Ability to Differentiate between Strategic Bombing and Tactical Bombing

[Excelsior-MU]

I want to be able to choose whether or not my attack is tactical (attack the units) or strategic (attack the infrastructure). They could be different types of attack, just like there is precision guided attack. Also, about precision guided attack, I should be able to choose a unit to attack as well as buildings. Those kinds of attacks in real life are not limited to just buildings.

[Lab Monkey]

Can the stealth attack option (given to ninjas and subs to choose a particular unit in a stack) be applied to bombardment?

[Sinapus]

Originally posted by Excelsior-MU
I want to be able to choose whether or not my attack is tactical (attack the units) or strategic (attack the infrastructure). They could be different types of attack, just like there is precision guided attack. Also, about precision guided attack, I should be able to choose a unit to attack as well as buildings. Those kinds of attacks in real life are not limited to just buildings.

Simple:

Tactical = Attacking military units.
Strategic = Attacking the means to create units.

[Excelsior-MU]

The problem comes down to this. When I bomb a city, it randomly destroys city improvements. Likewise, when I bomb units in the field, it destroys the improvment instead of attacking the unit. I want to be able to choose which is attacked, not have a random chance at one or the other.

[warpstorm]

While part of me likes this idea, there are two issues I have with it.

First off, bombing has been wildly inaccurate up until modern era. Bombs often just plain didn't fall within 1000 feet of what was aimed for in WW2 (look up the CEP on bombs in WW2). Unless you are talking guided munitions, it isn't remotely realistic.

Second it would give you another advantage over the AI making the game even easier.

[Patroklos]

I agree with that, and I think presision bombing should let you pick what building or unit in a city you want to attack exactly

[snowmelk]

I partly agree.
I think you should be able to pick your target. But it's a sad fact that the stupid defenders don't stand around crowded together on huge open places cheering "Hit me!". No, these bastards hide in, behind and on nearly every building in a city. Even with guided weapons you will not always hit the target unit, but the buildings that it uses to hide in.
In game rules: You are allowed to select a target unit, but with a certain percentage you hit some random building. Random because you can't decide where the defenders hide. "building" includes also population loss or no effect for hits on residential buildings or misses.
And of course you should be able to aim at city improvements.

By the way: Planes like Stukas for example made precision bombing long before it is availabe in Civilization. WW1 bombers made precision bombing, if you define precision bombing by trying to hit a specific target with a bomb. It was just not very precise in that times.
I would like that pecision and carpet bombing depends on the aircraft, not on laser-guiding technology.
But I agree with warpstorm that this would be another problem for the AI...

[Excelsior-MU]

One thing that you mentioned that I hate is that population units can be destroyed. This is true in Carpet bombing, but not in modern warfare with todays JDAMs and LGBs. Take the recent war in Iraq for example. Yes some civilians were killed, but thats not the same as the couple hundred thousdand or million that 1 population unit in Civilization represents. If Civ had a more detailed way of representing populations than it would be possible, but with the current state, it seems silly to think that population can be destroyed with a Precision guided attack.

[snowmelk]

In some way you are right.
I always looked at it that way: The attack as shown in the game stands for attacks of a whole squadron of aircrafts in a certain period of time. The loss of a population point includes kills in the civil population as well as homeless and fleeing people.
Yes, civil kills are low with guided weapons, but they still occur. Considering all this, the occasional loss of one population point is okay with me.
Where you are right is the point that carpet bombing will affect the population. Carpet bombing on a city is one of the worse things you can do in a war, since its main purpose IS hitting the civilians, and hitting them massively.
Carpet bombing in Civilization should inflict more severe population loss and cause negative diplomatic reactions if you do it too often.

[yoshi]

Why does it have to be percision bombing? The bombing of Dresden wasn't exacly what you would call precise --unless you call blasting the crap out of an entire city "precison bombing." It certainly got rid of all the city's 'improvements' though.

That said, from the Civ3 perspective, it makes sense that Bombers frequently miss, other wise it becomes an exploit for the human player since the AI isn't good with stuff like that.

What you want is to be able to pick which target to bombard. The only thing is that you probably won't hit it as probablity is low. If you want to hit a specific target, you have to keep bombing it over and over again until you destroy it. The discovery of 'Precision Bombing' should dramatically increase probablity of a hit.

As snowmelk implied, units are are much harder to hit than improvements so probablity should be lower for units in general --if it isn't already.

I should add that the great thing about Air Bombardment is that you can forget the Factories in the city and just focus destroying the city's shield-bonus tile improvements, thus having a similar effect! This is something people don't give Civ3 enough credit for.

A neat addition to Civ3 would be to add a 'Probability' field into the Editor's 'Units' window that would determine the unit's individual chances of getting a hit from bombardment.
This way you could distinguish between a precise but weaker Stuka and an imprecise but more devastating He 111 for instance.

And keeping with Excelsior-MU's idea, you should be able to clearly distinguish between Percision Bombing of units and percision bombing of improvements.
Distinguishing the two means that a Stuka can only attack units whereas an He 111 can only attack city improvements for instance.

[warpstorm]

Originally posted by yoshi
A neat addition to Civ3 would be to add a 'Probability' field into the Editor's 'Units' window that would determine the unit's individual chances of getting a hit from bombardment.
This way you could distinguish between a precise but weaker Stuka and an imprecise but more devastating He 111 for instance.

Yoshi, this is what bombard strength currently is. It is the probability of a bombardment getting a hit. Rate of fire essentially determines how much damage you do.

In your example you could give a Stuka a higher Bombard Strength but only give it a ROF of one, and give the He 111 a low Bombard Strength and give it a high ROF (say 4).

This would have the Stuka hit a lot more often but only do one hit of damage per bombardment. The He 111 in contrast would miss a lot but sometimes could do as much as 4 hits on one bombardment.

[yoshi]

Right, I completely forgot about ROF. But the Differentiating between attacking Imporvements and attacking units in cities still stands.