Useless bombers?

[AlanH]

New player here, although I've tried every version of paid-for Civ.
Greatly impressed with the few terminated games I've played, but the current one has progressed to modern times and I'm stuck in an endless war without an embassy.
Problem: bombers appear to be almost useless. Waves of attacks with them have very little effect on a city. Thinking this was strange, I attacked a single enemy worker - first with a helicopter expecting to remove the worker at once (it didn't) - and then with a bomber. Neither had the desired effect. The worker carried on barely losing any hit points.
What is going on?
Why are aircraft so useless?
I exclude fighters as they do a reasonable job.
Can someone with experience enlighten me?
I'm playing the version for Win 11 downloaded about a week ago (prior to the April 26 updated version).
Thanks.

[cazfi]

In civ2civ3 (current default) ruleset both Helicopter and Bomber do bombarding instead of regular attacks. It's pretty useless against a single unit, but should help the offensive when there's a big stack of defenders, all of them taking the damage.

Helicopter does two rounds with firepower of 1. Bomber does three rounds with firepower of 1. Stealth Bomber does four rounds with firepower of 1. These values might be a bit on the low side, but I haven't played much with the civ2civ3 ruleset to have first hand experience.

[AlanH]

Thanks. That's helpful.

[MarisaReichel]

The plane isn't harmless, it's just that I don't understand why, thanks for your reply.

[ricardisimo]

Maybe there's something I'm not understanding, but stealth bomber now seems almost completely useless. What's the point of having a base attack strength of 9, if - at least as far as I can tell - you are doing 1-2 points of damage to one of the enemy units, and zero damage to the rest? This unit has been nerfed beyond belief. I think nerfing it was probably a good idea, but this is ridiculous. It doesn't even kill units with zero defense strength, like spies and diplomats.

[cazfi]

you are doing 1-2 points of damage to one of the enemy units, and zero damage to the rest?

Can you attach a savegame where such a behavior can be reproduced?
In my quick test they worked as expected, dealing four rounds (->4 HP) of damage to all the units in the tile.
What version of freeciv you are using? There were some bugs related to this fixed a year or two ago (don't remember the details from the top of my head).

[ricardisimo]

This is Freeciv version 3.1.0, gui-gtk-3.22 client.
Built against gtk+ 3.24.41, using 3.24.41
Built against glib 2.80.0, using 2.80.0

I'm attaching before and after attack screenshots here. Thank you. If there is a fix, I would jump all over that.

[ricardisimo]

I'm going to assume that this is indeed a bug. I have in the past, with the right conditions and a little bit of luck, had green warriors take out an entire stack of settlers. That's the very first troop you have in beginning of the game. Meanwhile, I just attacked a stack of two settlers with a veteran Stealth bomber - the very last troop one gets after much research - and the settlers just had a little bit of damage. This is very clearly just a bug.

My understanding is that the reputation that real-life Stealth bombers have is extremely overblown, so if this is a bit of political commentary by the devs regarding the ineptitude of the Pentagon, then kudos for that. Well done. But I would like for my most expensive troop to be able to kill a diplomat in one shot.

[cazfi]

In your screenshots all the present units have lost hitpoints, so at least bombardment attack has worked as expected. Balance is harder to evaluate. How many stealth bombers should it take to reduce all (possibly dozens) defenders to just one hitpoint? Remembering that the Stealth Bomber itself is not at risk at all, but can make the bombardments freely. Just build ten of them, and you an use those for the rest of the game to go from an enemy city to enemy city.

[cazfi]

Actually I think that it's SAM Battery that has turned underpowered by these rules (as it doesn't provide any protection from Bombers or Helicopters): RM #1931