Air Raider (EDF 6)

Air Raider

Primary Role	Support, vehicle operations
Armor	{{{armortype}}}
Mobility	Walking only with normal jump and dodging roll, drastically improved speed with the provision of vehicles (i.e. tanks, APCs)
Weapons	Limpet guns, strike drones, guard drones, airstrikes (exclusive to past and good future segments) and support equipment
Special Attributes	Three weapon slots + Dedicated vehicle slot
Defensive Move	Roll

For the Air Raider class from EDF 2025 and EDF 4.1, see Air Raider (2025). For the weirdo in a welding mask from Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders From Planet Space, see Air Raider (IfPS). For the past version of this dude, see Air Raider (EDF 5).

Description

The Air Raider is the support class in Earth Defense Force 6. Depending on the version, the Air Raider starts in different places. As per usual, he cannot summon vehicles or EDF5-styled air strikes while underground; Additionally, while in the "Present" (Ruined World) he is cut off from summoning airstrikes or vehicles, except for the Depth Crawler for some reason.

"The delivery service really fell off that much, huh?"

Most key mechanics of the air raider have not been or are only slightly altered from EDF 5, so for more information it is highly recommended to go there.

Key Mechanics

The Air Raider remains as the most complex class to play by far with a significant amount of key mechanics required to utilize him to his full potential. Despite this complexity, Air Raiders still remain as a very valuable class for a number of reasons.

Reload credits and timed reloads

At the heart of the Air Raider is the reload credit system, which is used to replenish some of his strikes and his vehicle requests. All such abilities require a set amount of credits, which are earned by defeating enemies. There is no numeric display of how many credits the Air Raider has or which enemies award what, but it does not take long to get a feel for it. Every enemy killed in a mission, be it by the Air Raider, other players, NPCs or scripted airstrikes, counts towards every Air Raider's reload credits; this even applies if he is downed in multiplayer. Every Air Raider earns the full credit allocation; there is no way for one Air Raider to reduce the allocation of another.

Credits are earned simultaneously for everything that uses the system; each one gets the full credit allocation, it is not divided among them and does not require the strike or vehicle to be equipped. If a strike or vehicle drop is already fully reloaded, any further credits earned while it is full are lost.

Once the full allocation of credits for something has been reached, the Air Raider will receive a notification with a speaker icon on-screen from whichever character is responsible for the particular thing that is ready.

New for EDF 6 are the drones. They, unlike conventional air ordnance, only require the drone's return to be ready to be sent out again. This provides them a significant advantage over airstrikes in terms of reload time, though they carry much less strike power and are better suited for fighting singular targets. They can effectively function as Limpet Gun replacements for a majority of the game as they are also usable underground. Additionally, this allows them to be used right from the very beginning all the way to the end of the game, while conventional airstrikes can only be used in the Past and Future segments.

It should be noted that there is a timing difference between the three: a reload credit based strike cannot be deployed again until the effect of the previous use of the strike ends, but can earn reload credits again the instant it is initiated and the bar empties. A timer-based strike, on the other hand, will only start to reload when the effect of the previous strike concludes. This means in a target-rich environment (for example, Mission 37) it is possible for a reload credit strike to be ready faster than one that uses even the shortest timer. Additionally, drones cannot be utilized until the strike is concluded and it has returned to the user, which depending on the model's flight speed means that it could be a long time until the drones are ready to go again.

On the other hand, if the beacon for a timed strike is somehow destroyed, it will continue firing while simultaneously starting its reload. This can result in having two of these strikes out at the same time: this is particularly common with the Autocannon / Minigun / Vulcan strikes when attacking Cosmonauts, as the beacon will be deleted if the strike destroys the piece of armor it is attached to.

The Air Raider receives a starting credit allocation that is enough for all strikes to be deployed for the first time the instant the mission begins. All of the Air Raider's vehicles begin a mission with varying amounts of their credits filled, such as the Armored Vehicle Grape, which starts at 100%. The percentage of credits a vehicle starts off with is listed in their respective descriptions.

