Why are air units so underpowered in Civ5?

[Horizons]

I mean especially considering the boost to ships in G&K.

Bombers cannot pillage tiles, and they are easily damaged by large cities purely based on the city strength even if there are no fighters or anti-aircraft units nearby. Think about it, a bomber flying thousands of feet in the air above a city with no intercepting units whatsoever to fire back ... why is the bomber sustaining such heavy damage, all it is doing is dropping bombs from a safe distance?! lol even land units are able to shoot down air units easily with their rifles or lances? And to make things worse cities can even build anti-aircraft bunkers, effectively making them immune to air attacks.

Guided missiles are a bad joke.

Air units are really underwhelming ... in fact, on an aside, the whole end game is awfully rushed and is severely less play-tested and well thought through than the early game simply because most Civ players spend most of their gaming hours in the earlier eras.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Air units take that damage because it would be over-powered if they just dropped their bombs without risk. If you can't handle accepting it as a balance mechanic, try to think of it as routine maintenance.

 

[ahawk]

Air units are a mixed bag. The two earliest tiers of air units (Great War Era planes and standard fighters/bombers) are useful in some ways, and less useful in others.

Artillery is better at bombarding cities. Whether this is realistic or not is another issue, but it helps balance the game, because if bombers could attack cities without almost any damage, then Artillery and Rocket Artillery would be essentially worthless except in situations where you have no oil. By-and-large, I use Artillery on cities (Artillery, if set up out of range of a city, takes no damage from attacking it), and I use bombers on enemy land units that are in the way.

Unless you have B-17's or the city is farily weak anyways, it's best to use Artillery. Only when there is insufficient room to set up a bunch of Artillery will I use bombers to attack a city. This occurs most often when the city is on a coast and surrounded by mountains on multiple sides. In the case of the city being on the coast, if I can build Battleships and get them to that body of water, I'll use them instead.

Air-power is really best against land units most the time. Two bombers can do considerable damage to most pre-late-game units, if not killing them outright. But the same two bombers attacking a city might do a bit of damage to the city and end up doing tons of damage to the bombers.

Again, I don't disagree with the absurdity of bombers taking so much damage from empty cities, but it's an issue of game balance. Fact is, it's just as absurd that stone-age archers have a greater range than a machine gun from WWII, and there's a lot of other non-realistic situations, but I usually find that the poor realism is offset by a need to balance out functions for units and justify having a reason to build them. Usually.

Only once you have Stealth Bombers is air-power really best applied to anything and everything, including cities.

 

[Matthew.]

Promotion to allow heal every turn and the fact that they always heal in garrison (25 health as opposed to 10 outside of friendly territory). Throw on that you can stack unlimited numbers in one city and air is far from under powered. Even the highest strength cities will fall in a single turn.

In addition to balance, air getting damaged makes sense anyway. A third of the B-17's were destroyed during the war. Bombers were far from safe in the skies, especially in the early years of the war.

 

[RedFuneral]

You wouldn't think air underpowered if you saw my last game. One AI had a fleet of 30 planes and was taking 3 cities a turn from one of the other AIs(bringing their health to 0 at least, he had an army of ground troops pushing forward and taking the already weakened cities.)

Of course, the AI thought it smart to garrison all the planes in a city right on my (heavily guarded) border. He hadn't thought for an instant that I had paid him to attack the other AI in an effort to weaken him. He lost 30 planes that turn... lol

 

[jjkrause84]

Air units take that damage because it would be over-powered if they just dropped their bombs without risk.

Translation: the dev team couldn't come up with a decent system, so they (again!) resorted to a completely arbitrary limitation.

 

[smallfish]

It's okay. Folks tend to forget that CiV wars and battles are fought across the span of years, decades and quite often centuries, so like Matthew's example highlighted out, its alright for air units to receive some damage whenever they attack targets because that means they lost a small part of their squadron each time they hit go something (you can even see one or two of 'em airplanes shot down if combat animation is on)

That's why you shouldn't just build a handful of them anyway

 

[Seabastian Civ]

I don't find Air units underpowered at all. In fact, BOMBERS are usually the deciding factor in my wars, single or multiplayer. Triplanes/fighters, on the other hand, are very weak.

