Strategic Bombing
Strategic bombing is used to deny the enemy the benefits of industrial and infrastructure assets. SEOW supports strategic bombing by two mechanisms: bridge tracking and industrial tracking.
- Bridge Tracking
All road and rail bridges in SEOW are tracked automatically. This means that every undestroyed bridge is always a live target in every mission, regardless of whether any flight has it listed as a GATTACK point or not. At the end of each mission, any bridge destruction events listed in the logfile are extracted and those bridges are marked as destroyed. In the next mission, the bridge will appear as destroyed in-game (see image below) and, over time, the bridge will be repaired according to the Bridge Repair settings in the DCS. Whilst destroyed or under repair, SEOW will ensure that ground units will not be able to cross the bridge. Repair can be carried out either automatically, or by using the Engineer Repair option which requires undestroyed engineer units to be within the control radious of the destroyed bridge.
- Industrial Tracking
Factories and fuel dumps are not tracked automatically by SEOW (since there is no support within IL-2 like there is for bridges). Instead, SEOW supports two different methods to make factories and fuel dumps live targets in any mission. First, we note that industrial installations are grouped into industrial areas. There may be zero, one or more industrial areas in each town, e.g. "Stalingrad North", "Stalingrad Central", "Stalingrad South". If any installation is targeted for a GATTACK mission, then all installations in the same industrial area become live targets for that mission.
The first method is to use conventional bomber flights.
To target an industrial area using bomber flights, simply place a GATTACK point over the area and select a specific factory or fuel dump in the target selector drop-down box. Using "local search" or selecting a nearby military unit is not sufficient to make the whole industrial area live - you MUST target at least one factory or fuel dump directly. Subsequent bomber flights can use "local search", as long as at least one flight targets a factory or fuel dump in the area.