Vehicle deployment

Summoning a vehicle once the player has enough credits is a matter of selecting it and throwing a smoke grenade to mark the desired drop location. A Transport Aircraft Noble will fly onto the map after a short time, hover briefly, and then release a large shipping container over the marker, which will break open and deploy the vehicle wherever it lands. The transport cannot be targeted by enemies and is invincible, so there is no risk of losing a vehicle drop by requesting it in a "hot" landing area. Do note that vehicles cannot be summoned in the Ruined World segments.

Similarly to the previous game, the vehicle is not selectable in the normal weapon inventory, and it is not deployed using a normal grenade throw. Instead, pressing the bottom face button on the controller (Z on keyboard) when a vehicle is ready to deploy will trigger an animation where the Air Raider throws a grenade a short distance in front of himself. Unlike the previous game this is not a full grenade throw with a variable throw distance, but the player can control how far it goes to a limited extent by moving the camera position, as the grenade is thrown with a fixed amount of force at the middle of the screen. As with the Ranger's MG-series grenades, if the Air Raider is moving when he throws the grenade, its trajectory will be altered with respect to his motion.

Careful placement of the marker is important to avoid wasted credits. For example, if the marker is placed next to a building, it is quite likely the vehicle will end up on the roof. The game actively attempts to avoid this by having the container bounce once when it lands, but this can just result in the box breaking open in the air and the vehicle landing upside-down or sideways. If a vehicle is on a roof the best way to get it down is to destroy the building, though this requires the Air Raider to have a suitable weapon equipped. New for EDF 5 is that vehicles have a strong self-righting action and will often flip over of their own accord or when re-entered, even if completely upside-down. Walking vehicles are not subject to this and cannot fall over, they will just end up standing with one foot on thin air.

The dropship seems to use the same AI as Porters, and so in areas surrounded by skyscrapers may drop a vehicle in the middle of a road rather that at one side as requested.

The number of vehicles allowed in play at once is limited: each Air Raider can have three vehicles. Summoning a further vehicle will make the one that has been unoccupied the longest explode when the container for the new one opens.

Using a vehicle requires the character to step inside one of the one or more glowing blue circles around it and pressing the revive / enter vehicle button; if the vehicle has multiple positions, there will be multiple circles corresponding the the crew positions. If there is no circle, the vehicle is either occupied or the class being played as cannot get into any of the vehicle's available positions. While in a vehicle, any weapon reloads in progress are paused, though the Air Raider's reload credits accumulate as normal. A Wing Diver's energy will also regenerate as normal, and because the mechanics do not account for her unique off-hand reloading, the weapon she does not have selected will continue reloading normally if it is a reloading type. The crew of a vehicle retain their hitboxes while inside it even though there is no way for them to take damage; this means that Life-regenerating devices will heal their hitpoints and the vehicle's at the same time.

It is still possible to pick up Items in a vehicle: unlike the previous game, the pickup area is not limited to a small part of the vehicle and is instead defined by a large circle around it, as with a running Ranger. The exceptions to this are the BMX10 Proteus and Gigantic Unloader Barga, which cannot pick up items at all.

Vehicles can be healed by any life-replenishing device, but all vehicle weapons other than Barga's fists and feet have limited ammunition that cannot be replenished in the field. The only way to replenish ammunition for a vehicle is to summon a new one.

Enemies tend to ignore unoccupied vehicles, though they may attack them accidentally while trying to hit something else. In addition, Colonists and Cosmonauts may continue to attack an abandoned vehicle if it was previously occupied and they did not see the driver exit it. Occupied vehicles seem to have a slightly higher aggro priority than dismounted characters. Furthermore, unoccupied vehicles are subject to attacks from guard drones on occasion; It is a good idea to be mindful of this so the vehicle remains in good health and ammunition of the drones are not wasted.

Target marking

The Air Raider has multiple methods at his disposal for designating targets, some for off-map artillery strikes while others allow designation of targets for other players using lock-on weapons. Strikes provide their own method of marking the target; either a smoke grenade in the same way as vehicle drops, a provided Laser Guide Kit (which does not function as a normal Laser Guide Kit and can only be used to direct that specific strike) or a special gun that launches a marker.

