Cadet PRS Bomber Strategy

Strategy

This is where the bomber lessons really start to take off. We've taught you how to bomb Now we want you to start thinking about why and when you should be bombing.

The two schools of thought

From what I’ve seen in games bomber pilots fall into one of two categories. The ‘Bulldozers’ and the ‘Sneakers’. Bulldozers scream at the team to nan them and try and smash through the enemy through sheer weight of numbers. They tend to tie up a lot of the team’s manpower on a single objective and can often become blinded to the overall game. I’ve seen bomb trains throw themselves at the same minor outpost over and over again and lose the game because they weren't attacking enemy miners, stopping enemy cons expanding, or defending friendly miners.

Sneakers are the smart bomber pilots. Stealth and guile are your tools as a bomber pilot. It is not about blasting through a fully camped aleph guns blazing. That rarely works. It is about planning your route, deprobing, and getting teammates to distract them, then suddenly appearing in their sector as they go OH %#@&!! And you laugh as you drive the bomber to their doom.

Sometimes there's a need to Bulldoze and yell like mad. For instance you destroyed their last tech base and all that stands between you and victory is killing their garrison before a new tech is built. Generally though bombing only works if you use guile and ingenuity, and most of this week is aimed towards making you a better Sneaker. You have to think like the enemy and catch them with their pants down. I can’t stress enough how important it is to do the unexpected. Being predictable will just get you podded.

Game phase

Bombing changes as the game progresses. A simple bomb run with 3 nans and AC1 can easily beat light ints at the start of the game. The same run is suicide 30 mins in when they have hvy ints and mini2.

Early game

Refresher Phase I of games

Bombing tends to happen early because either the commander is trying to bomb rush or both team’s constructors planted in the same sector. Although in the later case you’d be better off to bypass their outpost and hunt miners behind it instead.

Anyway, I like to think early game bombing as the most ‘pure’ bombing, I tend to have the most fun that’s for sure. It’s you and your nans vs. the enemy team. Stronger tech doesn’t come into it, it’s all about which team has the better teamwork. You need to collect your nans, and make sure someone deprobes ahead because they don’t even know you have bombers yet. You generally want to get most of your team nanning you and Bulldoze it.

Destroying even a single station early game can be a devastating blow to the enemy, crippling their expansion and giving your team the map – assuming you don’t waste too much time doing it. Otherwise you’ll find 5 other cons being pushed all around you, especially if you’re facing Giga or Bios.

If you’re bomb rushing to destroy their garrison just remember those things are tough, and you’ll need at least 3 racks of missiles.

Mid game

Refresher Phase II of games

Mid game bombing can continue fairly successfully until they get adv figs or hvy ints. If your commander has gone sup remind him to get AC2 and AB2 – not too many comms buy it these days for some godforsaken reason, but they really improve your chances of bombing successfully.

Midgame you’re going to need distractions, pure and simple. Persuade your company to sacrifice a miner, get a 2nd pilot to launch an eyed bomber somewhere else, get a few int whores to raid enemy miners – any of those will pull a significant amount of enemy players away from defence. Assuming, of course, you aren’t eyed yourself.

Midgame you have a higher number of targets to bomb, which gives you more options. Pre planning your route is important. Look at what enemy stations can be attacked from what angle; even if you can’t do it at the moment perhaps you will get the opportunity slightly later. Create these opportunities by persuading your comm to push cons to good locations to bomb from.

You have more targets, but it’s important to maximise your bombing before they get to late game. Find what you can hit for maximum damage. Techbases are your top priority, but they’re not often built in easy-to-bomb locations. Be smart about your choices – destroying an outpost is good and all, but not much use if they’ve already mined out that sector and all the ones behind it. Don’t waste manpower that could be better spent elsewhere.

Strangely enough, the difficulty in bombing is inversely proportional to the number of miners on a team. I’ve seen teams clearly winning with better map control and slightly better tech suddenly lose it, because they killed all the enemy miners and now the enemy team has nothing to do except bomb back. And vice versa, if the enemy have no miners or cons to defend they’re going to muster a stronger defence.

Late game

Refresher Phase III of games

“You can’t bomb vs. hvy ints.” You’ve probably heard it by now. Heck you might’ve even said it. And it’s true … mostly. Yes, you can bomb vs heavy ints, but it requires a massive amount of teamwork, planning, and a dash of luck. When it is pulled off, it’s normally a core group of players from the same squad who are used to doing that kind of thing.

And the same thing holds true for pretty much any late-game tech path. Adv figs with dumb3? Very hard to bomb against. Adv sf with hunt3? Very hard to bomb against. You can pretty much forget bombing late game unless you’ve gone sup, gotten decent bombing tech - and even then only if the team sizes aren't too large (see next section).

Generally finishing a game if it reaches late game requires more esoteric tech, such as sbs, fig bees, TP attacks, and so forth.

Game size

As with game stage, bombing is also a function of game size. You will find the strategies that work with small games utterly fail in large games. As the number of players on at prime time has crept up over the last few years from 12-18 per side to 25-30 per side, the amount of bombing has gone down because it’s just that much harder with more players. Consequently games have dragged out that much longer.

Note also that games size is relative to map size - as the map gets smaller the amount of players per sector goes up. 18 players on HiHigher is a medium game. 18 players on InsideOut is a big game (yes, even a simple change of the home sectors can change the 'size' of the game!).

