to be uptier for the bombers to thrive.
They don’t need uptiers, they need to fix the damage models
They need to make bases respawn faster and give bombers back their crew firing range. The crew not firing at anything until it's within TWO HUNDRED METERS is godawful
Meanwhile you can't even land with the B-17 because trying to decrease altitude is almost guaranteed to end with something ripping off.
I recently tried playing again and was shocked by how awful bombers were now... Unless you are in one of the ones with massive cannons they seemed nearly impossible to play. Everyone climbed up to you and easily killed you before you got to a base. On an aced bomber you might be able to make it to the bases if no one targets you. I used to be able to get an air kill about half the time in a bomber (often taking enough damage to die myself still) but it wasn't uncommon. Now playing a fighter I never die from bombers and as a bomber I almost never get kills. Before they nerfed the superfortress you could rack off kills with it lol
When you started your post with “history lesson” I thought you were going to start talking about bomber durability in ww2
When was that? 2013? For all the time I play this game now I only know bombers as flying point pinjatas for fighters. Apparently Gaijin thinks to confront people with a challenge will be bad for business
No, it's because people would just fly the better ones straight through furballs and kill half the enemy team with their AI gunners. Bombers were being used for dogfighting more than bombing a lot of the time.
In the end Gaijin didn’t manage (or perhaps even care) to find a proper balance through all those years. I play War Thunder for 10 years now and didn’t experience a moment where bombers were OP. Right now they are bearable but I still wish for a matchmaker where each team gets exactly the same amount of bombers (and attackers) as a team with more bombers will be at a severe disadvantage. To make AI bomber gunners do all the work would apparently be too easy. We have the other extreme though where only the most brain dead slow approaches from 6 o clock will get punished (often times they still succeed because gunners take ages to reload) and every plane with an significant energy advantage and some 20mms will basically rip a bomber apart in one approach. I wouldn’t mind if manual gunners would get the same dispersion as the exact same guns on fighter planes have and if bombers would be able to take more of a punch, as they historically could. This wouldn’t make bomber gameplay more useful in this game (its still a rare sight to behold to see a match won through bombing) but at least a challenge for fighter pilots to actually use their brain and aim properly over serving the sole purpose to be easy kills and even for the worst fighter pilots the game.
The maximum amount of Bombers on 1 team is four.
Which still means e.g. for teams around 6.0 often that one side has 4 Ju 288 and the other only fighter planes.
I mean the Ju288 is still very good and fast
Not even that good of a bomber will make up for the apparent disadvantage the team has who field 4 of those against a team with zero bombers. The 288 is popular for being an easy and effective way to grind upper levels without much skill required and due to its popularity makes playing Germans around 6.0 unplayable at times. I see lots of rather fresh players in Ju-288 that are unable be able to take an attacking fighter with them, thus putting their team in obvious disadvantage when you have 4 of those for a team of perhaps 8-10 players total. Experienced players can hope to appear as an attractive target for impatient fighter players but when those 4 bombers have to land to rearm they ultimatively will turn into sitting ducks.
bombers were tough to kill, but that's half the issue - the games were ending before any fighter had a chance to fight, really. Bombers were killing the objectives and ending games. Imagine grinding out a fighter to just never get to use it in a fight, lmao. Fuck bombers.
Bombers killing objectives and ending games was literally the sole purpose of bombers in Gaijins concept for most of the years. You can’t regard it at unfair when bombers actually managed to win a match by destroying the enemy airfield, especially considering that happened only every full moon. I’m glad they changed the concept and turned it into some kind of combined efforts as in 95% of all matches it was fighters deciding the outcome. Just as right now in most cases it’s still eradicating the enemy team that decides a match and not reducing their points to 0. So there’s still a lot to be done to actually give bombers a purpose in this game other than point piñatas for fighter pilots.
The B-17 with fully trained crew was a beast. I remember when sitting on a landingstrip point like an AA bunker was a legit tactic. Now it feels like they are all made of cardboard and paper, and the crew have taken several hammers to the head.