Prolonged strikes using the Guide Kit may require direction throughout their duration, or benefit from it; the Bulge Laser can be redirected at any time with the Guide Kit or left in place. Missile strikes will fire the missiles so they fly over the map at a fixed altitude and the Guide Kit is required to guide them down to the ground; if this is not done, the missiles will keep on flying straight out of the map and the strike will be wasted.

Outside of strikes are the normal guidance devices. The Air Raider's Laser Guide Kits and Guide Beacon Guns are far more than just pointers; they multiply the lock-on range and lock speed of any guided weapon, and can allow a normally multi-target weapon to lock all of its attacks onto a single target, allowing area suppression weapons to bring down powerful enemies they would otherwise barely scratch. The lock target from a Laser Guide Kit is not fixed and can be moved by the Air Raider at any time; any missiles already locked on to it will shift their target accordingly, which can allow for aim adjustments on a moving target or sweeping the aim of a group of missiles to hit multiple enemies. If the Air Raider ceases to aim the Guide Kit, any missiles locked on to it will act as if the lock target still exists for a brief period, then lose target and continue moving in whatever direction they are currently moving in, though this can result in them hitting the target anyway.

A Guide Kit or Guide Beacon is required to designate targets for certain powerful Fencer weapons, specifically Haytal Multiple Missiles and the Phoenix and Leviathan: without one, they cannot be fired at all.

Guide Beacon Guns can affix a lock-on designation Beacon to a fixed position or an enemy; they are perfectly accurate and like the Guide Kit are fitted with a zoom mode for precision targeting, and have a long range. Placed Beacons last forever if left to their own devices, even if the Air Raider who placed them is downed, though they will vanish if the thing they are affixed to is destroyed, lasting until a corpse or vehicle wreck is deleted by the game engine. At any time the Air Raider can reload the Beacon Gun, a five-second procedure, which will delete all currently placed Beacons. They offer an inferior boost to the Guide Kit and generate a target at a fixed point that will only move if the Beacon does, but have the advantage that the Air Raider can place multiple Guide Beacons at the same time (with all but one of them) and that they do no have to continue aiming to designate the target after the Beacons are placed. They also allow him to single-target his own multi-target guided weapons like the Naegling Self-Propelled Rocket Launcher. Guide Beacons can also be affixed to vehicles and player characters, enabling gleefully stupid plans involving, say, firing Leviathans at a hidden target using a Guide Beacon attached to a Wing Diver.

When a weapon is being guided or locking on, small squares will appear in the Air Raider's HUD: a red square indicates a lock-on weapon trying to acquire a target or a missile from a strike following a current aiming point, while a green square indicates a lock.

Assist devices, Decoys and generators

The Air Raider's arsenal of support equipment includes special deployable devices and guns that can heal, increase the defensive or offensive capabilities of allies, distract his foes and even generate forcefields that can block the shots and in some cases the movement of enemies.

An assist device will affect all player characters and friendly NPCs in its radius of effect. The life-recovering items also affect all enemies in their area of effect, but since the radius is small, this is very seldom a disadvantage in practice. Power assist devices will not affect the damage dealt by turrets, bombs or mines, or by any form of Air Raider strike. Guard assist devices will not affect the durability of Decoys, though Life Vendors will work on them. Neither device provides any kind of bonus to forcefields.

Assist devices have a fixed duration of effect, after which they will disappear. Their behavior during reloads has changed: now, reloading does delete placed devices rather than having them last until their duration expires, but on the plus side, reloading an assist device no longer requires it to be equipped.

The life devices, because their duration is noted in seconds, appear useless when their stat card is examined: what use, the starting player might ask, is a device that only regenerates 0.097 health per second? The answer is that this boost is provided not for each second but for each frame, and thus 60 times per second.

Power and Guard assist devices now show their effect as a percentage rather than a multiplier value. They do not stack their effects if several are placed, so there is no point in placing more than one in a specific area. If for some reason the Air Raider brings two Power or Guard devices with different multipliers, only the better multiplier is applied. Life recovery devices, on the other hand, do stack their effects. Overlapping forcefield generators will have to be penetrated one at a time.

