I'm just getting to the stealth tech on my first epic since I got C3C, so I've been pondering military strategy for a late game domination victory push.
Obviously, the stealth bomber is devastating. If you have no shortage of shields, you cannot go wrong with building those. But, is the beefed up stealth fighter now useful, too?
Originally posted by Enkidu Warrior
Is it really just the poor mans way to use precision bombing?
The key question is value. For every expensive stealth bomber (240 shields) you can build twice as many stealth fighters (120), but which is the best investment? Even the poor man (poor in shields) most often will want to build fewer of the bombers if they are a better value per shield. They have most of the same abilities, except the fighter can do recon missions. The Civlopedia says the fighter cannot do air superiority - correct me if I'm wrong. Neither gets intercepted much, so attack/defense values don't mean much.
Therefore, it mainly comes down to bombing performance per shield invested. The bomber has a bombard/rate of fire of 18/3 and the half price fighter has 6/2. We can use the handy Binomial distribution to help figure out the expected hits and relative probabilities of a kill when each air unit attacks ground units of with a particular defense value and total hit points. Then, scaling expected hits and kills relative to shield costs helps to assess the efficiency of bombing with each type of air unit.
Except when defense values are very low (3 or lower), bombers do more hit point damage per shield than fighters.
However, things get more interesting when considering killing units, because multiple attacks might need to be made and extra hits from a bombing run are "wasted" once a ground unit is killed. Bombers are more prone to waste "attacks" than fighters, because 3 rather than 2 "attacks" must be made with each bombing run. Obviously, attacking a low defense unit with only 1 hit point left with a bomber is likely to be inefficient, because the kill will likely occur on the first attack and the next 2 will be wasted.
In terms of kills per shield, attacking with bombers is more efficient than attacking with fighters, except when:
1) Defenders have 2 or 4 HP and defense <4
2) Defenders have 1 HP and defense <18!
The first case is not surprising, because the even number of HP means that either 1 bomber attack is likely to be wasted (on the 2HP), or a second bomber will be needed to finish the job (on the 4HP). Thus, fighters can be more efficient than bombers when attacking veteran transports, but differences in efficiency were quite small.
The second case is potentially more interesting. If a previous attack leaves a ground unit with 1 HP, then fighters are more efficient in finishing them off up to the level of mech infantry (with no defense modifications). Here are the relative probabilities of a kill and the % increase in kills per shield for the fighter over the bomber for a variety of defense values.
___________Probability of Kill
Defense____Fighter_____Bomber______% Increase in Kills/Shield
2__________94%______99.9%________88%
6__________75%______98%__________52%
10_________61%______95%__________28%
12_________56%______94%__________19%
14_________51%______91%__________11%
Note that even though fighters are more more efficient per shield because the probability of having good luck is fairly high relative to the shield investment, using 2 fighter bombing runs in the place of 1 bomber run will still yield a lower overall chance of a kill. Thus, fighters can be efficient in picking off damaged units, but their success will be more variable and you can't count on them when getting a kill is critical.
So, what's it all mean??? Heck if I know!
It might be handy to keep a few fighters around for recon duties and to efficiently finish off low defense units with 1 HP. Other than that, bombers typically should always be built despite higher shield costs. Fighters seem like they'd be particularly good for finishing off relatively low defence units (e.g., flak, mobile SAM) after those have been damaged by stealth bombers. Thus, a few stealth bombers/fighters could open the way for effective use of your massive fleet of regular bombers left over from industrial era wars. Don't city improvements and population have a defense value of 12? Fighters might be a slightly more efficient option if you wanted to precision bomb a civ back to the stone age, but this would require a large force that would have few other uses. Overall, there don't seem to be many compelling reasons to build more than a few stealth fighters . . .
I'm trying hard to find reasons to give stealth fighters a chance, because they look really cool!
Can anyone come up with other reasons to build them?
