Maps are not that small and explosion radius is just a quarter of the real thing. On top of that pilots have a crappy visibility compared to RL. The only reason you can kill 10-20 people with a single bomb is because it’s predictable where people leave their bots or tend to group up before the objective.
I use similar tactics when driving tank and you can mow-down multiple squads with a single belt just by knowing from where to where people usually run.
This reminds me of how planes went through multiple updates in H&G. At first they where pretty easy to control and you could see and strafe infantry or small vehicles. It felt very satisfying as you had a small time window between spotting someone, aiming and sending shots at the point where they will be when shots land. But dog fighting was kind of rubbish - you circle around each other until someone gives up or crashes.
After the update to flight model, dog fights became more nuanced but strafing of ground targets it’s just a luck thing. You can’t really see infantry anymore. So at the end, you get rather unsatisfying gameplay which mostly focused on fighting other planes and sometimes bombing tanks, both of which can be done in other games that do it better.
So keep in mind that too much nerfing of the planes, makes them rather pointless to have at all.
I’ve been squad wiped from German bombs that landed over 70 meters away… I don’t know exactly what the lethal blast radius of the SC250s are but thats a large portion of the map.
In that case 500kg one would cover half of the map. How do you know it landed 70 meters away?
Because I could see where it was in relation to the B point on conquest which was centered around 75 m away
Some fragments can fly quite a distance away, as one can see on the “tank hit screen”, but it very unluckily to squad wipe. Otherwise we would be getting 50+ kills per drop. 140 meters diameter is like half of the city map in the Moscow campaign. Maybe you where unlucky or it actually bounced off and exploded near your squad.
From own experience - you have to drop even 250kg ones pretty on target to get hits and under sharp angle to avoid bounce. For example, on Monastery Invasion, when 2nd point is contested, people often leave their bots in two barns. Dropping bomb exactly between barns gives you 10+ kills on a good day. Dropping it on a roof of one of the barns, gives no kills. It either just bounces off or all fragments go around. The difference between those is like 5 meters.
In Normandy bombers typically rack up 3+ squad wipes on a normal run
I’m not even sure if bombs have any HE effect, because in case of tanks, you see them kill crew by fragments, while I can lob an HE shell into a side of BT-7 and it goes in flames.
Well, you could theoretically kill all enemy squads with a single 50kg bomb if you land it into the door of a room with all squads inside. Bomb kills come from predictable location of the people or where they park their bots, not the blast radius. Blast radius just gives you better margins for error.
As a tanker I’ve seen 100kg bombs land few meters away from me and do no damage, but at the same time, I’ve been blow up by a single 50kg one. It comes down to how fragments spread.
Many things simply don’t stop shells/fragments, like thin wooden walls, bales and etc. I don’t know if projectiles can kill after being deflected from the surface. At least with MGs I wasn’t able to do that.
To be honest, if maps would be larger, with bigger cap areas and friendly fire from mortars/artillery/bombs, then some of these problems might go away. As game simulates fragments flying around instead of a simple area damage with fall-off, it ads a bit of unpredictability but with intuitive ways to protect yourself - have some solid object between you and a bomb, go prone, avoid predictable locations - aka shortest path between spawn and objective.
If it would be a simple, fall-off radial damage as in H&G, then it turns into a primitive meta-game of “touch the point and wait for bomb to land on your head”. It’s not really satisfying neither to pilots nor to infantry.
I don’t know about mortars, but artillery and bombs finally have friendly fire. Only problem is you’re not given a reason to care about friendly fire if you’re the one firing.
At least you can’t just call arty on yourself with no consequence other than screenshake anymore.