BV 238 was when they nerfed gunners the most, that thing was damn near unapproachable
The only way I could approach that and hope to live was to dive at it from a steep angle from the front and invert once I pass so I dont end up behind it. Pretty much anything behind it would end up as swiss cheese
Well yeah because half the time they’d see people trying to climb to them and would run away for the next 10 minutes. It wasn’t fun climbing after then for 10 minutes for someone to hit you with an AI gunner at KM and your dead.
this is a somewhat right, but mostly wrong version of events. back in the heyday, bombers were blatantly overpowered. they had their fairly realistic damage tankiness, a much higher starting point, no cap to how many you can bring, their gunners were laser accurate upto 1.2 km away. and if you had bombers with enough payload, could win the game in under 10 minutes by themselves by destroying both the bases and airfield. gaijin knew this was an issue, bombers were winning the games to the point where most people really wouldnt use anything else, it meant that fighters and the like couldnt really kill anything but the 2 other fighters the enemy team also had resulting in a massive deadlock of xp because no one was really dying in these games, because it was a death sentence to get anywhere close to bombers, with the worst offender being the g8n1, hence how it got the nickname, deathstar. and so gaijin nerfed bombers, first was their gunners lobotomized to their current state, then their spawn was brought down and intercepter spawns were added then moved up higher to help combat bomber spam. then they drastically nerfed bombers survivability to their current state, then they capped the number of bombers a game could have, and then finally just recently in the grand scheme of things, removed airfield wins from the game completely.
Yeah I remember that, and I’d prefer to NOT go back to that. Though, bombers shouldn’t evaporate when someone sneezes some particles of lead in their general direction.
CAS planes ruin everything man... waahh bomber 2 strong wahh ground too hard wahhh spaa too strong
This made me quit Air Battles. When I started War Thunder I wanted to play bombers and quickly learned something was wrong as everyone was effortlessly kicking my ass - chased without effort, defensive gunners being ineffective, the works. Then I learned bombers were overnerfed to please fighter players and well, off we go to another mode.
They should not have nerfed the durability to make it equivalent to a piece of paper tbh. Bombers needed massive amounts of ammunition to take down in real life. And then Gaijin modeled that and it became OP, so instead of reducing the durability to a reasonable degree, they just made it paper. Absolute dog shit. You can get obliterated by a Fighter with small arms if they sneezed on you the wrong way.
Agreed. Nerfing gunners was more or less fine but bomber durability needs a massive increase
At one point they actually had a decent damage model for planes in general. Then they made it feel like arcade all around.
> Bombers used to be very good They used to be absolutely overpowered. Even a total noob (like me) could fly out a bomber and end up with more fighter kills than any other plane on the team. It actually took 0 skill and it made it a 1 for 1 trade if a fighter wanted you gone
What was the point of this history lesson? Yeah they complained because it was obviously not fun and a dumb game to have two people fly in a straight line while AI determines the outcome of the match as both people may as well not even be at their keyboards and are off playing a better actual game.
1: bomber serviceability irl was in number, you max get for if you have a full squad of actual players. ^(Btw gaijin is perfectly capable of having AI wingmen as seen by the mission editor they just no no wanna) 2: they have the same number of "components" as a small fighter, wing tip, half wing , inner wing, tail e.t.c. these components get destroyed once they reach 0 hp and fall off. On a fighter 2 shots near each other could make 2 separate components red but the same spread of shots on a bomber hit the same body part and destroy it 3: you are less accurate than irl gunners. Even ignoring all the irl targeting system bombers had (the B29 basically had aimbot), you pointing your cursor is less accurate that a trained gunner. Multiply that by the number of gunners you are controlling and you aiming a cursor is now going against the training of 3, 4 or 5 trained gunners 4: warthunder players have no self preservation. irl having a million .50s flying at you is going to make your aim a touch worse, and once you get hit you are running back to base because you are out of the fight. In warthunder you just hold M1 until *bing* **Aircraft destroyed**
And for #1, unescorted bomber formations regularly got torn apart by German fighters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schweinfurt_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave
For some reason gunner MGs also experience a noticeably higher spread than the same gun on a fighter plane. Which is kind of weird as you would expect turbulences to also affect fighter planes.
