This will be a sensitive subject but bear with me. If there's a possibility for night operations, maybe we'd need a way to set area targets on the mission builder. I'm not debating the rights and wrongs of indiscriminate area bombing here, but the historical truth is that it was used by all combatants in various theaters. Germans bombed London, the RAF bombed the German cities into oblivion and even the US who was usually more careful in the ETO, carried out attacks with incendaries against Japanese residential areas.
I know there's a pressure to keep ratings for the game favorable though, so it could be masked the same way it was masked in wartime. For example, some pilots claimed they didn't know they were sent to bomb residential areas, but were briefed to hit a "small weapons factory that's camouflaged as a post office in such and such district". Then it was the difficulties of night navigation and accurate bomb drops at zero visibility that exacerbated the effect.
All i'm saying is that it would be nice to have something that's historically accurate. Debating the actual morality of the action should be an individual process for each one of us and in fact, it would serve to highlight the horrors of war to every adult playing the game. Younger players on the other hand would be just getting points for bombing what they were briefed to bomb, a "camouflaged weapons factory".
Presently, when people want to keep scores in an online map involving carpet bombing in IL2, they have to "hide" vehicles inside buildings. Since individual buildings might be too much to keep a tally of and present unnecessary load on the PCs, maybe setting area specific targets in the mission builder would be a good alternative. This will also serve the mission builders well in creating all sorts of flexible historical objectives that don't involve dubious morality as well. I think it's easier to calculate a score based on % of bomb load that falls inside a designated area, than calculating a score for each building that's destroyed in a factory complex. It could also be useful for airfield denial missions, where the aim would be to crater the runways, taxiways and parking areas and not just blow up some hangars.
It's also more fair to the player, as cratering the roads between the factories would be hampering their production anyway and bombs were also dropped on runways, whereas a separate tally for each building would only award points for direct hits, something that's not always feasible when you are bombing on a leader's command from a certain position in the formation.
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