AA guns come so much later than GW bombers that GW bombers might be the strongest unit on the map for 100+ years... Give them range promotion right out of the gate and they will decimate enemies... Bombers can replace artillery entirely.

If anything, Bombers with range and air repair are overpowered.

 

[Biologist]

I wouldn't say that air units are underpowered. I think their function has simply changed from destruction of enemy infrastructure to wiping out enemy troops. Bombers can be used effectively against an enemy city in the event that artillery is impractical, but their main value is in eliminating enemy carpets of doom. Even if the AI brings along AA guns, each gun can only fire once per turn. Fighters set to intercept are more of a problem, but they can be cleared with air sweeps. You can use ground troops to clear the way for an assault or to make a city unapproachable.

The thing about guided missiles is that they are weak individually, but easy to spam and cost no resources. If your economy can support it, you can keep 30-40 in reserve within a contested city, and quickly demolish an incoming army or fleet.

Finally, simply having air units within your cities extends your line of sight significantly. This is helpful when you can't risk using a ground unit to scout, or don't have enough spies to use them for scouting.

 

[kaspergm]

I don't find Air units underpowered at all. In fact, BOMBERS are usually the deciding factor in my wars, single or multiplayer. Triplanes/fighters, on the other hand, are very weak.

AA guns come so much later than GW bombers that GW bombers might be the strongest unit on the map for 100+ years... Give them range promotion right out of the gate and they will decimate enemies... Bombers can replace artillery entirely.

If anything, Bombers with range and air repair are overpowered.

Yeah, Bombers and to a certain degree GW-Bombers are real powerhouses against cities. Not on a 1:1 basis, but you can easily have 5-6 Bombers running simultaneously and they will level pretty much anything within sight. Plus you can get the Air Repair promotion already at level 3, which means that with Baracks and Armory, you only need to earn one promotion to pick Air Repair which will pretty much have them running continuously without taking damage unless you encounted an unexpected AA-gun. And then you only need two more levels to get the double-strike promotion ...

Fighters are far from weak, but AI is not coded to use them properly, which is why you won't notice their strength. A single Fighter with Intercept I and II promotion will take down a Bomber in one interception, which is pretty frightening, so not only are Fighters great for defensive purposes, you would also need to bring Fighters to air sweep enemy Figters if not for the fact that AI doesn't understand to use Fighters for interception (sigh). You may still use them for air sweeping AA-guns and SAMs, but these can also be taken down from land, making Fighters less critical in most offenses.

 

[sufficiency]

imo air units are incredibly overpowered in this game. They can attack from great range and they are protected by the cities.

 

[ork75]

Guided missiles fit a nice niche - destroying enemy anti-air. If they only have one use, there is no risk to letting them take out AA guns and SAMS.

 

[smallfish]

Guided Missiles do come a bit too late, however. They should have stuck the 33% bonus against cities on GMs instead of removing them entirely from the game - then there might be more incentive for late game folks to actually build them (they are already cheap to begin with)

 

[michaeljhuman]

They are a bit weak in terms of damage against cities (early units.) But if you have planes, you can wipe out many civ's defensive units while keeping your units safe. Then move in with siege weapons.

Obviously the game designers must perform the tricky task of game balance. This is a game, not a real world sim. It's frustrating to do so little damage at times, but I trust that the game designers had to put some limits on their damage.

 

[Irkalla]

Hint: They're not. You need numbers for them to be effective. At least 6 bombers and 3 fighters.

Use your fighters to do a scouting run, then send your bombers in after you've popped all the AA. Also, fighters work wonders on interception.

 

[azzaman333]

Air units are anything but underpowered. They're extremely powerful. Bombers are lethal to everything on land, and fighters remove the threats to the bombers.

 

[TrentL]

Yeah at first I used to upgrade my planes to take on cities.

Now I upgrade my bombers to take out Land Units, and my fighters to be awesome at intercepting. And then use those planes launched from Carriers on the coasts to take out Enemy Artillery with little to no loss.

Once you have a couple of carriers off the coast loaded with bombers, landing on a beach and securing a foothold in someone's country is alot easier.

They also come in handy for defending your cities by taking out the same key land units.

 

[tetley]

Why are stealth bombers in Civ5 vanilla so underpowered?