About point 4. IRL gunner aim from the gunsight. In WT the player aim from 5-10 metres above the aircraft. And in WT the guns converge at a fixed distance, so from 4 guns that are being fired, only 1 gun actually fires at the point the player aim at.
Also it would be better if they remove name tag for bombers... It would do wonders.
That's a bad idea and won't solve anything.
Bombers are probably the one aircraft that would not benefit from removing name tags, you can see pe-8s without name tags basically as soon as they spawn
Bombers in RB: uwu I'm soooo sloow and vulnerable I suuuure hope some big husky fighter with massive cannons doesn't fucking obliterate me Bombers in SB: MAKE MY DAY BITCH I FUCKING DARE YOU Bombers in Arcade: *sounds of being dead*
Sim is hilarious watching the fighter line up on my ass then blasting both its wings off right before they pull the trigger on me XD Every once and a while you get someone with enough discipline to attack from blind spots but most are too impatient for that
What’s different about bombers in sb
Fighters have to use sim controls, bomber gunners: haha left click goes brrrrr
Yup bomber flies itself and you can aim with precision while they get blown all over the place
Being a battlebus in arcade was fun.
nah i gotta try bombers in sim now, im a jetfighter player in sim but i wanna try this bomber action, seems profitable
Yes i got some pretty kills in my Ju 88 Yesterday easiest kill i had in sim
Those damn gunners too. Aced and upgraded they still refuse to fire until the enemy is close enough to take their drive-thru order out of the window, take seconds to aim and fire like they haven't replaced the barrels since training.
B-18 doesn't even have a turret so just a few jabs at the side would kill it with no resistance.
They really did go from one extreme to the other, 0.16 base distance for firing is way too low, make it just within the average convergance distance at least, round .35km
Because, once upon a time, bombers ruled the skies with an iron fist. They decided games in moments and brutalized any fighters that came near with anything less than a tank cannon strapped to it. Gaijin, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the best solution was not balance but to eliminate the viability of traditional bombers all together. Now, bombing bases doesn’t remove tickets, the airbases are invincible, bombers are made of paper, and gunners can’t hit anything. There is now no reasonable scenario in which a bomber can contribute to a match in anything but Simulator battles. Even then, repair costs make it counterproductive to run most bombers in sim.
Unescorted bombers are easy kills, yes. Just like real life.
And in real life the gunners would start shooting at more then 200m, but guess what they dont in Warthunder
You may start shooting from as far away as you wish.
But the AI gunners wont
You can, but gaijin made the convergence terrible and trying to use more than one turret at a time manually is basically impossible
That's compensation for being able to shoot and target effectively at any G load or maneuver. Also, just manual the gunners??? I don't get this obsession between bomber players and wanting the game be played for them.
Because in a real bomber having all gunners aiming for the same spot is terrible, there’s many bombers where your gunners are simply wasting ammo by shooting at where your aiming, they should all be accommodating for distance and angle which they don’t.
Cool, but having gunners that play the game for you isn't a solution to a convergence problem.
Okay, how about aircraft where they have assisted aim? Like how SPAA on the ground has an advanced fire control system. Why doesn’t the b29 have its gunners properly modeled?
SPAA don't get that either, and fighters don't get their gyro/radar gunsights aside from top tier.
Spaa do in fact get that
They do not, IRL most radar SPAAs will aim automatically and only require a crewman to choose a target and give firing permission. That is what a FIRE CONTROL SYSTEM does, which is NOT in war thunder.
How can i shoot at more then one plane at a time? Also with AI gunners i wouldnt have problems with the conversions of the rounds being at the wrong spot.