The forcefield generators create glowing walls of various shapes that can absorb a set amount of damage. Allies can fire through the field (though their splash damage from explosive weapons will reduce its hitpoints, even the normally harmless splash damage weapons of NPCs), while it will block shots from enemies. It should be noted that the laser from a Guide Kit now can pass through a forcefield (unlike in 2025 and 4.1), though the device's description is still incorrect and it actually will stop enemy explosions from dealing splash damage though it, just not allied ones. The precise method of identifying the allegiance of an explosion is a closely guarded secret of the EDF.

Enemies cannot walk through most forcefields, though large physical attacks like charging Ants or a Deroy's lunging stab attack may pass through them. Unlike assist devices, generators will last until their hitpoints are exhausted and are not on a timer; however, they will all vanish if the system is reloaded.

Decoy devices seem to function by having a much higher targeting priority than NPCs or player characters. They work like a hybrid of an assist device and a forcefield, having their own hitpoints and a timer, but unlike assist devices will remain in effect even if they are reloaded. They take up an equipment slot with something that is not a weapon, but can be valuable if used correctly. Normal Decoys are placed and then activated manually, while the DLC "Pure Decoys" are fired from a modified Limpet Gun and can thus be placed at a distance; Pure Decoys have twice the duration of the longest-operating normal Decoy though only one-third the durability of the lowest-ranked normal one. It is more than a little amusing watching a Colonist attempting to target a Pure Decoy that is attached to its own elbow. It should, however, be noted that the aggro alterations to allow for "stealth" missions also reduce the distance at which enemies can aggro to a Decoy, making them somewhat less useful. In particular, one classic tactic of using a helicopter to place a Decoy on top of a Transport Ship to distract the enemies it spawns now seldom works.

Uniquely, Decoys will take damage from normal shots fired by NPC allies, though allies will not deliberately target them. Enemies with grapple attacks treat a Decoy like a vehicle, taking a fixed amount of damage per bite attack but not being picked up.

All devices will adhere to vehicles and travel with them. Forcefield generators seem to have lost much of their old tendency to fall off moving vehicles, and so are more effective when placed on them. Assist guns can also be fired directly at NPCs or player characters and will adhere to them, providing the boost for as long as they are active.

Limpet Gun functionality

For first-time players there is often some puzzlement as to why these weapons do not appear to do anything but attach flashing lights to enemies. The Limpet Guns fire one or more sticky projectiles that must be detonated manually using the alt-fire button; reloading them makes all currently planted projectiles disappear, and is intended as a safety measure if one of them has attached itself to something the Air Raider does not want to blow up for some reason.

Another point of note is that often only one explosive Limpet Gun projectile attached to a specific building or low-level enemy will actually detonate, as the game engine sometimes deletes all the others as the target switches from its normal model to its destroyed model. This is particularly common with small structures and high-level Limpet Guns.

Suppress Guns

The Suppress Gun replaces the Wireguns from the previous game, giving the Air Raider his only ordinary projectile weapon: this is functionally a shotgun with an extremely short effective range even when fully upgraded, after which the projectiles simply disappear. Since it is so lacking in range, it is no longer useful against flying enemies, and more suited to emergency defense, particularly freeing the Air Raider from the grasp of a Crimson Ant.

Rolling

The key to moving around quickly without a vehicle and avoiding enemy attacks is the dodge roll move, executed by pressing the jump button while moving left or right at any angle. This not only speeds the Air Raider up slightly, it also has the effect of flattening his hitbox, meaning many enemy attacks will pass harmlessly over him, and has some invincible frames. A rolling Air Raider is a much smaller target than a Fencer or Wing Diver.

Weapon Classes

Including his vehicles, the Air Raider has the most weapons of any class in the entire series.

Request Artillery Units

Artillery, such as howitzers, mortars and cannons remain relatively unchanged. Strikes in the Artillery category consist of either the middle-of-the-road Mortar, an area-effect Howitzer or a more focused Cannon. All Artillery strikes are based on a Reload Credit requirement: the Mortars have the lowest, with Cannon about four times more costly and Howitzers the most expensive. All types of Artillery strike use a thrown smoke grenade as a marker for the midpoint of the strike area, making them a little imprecise: they also take a fair amount of time between being signalled and the rounds actually arriving in the target area, meaning some lead must be applied to moving targets.

