Crude and simplistic...

[Zigrat]

yes i understand but your idea makes the battle wholly strategic, not tactical. in your game the front is only influenced by strategic strikes, but you cannot attack the troops on the front directly to stop them. you need a combination of both. like falcon 4. but with massive multiplay and ww2 equipment.

[Serapis]

Zigrat, hegemon's suggestion would incorporate a tactical element, that could even be instituted with the current "strat" system:

 

 I like the idea a lot, but I think that you should still be required to get troops on the ground at a location in order to capture it, strat stuff included. Airpower alone does not take territory, you have to have people on the ground.
The_hegemon

Using both a strategic weakening process and a land capture model would multiple the variety of missions flown in the MA. Of course, you could then adjust issues like bombing accuracy from 20K feet w/level bombers to further make a role for a diver-bomber element against bridges, etc.

Great ideas all, and I believ a great direction for the game if it is ever adopted.

Charon

[ft]

Now that would kick a**.

And how to implement it? Here's an idea. Not easy by any means and very hard to find a balance but I'm hoping to get a brainstorming session going for version 4.72 or so here.  

Make the front a vector based line. Give all strat structures a "pressure value". Have the strat structure "push" on each segment of the the front with it's pressure value divided by the distance squared. Every five or ten minutes calculate the pressure vector on each segment of the frontline and move it accordingly.

Strat points just captured would have a zero value. Attacking strat points decrease their value.

In the rear, there are factories, cities and HQs. These have logistic values. These are then distributed along the infrastructure, giving each road/railroad node and each port a logistics value. For each strat target, these logistics values divided by the square of the distance are again added up, giving the rebuild rate (value increase rate) for the strat targets. Airfields could have logistics values as well, making it possible to transport logistic points from a rear field to a front field in a transport. Front caving in after a number of bridges were divebombed, cutting off the roads? Get an air bridge going!

If we can have some kind of graphic representation of the front line, bombing or strafing the front line might be made to change how sensitive that segment of the front is to the "pressure" to model morale of the troops.

Overall morale could add or decrease from the value of all strat targets. Bombing factories and cities would decrease the logistic support at the source. When the logistics reach the low end of the scale, you might limit the ammo/fuel/ordnace available.

Off the top of my head over a cup of coffee. What do you all think? If you think "now THAT will take years to implement", there's no need to say it. We all know. But let us for once dream up a vision together of what things can be like in a distant future instead of shooting down everyone else's ideas as per usual?

Cheers,
  /ft

[SKurj]

Read the thread once again....

Troops are required.  We cannot implement AI vehicles etc Zig, so its not even an option worth considering at this point.  BUT troops can be dropped to supporta facility under attack, and troops must be dropped to capture a facility.  

Check out my suggestion about city captures

SKurj

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[Fester']

have player spawned ground vehicles from adjacent bases spawn along the front lines