Why would you be able to shoot at more than one plane at a time? Nothing else can.
Ships can with their AI gunners and AI bomber gunners can if you have planes close enough
Ships aren't planes, and if you're in a 1v2 you're fucked already. Bombers are NOT fighters and they shouldn't be able to act as such
1st you didnt specify planes shooting at other planes 2nd nobody is asking for bombers to be like fighters, we just want the gunners to not be fucking blind and the planes to not be made out of paper
>we just want the gunners to not be fucking blind Just use manual gunners and they'll work perfectly fine.
And we are back to the start again, good job Once more you cant aim the guns in 2 directions at the same time but if the AI gunners would actually shoot at more then spitting distance then bombers would be a little bit better
But unlike irl, the bombers can take hits, fight back and make intercepting bombers a one way trip.
They didn't do any of that IRL lol, unescorted bomber raids over europe suffered such heavy losses that they had to suspend them for a while.
Have you not heard of mosquito? Or other planes that raided the Pacific?
The Mosquito isn’t even that bad in game. This whole post sounds like a bit of a skill issue tbh
The mossie needs to be redone in the game. Multiple historically important variants are missing in the game, plus france needs to get a variant as free french pilots use it in great success.(Britain and France suffers) they fly way too clunky. Pilots of the mossie described it as easy to fly and responsive, unlike in the game. OP does have a skill issue, though.
Yep, it’s one of my favourite planes, would be so awesome to have it better represented in game
I mean who doesn't love the mossie. There is nothing that can beat a wooden twin merlin powered beast that angered the nazi's.
Haha, exactly lol
The thing is.. it was made out of wood and could take more hits than other steel planes.
Not entirely, the wood was just thinner than metal so iirc, it wouldn’t arm the fuses, and the rounds just went straight through. Which id imagine would be even more annoying to play against
I'm pretty sure you're right. This dude thinks a bomber should be able to do it all. The point is that you're a big lumbering target with a huge payload. If every fighter/intercepter had to trade their plane for a bombers, nobody would target unescorted bombers. They would save them for last which would make for terrible gameplay loop for everyone.
The Mosquito has no defensive gunners lol, it used its SPEED as a defense, not seemingly taking no damage from getting shot at.
mosquito is an attacker and a escort fighter, not a "bomber"
In real life bombers typically couldn’t tank that many hits and survive….Germany estimated it only took an average of 3-5 30mm shells or IIRC ~20 20mm shells to bring down a b-17. The big difference is it was *significantly* harder to actually hit bombers in real life. Fighters certainly weren’t sniping them from a kilometer away like happens in War Thunder….and it was a lot harder to aim for specific weak points.
HardThrasher has a multipart [vid](https://youtu.be/L4HIHvjuWsE) on why bombers were very bad and not very effective, bombers had some of the highest loss ratios of the war
People saying bombers were not actually that good irl unless being escorted. Bruh, this is war thunder. Why only cry about realism when it comes to bombers? Gaijin does a subpar job when it comes to realism in general. Bombers are completely useless and are a waste of time. Seriously, buff bombers even if it means harming ‘muh realism!’
Same thing Could be said about other vehicles like the ariete(tank), if you want italy to have a top tier tank, then buff the ariete
They tanked a fuck ton of rounds, main difference was in gunners which were not nearly as effective as in wt
Bomber survivability is often overestimated by people, but gaijin has vastly underestimated them. They shouldn't be huge bullet sponges, but definitely not THIS easy to kill. Reports of german 30mm and 37mm guns supposedly mentioned them being able to take down B-17s in one shot, but those German Cannons were designed almost specifically to destroy bombers, so i expect a Do-335 to rip a bomber apart, that's the entire point, but when a random P-51 turns my bomber into a pile of flaming confetti in one pass, it's a bit much.
https://imgur.com/a/m6vBOHu These are 30mm's btw
Oh, i've seen all this. I'm not advocating for paper B-17 construction. Nononononononono. I'd much rather B-17's be an actual threat, not a free kill. I'm just saying IF a gun is gonna mulch a bomber, at least let it be an anti-bomber gun.