These strikes will have two stats that define a radius: one is the overall effect area ("attack radius"), the other the effect area of each individual shot ("blast area"). The red marker that appears on the ground and in the minimap when the strike is deployed is the attack radius, and all shots fired will be randomized within this area. Just being outside the red area therefore does not necessarily mean the player character is safe, since a shot that lands at the very edge of the red area can have a blast that extends well outside it. For example, the Gigantic Howitzer's map marker is 160 metres in radius, but the 60 metre blast radius for each shot means in theory it could deal damage up to 220 metres from the location of the grenade marker.

Mortar strikes are very cheap and deal more damage per shot than the Howitzer, but have smaller splash and effect areas, sometimes missing targets in the marked strike zone entirely. Howitzer strikes deal fairly low damage with an enormous splash area (up to 60m per round) which means that any given target will tend to receive damage multiple times during the strike, and are best against groups of low-level enemies such as Ants and Spiders, while the Cannon strikes fire double the number of shots with less than half the splash radius, but can deal up to almost 60,000 damage per hit, more than enough to bring down a Colonist on Inferno. They are very well suited to killing boss-type giant insect enemies.

Mortar Drones, being drones, can be used where normal Artillery cannot, though their effectiveness underground is unsurprisingly subpar when the ceilings are low. The player uses these by tossing a marker similar to the normal smoke grenades, though this one looks more like a ball of light and is much more predictable in their trajectory. Once the marker lands, the respective mortar drone will stop following the player and slowly rise into the air while firing a barrage of projectiles in an arch, bombarding the general area around the marker. Heavy Mortar drones have a larger blast radius per explosive, but still cannot be compared to standard artillery strikes. Even the regular Mortar drones are slow to return, so take care to not stray too far if you plan to use it again soon.

Request Gunships

The "Gunship" category of strikes from the unfeasibly heavily armed aircraft DE 202 include a broad range of strike options. All of them use a beacon gun marker and time-based reload: the reload will not start until the marker for the previous strike has been deleted by the game engine. This happens when the strike has concluded, but it will sometimes be deleted sooner: one example is if it is attached to a piece of a Cosmonaut's armor and that piece is destroyed during the strike.

Autocannon strikes, including the Minigun and Vulcan, fire a prolonged burst of gunfire onto a single target zone with a 10-18 meter radius depending on the variant. The fire from this strike can penetrate multiple enemies, but does not damage buildings. Per-shot damage is low, but the whole burst deals significant damage and the reload speed is extremely fast, less than 2 seconds when fully upgraded, allowing this to be used as a basic weapon for the Air Raider. If the marker is attached to an enemy, the burst will track it, making it well-suited to attacking highly mobile enemies: the flipside is that it will remain attached to the corpse of an enemy it kills and knock it around if it is small, potentially harming allies or the Air Raider himself. Targeting the ground will prevent the system tracking a specific target, but can be useful if the player intends for the strike to remain in place and suppress a particular area.

105mm Rapid-Fire Cannon strikes are similar to the Autocannon strikes, but fire a smaller number of high-powered shots. These function like rounds from an Epsilon, with both a piercing effect and the ablity to damage buildings. They affect an area around double the radius, but this plus their increased power comes at the cost of having about five times the reload time.

120mm Neutralize Cannon attacks are essentially a downward-aimed shotgun blast, firing all projectiles at the same time in a broad spread. The weapon lacks any piercing ability and cannot destroy buildings, meaning it is actually fairly safe to use it even to escape from being bitten as the enemy's body will usually stop the projectiles. Unlike the prior strikes which are all single-shot, the 120mm Neutralize Cannon has a "magazine" of 7-15 shots per reload. If the player desires, they can replenish this before it is fully depleted by hitting reload in the normal way.

Unfortunately, because the origin point of the strike is high in the air, it will be blocked if the player tries to use it under any overhead obstruction such as a Transport Ship, and the Mothership will block attacks from this weapon across more or less the entire map.

The 150mm Cannon fires extremely powerful single shots: as with the Neutralize cannon, these strikes have a "magazine" which ranges from 6 to 20 beacons per reload when fully upgraded. As in 2025, the 150mm Cannon claims to have no area of effect, but actually hits a small area surrounding the impact point, meaning it can damage multiple enemies. However, the weapon is primarily useful for dealing with high-HP point targets. Shots from the 150mm Cannon have piercing capabilities and can destroy buildings.

