What is the advantage to Bombers?

[KrikkitTwo]

Artillery gets destroyed by great war bombers also. The tech gap is not that big there.

Well its bigger than it looks because Artillery just needs 1 tech (Dynamite)
GW Bombers need 2 (Biology for Oil..possibly even Refrigeration and Flight).. and Biology is out of the way if you are going non-naval military

 

[beetle]

^^My difficulty is that the neighbor AI seems to have no trouble getting both those techs in time to counter my arty.

OTOH, if I try a GWB rush, they also comes too late (and at the expense of arty).

I have had better success with Bombers as filler after arty while waiting on Rocketry. I am still working on better timing for that, but really I should probably be working on getting arty sooner.

 

[pollock]

As others have posted the 3rd promotion air repair is very good. They have very good range, high map mobility and concentration of force when there is a limit of 1 combat unit per hex.

With good decisions you should never lose them. Especially if you don't move to a recently captured city in range of enemy units.

I don't tend to attack cities often unless have ran out of other targets. Infantry in good terrain or with good promotions may be a bad idea. Obviously AA is a target for your ground units but even that can be finished my a bomber that takes no damage when it kills units.

 

[Athenaeum]

This. Whereas ranged units are usually put in harm's way in order to make an attack, and you can sometimes lose one to an unseen counterattack (e.g. from a fast mounted unit), there's pretty much no way to counterattack a bomber, except as someone noted with a nuke.

This was the point I was making in pointing out that they do not take up a physical hex tile on the map.

I guess a parallel between mounted units might be more appropriate...as knights can usually attack Xbows and then retreat out of range (at least if you have roads). But you can only do that for a certain amount of time before the knight dies from accumulating damage.