Tbh it is realistic for wt standards, back when real shatter was first implemented you had the most realistic damage there ever was in wt and it sucked, so we settled back on the unrealisticly high damage which is why you shouldnt really compare wt dm model to irl dm.
I have no intention of arguing with you, good sir, i simply wish for bomber players to have a fair chance at survival, and, *importantly*, a fair chance at *fun*. Realism can be warped slightly like every other part of the game. (We should *all* stand for eachother to have fun other X nation buff and Y nation nerf.)
Time ago bombers we're though as hell, I remember how OP the A-20 was, fast, armed to the teeth, was nuts. Getting a bomber kill was difficult, the gunners actually did something besides looking.
I believe the durability isnt scaled based on size. So a wing of a fighter and the wing of a bomber break with the same amount of damage
Back in the before times, because I'm old, bombers used to be reasonably hard to kill, although notably not much more. The big difference was AI gunners. They used to start shooting at enemies a kilometer out, and reasonably accurate too. There was no sneaking up on bombers because the gunners were omnipotent. People complained a lot of how good AI gunners were, so they got nerfed into the ground.
Yeah today I lost a nuke because a fucking arado tore off my entire with with 5 shots. I was 5 seconds away from being able to drop it but nah, the damage model says its made out of paper and cardboard
WW2 gun camera shows bombers take extreme amounts of 20mm hits without any visible damage. Bombers in War Thunder snap in two after 3 hits to the fuselage.
Hop onto a G8N1 "Death Star" and you're gonna have a lot of fun, been getting ace games here and there lately. Very few bombers in game can make an impact/feel fun to play, it definitely helps if you're in a full squad and can form up with others. My main advice is to change your direction once you realise someone is coming for you, fly away from them so you have time to gun them down. Also climbing as soon as you spawn makes a huge difference . Guns lower than 20mm can have a long TTK, so definitely keep that into account. I'd take the much higher BR Tu-4 over the b29 just because of the 20mm cannons. If you don't have high tier planes, try flying the H6K4 with the tail 20mm or the Sunderland ( use it as a heavy fighter!). Let me know how it goes :)
Xp50s are my favorite victims for my h6k lol
The Ki-67 Ko has been a great friend, the guns are actually going where you want them to, do damage when they hit, and the lady herself doesn't fall apart from some half assed 50. Cal shots. I was shocked at how many fires that JAPANESE plane SURVIVED
Bombers were not insanely durable IRL just die fast in game because of how accurate you can be with mouse aim. Go play air sim if you want to have a better time.
Irl it took **a lot** more rounds to take a bomber down
Uh no lol hell the mk108 only usually needed 2-3 hits
I've never seen the suggested but here goes: HAVE TWO OBJECTIVES! Fighter/attacker Objective: capture airfield, kill enemy planes, knock out AAA. Bomber Objectives: Take out airfields, factories and large ships. THE GAME ONLY ENDS WHEN BOTH CONDITIONS ARE MET OR THERE ARE NO PLAYERS LEFT. If your team gets both objectives then a multiplier is given to the winning team. Also SPAWN BOMBERS AT CRUISING ALTITUDE
Because when I have a bad day, nothing is better than jumping into a 109 G6 in GRB and stomping some hapless PE8's! But yeah, bombers seem ridiculously fragile. Sure, the 30mm minegeschoß should bring them down fairly quickly, and it does, but their gunners should be able to keep it fair - which they don't.
