Which Level Bomber for Africa?

[Longasc]

It's a decision between the 7 ammo Ju88 which has somewhat better air defense or the better naval attack and only 5 ammo and lower air defense of the Italian bomber.

Opinions?

[Loki1942]

Ju 88 all the way baby

[Tarrak]

The both bombers are imho very close in performance but Ju88 comes a bit ahead for mostly two reasons:

1) The higher AD of the Ju88 gives him a little edge with all the quite tough british fighters flying around. In long terms i usually manage to maintain air superiority but sometimes a fresh fighter reinforcement manages to go after one of my bombers and then you are happy about any point of AD.

2) The italian bomber got a lot more fuel while having less ammunition. The problem is that the Ju88 already got more then enough fuel to be out of ammo before it runs out of fuel usually. This gives the Ju88 a lot more effective bombing time.

Said that i still bought the italian bomber for my core just to maintain the flavor of a mixed german-italian forces but from pure efficiency point of view the Ju88 is better.

[ThvN]

They both have their strong points, it depends on how you are going to use it I guess, and how good the rest of your airforce is. If you can afford to escort the bomber with a fighter than the Piaggo is very interesting, it has better ground/naval attack, and I like the spotting range of 2. But on the other hand it is more expensive and has relatively little ammo, like you said. I don't think I ever ran out of fuel with the Piaggio, and even the Ju88 should run out of ammo before running out of fuel, so the fuel stat is not very important, like Tarrak said.

The Ju88 is affordable, capable and can later cheaply be upgraded to the Ju188, although that is not a very big improvent overall, but the extra hard attack is nice during the later years.

I got both, and I liked them both.

[KeldorKatarn]

I used the Italian bombers. I wanted italian units and their bombers were initially better than what the Germans had to offer in my opinion. So I kept them and they served me quite well

[Kamerer]

The correct answer for "what strategic (level) bomber for Africa?" is:

None.

I've modeled and played this many times and buying a German level bomber is never the answer.

In el Aghelia or such you get a +3A italian Ba.65. it works wonders, and when you can, you upgrade it to an SM.79. Oh, like magic. Great naval attack, cheap. I play on Rommel so I watch pennies. You can deploy it out every turn, pay for the damage, and build its experience. There's no real need for wasting a deployment space on an additional level/strategic bomber. AK never generates the same level of opponent prestige/spam like the east campaigns in that the strat bomber neutralizes the prestige to create a more favorable, non-spam last few turns. Translation: strat/level bomber have massively less per-turn value in AK vs. GCE. Likewise, there's no naval scenario your streoidal SM.79 and organic tac bombers can't handle easily. I can dominate India with the experienced SM.79 and my additional few Ju87s; you don't need strat bombers to dominte them or the med fleet in Palestine.

You are better skipping the strat bomber, working it with tac-air, and putting that slot into an extra fighter, arty, or amour.

[Longasc]

I got a Ju88 in the end but your analysis makes sense, Kamerer. I might use a tandem of level bombers to suppress flak and bomb nearby artillery in the end, who knows. The Italian tac bombers have indeed great anti-naval potential but in this case I would probably get Stukas.

I don't know how enemy airpower will develop over the course of the Afrika Campaign, I stopped testing due to time constraints after the hypothetical post Al Halfa/Alamein scenarios began.

So let's see what will happen to Ju88 and Ju87 till the end of this campaign. Right now I am in Alam Halfa and playing on General I have really kickass fighters, one Italian Veltro and 3 Bf109G, they are working really well so far combined with the plentiful aux fighters.


Edit: Let's see if Ju88 can at least survive attacks by a single Spitfire! Two seem to be the death of any badly escorted or unescorted bomber.