Bombing Roads

[snafuc4]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
snafuc: So what do you suggest ? Should bombers be able to take out roads or not ? Maybe fighters ? Have a new unit called dive bomber ?

Apologies, I do tend to be a bit pedantic about parts of history I think I know about

There was a fairly involved discussion last November in this thread: http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showt...22#post4182022
but I see we didn't touch on the question you're asking. My choice would be to have an intermediate fighter/bomber unit that (amongst the other things I mentioned then) could /damage/ roads with bridges, but not take them out completely - don't forget that up until quite recently a 'road' fas frequently unmetalled cleared hard-packed earth track, & that a Civ 'square' covers several square Km, giving license for several detours. How this could be implemented (ie the damage-but-not-distruction) I'm not quite sure..

[uberfish]

From a purely game mechanics point of view air power is already a *very* strong offensive weapon being able to bombard everything from the safety of your own cities instead of having to walk cannon stacks around, the ability to cut the defender's lines of communication by destroying roads and railroads too would probably be a bit too much.

[Hermann the Lombard]

Vietnam demonstrated the futility of trying to cut roads even with massive air power. As someone wrote above, it's pathetically easy to fill in the holes and return a road to service in a matter of hours. Before laser-guided munitions, bridges were among the hardest and most dangerous targets...and when dropped the North Vietnamese had pontoon bridges in place within days.

Infantry with clubs are also infantry with shovels and can lay waste to a road. It's similar to the classic axiom that you need infantry to HOLD ground; you also need infantry to DESTROY ground. Look at the American Civil War and attempts to knock out rail lines: cavalry damaged rail lines, but infantry destroyed them (heating rails and wrapping them around trees, for example).

At most I could see a "dropped bridge" which would delay road or rail as if the bridge wasn't there until a worker does a repair operation, but any infantry unit should be able to repair the bridge as well (perhaps taking 2 turns instead of 1).