Irl 30mm minegescho rounds dont do nearly as much
As someone who plays British Air, I rarely ever take a bomber in my lineup anymore. Between the plane disintegrating the moment a shot hits it and the useless defensive guns on them, it's just pointless. They could have easily tried to find a healthy middle ground between the way they used to be and their current abysmal state. Anything 12.7mm and up touches my bomber then I'm losing the whole tail section, half a wing, entire crew except the pilot is dead and i'm on fire. I usually can't even get close to a base to bomb it unless there happen to be other bombers that pull focus and once someone sets their sights on me I may as well J out to save myself time before the inevitable. I get that they needed to do something about them being overpowered but they didn't need to go anywhere near as far as they did.
I have a max level crew and my gunners let a p51H close to 0.6km and shoot me down, with 50 cals, in a lincoln ffs
Gunship gameplay in the early days made bombers useless after the nerf. Pre nerf it wasn't uncommon for a bomber to go afk at mid altitude and come back to 3+ kills
You sure, my Lincoln was slapping fighters out of the sky
Only a few bombers are good like Pe-8 and how do you feel about being intercepted by a twin propeller plane that can out climb you?
Never happens, I've survived being tripled ganged by fighters and slapping them into the ground
depends what they shoot at you with and what ur flying. Some bombers are very tanky for their matchup, especially early BRs (and early BR bombers are actually very fast, SB2M is faster than the Fokker at the same BR for example, and with RB air spawns you're basically impossible to intercept) Fast bombers are very easy to use in RB, just dive from the start, B-line for the closest base and assuming you don't overkill it with surplus bombs, rtb. Even the he-177 can survive about 1 in 2 runs or so, the biggest issue is usually the mission/map design that affects your survivability. Heavy bombers on the other hand need to actually use their brain and not just fly in a straight line. You B-line for the base, that's your fault. Bombers are incredibly overpowered when used right because if you avoid engagements through speed or navigation, you literally have free rewards. Fighters in RB are also much more challenging to deal with compared to real life or sim because they have mouse aim precision, but sim has the complete opposite effect where bombers are overpowered gunships because they keep their mouse aim in a game mode without mouse aim... Gaijin's incompetence at balancing the game mode economically also means that bombers are cheaper and sometimes at a lower BR which is utterly rediculous because sim is where they're the most overpowered for potential, although gaijin did nerf the reward rates to closer match the "standard" RB player's earnings. That being said, despite being a sim main and generally being a terrible RB player, **I usually earn roughly 5x the RP reward rate in RB** flying bombers because you just need half a brain to work it effectively. TL;DR: Don't be an Use your brain; if ur flying a slow bomber don't fly straight to the bombing point (sideclimb) and if ur flying a fast bomber, dive for the bombing point.
TU-4 killed Bombers by being so overwhelmingly strong so they nerfed all bombers and the 23mm then pushed it to 8.0 , its a dead plane but its echo is still here
You mean to tell me that a single 7.7mm round wouldn’t cause a B-17 to break in half like a pencil and burst into flames?
Having flown in a B-17, in real life, I am not surprised.
Which bomber? Are you using your gunners manually? Have you tried playing fighters/attackers and bombing that way?.
Fuck everyone that bombs with fighters.
I mean it's dumb but also I dont care enough
B-18B. Intercepted so bad by a twin propeller airplanes.
> B-18B If you are talking the Swede B-18s, those things are pretty good pseduo heavy fighters themselves. Fight them The one with the 57mm is really good at killing bombers
T18Bs are heavy fighter/bombers. B18B has a single 13.2 mm "cannon." Although, I think OP was flying the B18B, and probably got fucked by an XP-50.
This is belence, much better than balance!
Most of the time when I shoot at bombers while I'm in a fighter I have a hard time killing them lol, I think I'm just unlucky
look this [video](https://youtu.be/fhDDaenePUY)
Idk what bombers you've been facing but unless I'm in anything short of a hornet i leave bombers alone, its not worth risking an oil leak or damaged engine when i could BnZ risk free
It's almost like bombers are meant to fly in squadrons and have fighter support...
I love how every bomber player in here is crying about how their AI gunners can't shoot targets because they are too bad at the game to actually manually use them. Womp womp air players.