For the normal variants, the beacon will track a moving target until the shell is fired, after which, even though the beacon will visibly still move with the target, the shot will impact where the enemy was at the time of firing. This can cause it to miss agile enemies such as Spiders and Battle Drones.

The variants with Lapis in their name are slightly weakened and have a lengthened reload, but allow more shots per reload, have a higher rate of fire for the beacon gun, the interval between deploying the beacon and the shot being fired is shortened, and the velocity of the shell itself is increased. The triple and quad variants, meanwhile, fire multiple projectiles at once, at the cost of a longer reload, fewer beacons per "magazine," and decreased per-projectile damage.

The 180mm Cannon and 190mm Cannon are essentially an even more powerful 150mm Cannon shot, with a larger impact area and high damage, at the cost of a reload time that is roughly doubled.

Rocket Cannon strikes differ from the others in that they fire a high-explosive rocket rather than a gun round. As with the 120mm Neutralize Cannon, since they lack a piercing effect they will be blocked if the target is under a Teleportation Ship or the Mothership. Unlike the Neutralize Cannon, the Rocket Cannon is able to damage buildings. The level 108 T2HS Rocket Cannon introduced in DLC2 is an oddity in that it actually has identical stats to the existing level 86 T2 Rocket Cannon: the gimmick here is that the T2HS has the firing delay and landing speed of a Lapis-type 150mm Cannon strike.

Drones are the newest addition to this category. They function similarly to most strikes, launching off towards an enemy in a similar manner to the Miniguns. Each drone is launched individually and they do not "reload", instead only having to return to be ready to fire. This gives them one of the highest firerates of any strike. Drones come in many shapes and sizes; There are drones with shotguns, assault rifles, machine guns, snipers, Iron Shot (steel projectiles that are shot at enemies in a similar manner to a roundshot from an old cannon), tasers and probably more. One must be careful when aiming with these drones, however, as most gunship drones' beacons will simply fall down instead of despawning once reaching their max range, causing drones to make their way to where the missed marker landed rather than staying nearby, potentially leaving the player defenseless if they miss too much.

An Air Raider effectively using minigun drones to attack a Colonist.

Machine Gun drones fire a barrage of bullets they vary in duration, chasing their target even whilst firing. Light Machine Gun drones specialize in movement speed and have a much higher rate of fire. Heavy Machine Gun drones are slower but either deal more damage per shot, or fire more bullets per drone, and often allows more drones to be deployed at once.

Stun Copters are unique among Gunship-type drones, having a relatively high movement speed and a beacon range on-par with the Night Copter sniper drones. These Stun Copter drones show very high damage in their descriptions, but this is the total damage they do over the course of their attack. In reality, once the drone tethers to an enemy, it takes a rather long time to reach the damage listed. This makes them suitable as support weapons, adding consistent DPS and sometimes hitstun depending on the target. However, similar to the Night Copter series, beacons from this series of drones do not fall down after reaching their max range, and instead despawn to instantly give the player another shot. In an open sky, this makes these drones far less risky to use against high-up or flying targets.

Request Bombers

When times get tough, the EDF gets tougher.

A broad selection of airstrikes carried out by one or more aircraft, with a strike for just about any conceivable situation. The attack itself can consist of explosive bombs, napalm, or strafing runs with piercing gunfire. Gun strikes do not deal friendly fire damage.

These strikes use a new placement method: rather than a grenade, pressing the trigger activates an aim mode where the camera detaches from the Air Raider and shifts to an isometric overhead view. The orientation of this overhead view is relative to the direction the Air Raider was facing when he initiated the strike. The player then controls either the midpoint or one end of the strike marker, moving it with the left analog stick while the right can be used to re-orient the strike marker around the point being moved. This means there are no longer any strikes that are specifically aimed across the map, as the player can do this with any strike they wish to. If the strike marker is controlled from one end, this is the direction the aircraft will come from, if not the marker's default position will have the aircraft coming in the direction the Air Raider is facing. The strike is called when the player releases the trigger: if they wish to cancel after bringing up the aim mode, they can switch weapons in the same manner as aborting a grenade throw.