Small games (5-12 players per side)

Bombing is almost overpowered in small games. Provided you don’t get eyed too soon only a few pilots will make it to camp before you burst through, and your gunners can deal with them easily. More pilots will launch to defend as soon as they can but they’ll be well spread out and easy pickings. Pretty soon the entire enemy team is podded and you're blowing up a ghost town.

Of course, the opposite holds true for you. With fewer players supporting you, every nan you lose is a critical blow. You don’t want to leave them floating home, you need someone acting as Sweeper to grab all the pods if you don’t want your bomb run to fail by attrition.

Bomb runs take up a significant amount of manpower, leaving you with few reserves for defence, and takes them up for a significant amount of time. You need to balance time spent bombing vs. time spent on other tasks, such as probing. Nothing worse than having your whole team about to bomb their op uneyed and their bbr pops into your garr sector.

Medium games (12-20 players per side)

The advice given in all other sections is ostensibly aimed towards medium games, and saying anything further here is redundant.

Large games (20-30 players per side)

Bombing in these sort of games is verging on ridiculous. You are never going to be uneyed because you can depend that at least one random enemy scout is going to decide he’s got nothing better to do than fly through your sector.

You are going to need whores to clear the aleph for you. A lot of teams like to form up a large group of ints, rush in together and the bbr follows about 15 seconds later once the camp is (hopefully) destroyed.

This is stupid. While they gather courage to charge, the defenders are getting all nice and relaxed and ready to fire. It means a single minefield can lay waste to all the ints. Instead the ints should be streaming through the aleph constantly and preventing the enemy from forming a camp. They should keep up the pressure until they can successfully hold the enemy’s side of the aleph, then tell the bbr to come on through, and then escort it the rest of the way to base.

Of course this never happens because intwhores don’t want to risk being the first one through a camped aleph and losing their kb. As to that, I say see section 3.7.

Another thing you will need in large games are multiple bbrs. Consider the case of 1 bbr with 2 turrets vs 2 bbrs with 1 turret each. Both have the same firepower, but the second case has twice the shield, hull, splits the defenders fire in twain, and can destroy the base twice as fast – all at the low-low cost of a single extra player.

Distractions on other sides of the map become more important, too.

=Ridiculously big games (30+ players per side)

$#@! bombing. Do something else, like trying to deal with lag.

Game strategies

Breathing room

Sometimes your team needs to clear a few enemy stations just to get the monkey off your back. A single outpost placed well can cripple all your commander’s efforts to mine safely. A teleport can give the enemy a position to ripcord cons to and continue expanding. A single station may be blocking the way for you to push a con all the way next to their techbase.

Cases like this can warrant expenditure of effort on small targets that would otherwise be a waste of time.

Bomb rushing

Bomb rushing is buying bombers asap and trying to do as much damage as possible before the enemy get decent defensive tech up. Ideally you kill their garrison before they build a techbase, thus winning the game.

Not many comms do this these days for some reason. Bombing has gotten a bad rep and teams would rather get adv tech and then try and prove their masculinity via an infinite number of pointless dogfights.

Anyway, bomb rushing depends on several factors:

• Having a station built decently close to the enemy sector. It’s hardly a rush if you have to fly 10k.
• Deprobing.
• Getting a large number of the team behind you, whereas the enemy are scattered scouting the map, harassing your miners, etc.

Int bombing

The theory behind this is simple – get most of your team in offensive craft and then pod the enemy team, thus allowing your bomber to roll in virtually unopposed and needing only a few nans. There are lots of variations on this strategy, such as carrier bombing, gunship bombing, even capship bombing.

In all cases it requires that you have 1) Ships which are better at dogfighting than the enemy’s (most commonly ints) and 2) Pilots that are capable of flying them. Strategies often fall apart when the comm doesn’t account for the second requirement.

The best way to escort the bbr has already been described in section 6.2.

Bombing vs. Tac

If the enemy goes tac your comm has 3 choices – make his team try and defend miners and out-tech the enemy; get his team to kill enemy miners and out-tech the enemy; or bomb the enemy. Personally I would say kill ¾ of their miners, making them put a lot of defence on the last one, then bomb.

If the enemy goes tac then you want to force bomb runs down their throat run after run. Why? Stealth fighters are not very good to defend with and if you get about 4 Nan's your run should succeed frequently. So what if the enemy has light ints to d with you say? Bomb them anyways. The average pickup team will have at least half of their team in stealths while you make your run.

Another advantage to bombing a tac team is they often need the majority of their team to defend. Their miner killers must make a choice of losing the base or ripping back to make a stand against you. When your enemy has gone tac keep in mind that the clock is ticking on you. You have to hit that tac before they get up their advanced tech. Hunter 3, cloak 3, adv sf and SB will ruin your day real fast.

Wear them out

If your enemy has incredible bomber stopping capabilities and your team lacks the necessary tech to bomb properly against it, even when bombing uneyed, you can try the desperate method of wearing them down (only works in pickup games). Launch with a gunned bomber and 2 nans. Make a run on a base but abort if you see to many defenders launch (make sure you tell your nans to rip as well). Just rip out and hit the next target.

Again too many defenders? Rip out and hit another target. Do that again and again and again. At some point, few enemy pilots will launch to attack you because they do not care anymore (stopping bombers without shooting anyone is no fun) or they lost the fear of bombers. Blow the base and hit their morale: the enemy comm will scream and ask why the team did not defend the base with the insane tech. On your side your team sees a success against the insane tech of the enemy team. Continue with the strategy until you either killed the enemy or your team got better tech up.