Purpose of Air Units

[bahamuto]

With the understanding that the AI generally does not build air units I figured that, I would build them myself. I managed to build some 3 Jet bombers and began going after their cities. While there were no air defense, I noticed the damage output against the cities were not very high at all.

Is this something that is expected? Is 3 not a decent amount? Its not like you can make a corp or an army out of them to combine them. In Civ5 bombers were pretty efficient and could get the job done.

Is there something better to use them against then Cities?

Thanks for any tips on this.

 

[Miracle_007]

I've found air to be more effective againt certain types of ground troops and not as effective against cities. They seem to be more effective against bombard class and less effective against melee type in my experience. It hard to tell as usually I'm bombing knights and catapults with stealth bombers so I'm not 100% confident about that.

 

[Chibisuke]

I have not yet used air units with the exception of the observation balloon in several playthroughs. They seem to be pretty useless unless you are in a very long game where domination is the only allowed victory condition.

 

[TheGreatSleepyOne]

You can use bombers to pillage enemy tiles.
The use for Aircraft is to deploy a lot of them around your spaceports in combination with Mobile SAMs to intercept enemy nukes. Very niche.

 

[Promethian]

Air attacks are effectively free attacks if your opponent doesnt also invest to counter you. Air also allows you to project more force in a smaller area in the 1upt environment.

 

[Gtdead]

Bombers are really weak. They start with a -17 combat penalty against units and you need to upgrade them to break even, and they can't be formed into corps/armies. Also they will probably come late enough that the AI will be in a position to spam those annoying infantry/mech infantry armies like there's no tommorow (at least on deity). The combat strength different is just too big, it's like fighting end game units with cavalry.

Their only advantage is that they are easy to mass, and once you reach critical mass, you can kill stuff faster than they can move, but this will take a lot of time and resources. If you just want them to kill cities, go for nukes instead. They are a one hit ko against cities, and you can use an ultra fast to capture them.

Fighters seem to perform a lot better against units, but they are pretty inconvenient to use imo.