With strikes that are the entire length of the map such as the first Phobos strike, they cannot be moved vertically in their starting orientation: to move them in this way, they have to be rotated first.

Airstrikes state their accuracy in terms of an "impact error" measured in meters: this defines the radius from the aim point (the dead-center of the marker line) in which a given projectile may land. This rating is similar to the concept of "circular error probable" (CEP) used as a measure of accuracy in real life, though in the game it is more "circular error absolute" since bombs will never exceed this radius. As a result, the straight line of the air strike marker is not a totally accurate reflection of where damage will be dealt: just being on the very edge of it will not necessary avoid damage from the strike: the marker actually indicates what the strike would look like if all projectiles impacted with zero deviation from the midline.

Of note is that enemies no longer aggro to bombers flying overhead, removing their functionality as a distraction in addition to a method of dealing damage.

Combat Bomber KM6 calls in one or more fighter-bombers to carry out a strafing run on the targeted area. Each gun run of the strike deals damage in an area 8 meters wide and the projectiles can penetrate multiple targets while descending (and sometimes even have a round damage the same target multiple times while passing through it), but do not damage structures.

High-Speed Bomber KM6 F offers further strafing run options: these offer less area coverage, but more focused damage, with individual shots more powerful than comparable level KM6 strikes in most cases. The principle advantage of KM6F is speed, however: they have a significantly lower reload credit requirement, and the aircraft itself arrives and completes its run extremely quickly.

Combat Bomber Kamuy offers a selection of fairly cheap single-plane strikes with high-explosive bombs, with good area coverage, high damage for their level and only a short wait between calling for the strike and the aircraft arriving.

Heavy Bomber Vesta calls in either one or two bombers to perform a napalm strike on the designated area. The napalm functions like other weapons of the type, creating an area of flames that lasts a significant time (a rather meagre 16 seconds for the first model, but 40-60 for later variants) and deals continuous damage to any enemy in contact with it. Also like these weapons, Vesta's napalm will stick to any surface it contacts: any bomb that strikes an enemy directly will ignite a fire on that enemy that moves around with it. This means it is generally best to aim Vesta's strikes ahead of enemies and force them to walk through it. The randomization of Vesta's bomb drops does, however, mean that it is rare for the flames to form a continuous wall, and a few enemies will often slip through gaps between patches of napalm.

The weapon description is a little misleading: Vesta's damage stat is the total damage an enemy would receive if it were in contact with one of the fires for its entire duration, and the per-hit damage and DPS are actually quite mediocre. Vesta also has the disadvantage that even if its reload credits fully refill, it cannot be called in again until the napalm from the previous strike burns out, leading to long downtimes with the longer-duration versions. It is most effective at dealing with Ants, and is even capable of stunlocking Gold Ants.

Heavy Bomber Phobos, which includes the Scout Bomber, is essentially a more powerful Kamuy, with a larger reload credit requirement to match, as well as a longer delay between calling in the strike and the bomber or bombers arriving. While it has a few single-plane strikes similar to Kamuy's (though vastly greater in effect), Phobos also has the multi-plane strikes of the old Charon Tactical Bomber with up to four planes, the old Wave Attack (now called Plan 10), and Bomber Midnight's Cluster Hit, with an even more powerful level 102 Cluster attack accessible in DLC 1. Phobos Z is the high-powered variant used for the final two non-DLC strikes, dropping bombs with high damage and greatly improved splash radius: the second strike is a fan-shaped four-bomber run where all four bombers will hit the initial aiming point with their first drop and the first few bombs deal overlapping damage.

Drones also have several models in this category, with weapons like the G3 Portable Attack Aircraft and B1 Portable Bomber to launch small-scale strikes. Due to their low altitude flying, they are best suited for dealing with small clusters of bugs. Unlike the other bomber strikes, drone strikes do not present the ability to independently modify the direction of their attack, instead following the direction of the player. They can be aimed farther away by looking up. Most strikes emulate their larger counterparts; For example, the Portable Attack Aircraft series deploys drones to strafe an area, similar to a KM6.