Units Moral affected by heavy bombers

[StG77_CountZero]

Hello,

Is it possible to have moral of ground units being affected by large bombardment by high alt bombers.

If im not wrong, as it is now in SEOW, doing big high alt. bombing attacks on citys or areas with enemy units to soften it for ground units, has no effect in game. 20-30 B17s can drop bombs on that city/area and its big chance they will not hit anything with all thouse 200-300 bombs as even on infantry bombs have to explode close in game to kill it. Its far to effective to send pin-point low alt fighters or fighter-bombers and take out enemy units with guns or bombs.

But if some how moral of units in that town would drop by bombing it with big number of bombers, same as barrage effect does to them, situation would change to more as it was done in ww2. So some times it would be effective to send some high alt bombers to soften deffences before planed advance on ground.

Is it posible to do somthing like that, or its not neccesery to have it.

Cheers
CZ

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

This idea is good, if we could only know where/when such bombardments occurred and how big they were. The eventlog does not record locations and times of heavy bomber bombardments, unless a unit is destroyed by the bombardment. Of course, SEOW knows (by checking the scheduled missions list) that such a bombardment is planned by a commander, but it cannot always know whether the bombardment actually occurred, or the size of the bombardment that actually occurred.

Example, 5 full B-17 flights (20 bombers in total) are planned to hit a town. They all take off with no mishaps. At the end of the mission the eventlog reports no losses or damage to the bombers, and no destruction of enemy units or infrastructure. What, if anything, should SEOW assume happened?

We could assume that if the bombers were AI then they would automatically fly their routes, drop their bombs at the target and get home. This is similar to the supply drop and photo recon assumptions for AI. However it is not a perfectly safe assumption. If the bombers were given insufficient fuel they may return to base without reaching the target. Or if they were planned badly they may drop bombs and miss the target altogether.

If there was a single human pilot, that pilot may lead the bomber group to the wrong target, or may make them fly a completely different mission.

On the other hand, if there are logged destruction/damage events, then we are in better shape to affect the morale of nearby units. The DCS has a function called subUpdateUrbanDamageFromEvents() that alters the landscape damage state based on the amount of nearby combat actions from all events. It is possible to add some code to this to reduce unit morale at the same location as well.

So, in summary, we can do this but it will not be 100% reliable, and it will not be specific to heavy bomber actions.

Cheers,
4S

[PA-Dore]

Yes Mike I agree, it's not easy to have it 100% available. Count is right, it would be very useful: I needed that in the Battle of Moscow campaign when Germans bombed the Kremlin. I decreased morale manually. Perhaps an idea: If we could have virtual factories as "morale markers", campaign builders could locate them in special locations (e.g. main towns). Then we could use the partial and cumulative damage, more the "morale tracker" is hit, more the units around ( x km) decrease their morale. The difficulty is to recognize normal factories from "morale markers" factories, perhaps using their extended name as for secret factories? My two cents ^^

[StG77_CountZero]

I see, its not posible to know if bombs hit in area without some object there that would detect them, and factory plates in game would not be good as they are to high and would also detect hits from ground units. It would be maybe ok if we could make object what is like factory plate but hitboxes are at 0 or 1m, not 50m in air like with factory plates.

I was thinking that somthing could be done like you 4Shades explained, but like you say, even if all bombers come back ok, MP would not know how many bombers drop bombs in area where they were planned to drop them.