Originally posted by Guppy35
snip
I always thought one of the bigger mistakes AW made was making all the fields capturable. It seemed to be the time when the mindset changed to 'winning it all' in that game, when previously it never entered the equation.
prior to this change, you knew that there were always safer fields to regroup and ounterattack from as there was a layer of uncapturable fields that even if damaged still posed a threat so the odds of all fields being totally wrecked was minimal.
Dan/Slack
Yeah, that's exactly why we ended up not only having some uncapturable fields for each country, but also making "front line" fields (as in the border fields when the terrain was in default load mode) easier to damage than "middle" and "deep" fields that got progressively harder to damage (more ordnance per object required).
That last year or so of AW, the setup we arrived at that IMO worked the best was the one we used in the RR Large ETO arena - each country had 3 fields that were not only uncaptureable but were actually undamageable no matter how many eggs they got dropped on 'em. Even if one country got gangbanged really bad, they still were able to get good planes in the air without being totally vulched. (Keep in mind this was in an arena that would only allow 200 or 250 people max - in the current "one for all" AH model you''d need more than just 3 fields because there WOULD be enough numbers available to gangvulch that many fields....I'd guess 6 per side would be more like it in a large terrain here.)
That helped a lot. There was a constant ebb and flow of ownership in the "front line" areas, with one country occasionally making concerted attacks farther into one or both of the other countries. But when a country got ganged on and beat back to their last 3 fields, there was really not much more torment that could be dealt out to them, so the other 2 countries would always turn on each other like feeding sharks will when the food runs out
We also did stuff like make it harder to capture the more you penetrated by making it take more troops, etc.
The idea I had that I was proudest of was in the Allies vs Axis arena. There we had the 2 country conundrum - when one side would conspire to really load the numbers up they could quickly wipe the other off the map. So, I created zones based on logical logistics.
This was a "historic map" terrain, featuring England France and Germany. I considered France to be the middle ground, and wanted to allow either side to attack the other's homeland, but make it hard enough that the fighting stayed hot and heavy in France most of the time.
So......each side could get some planes only in their homeland.
For the Allies, this was the B17 and A26 bombers, unlimited from England, but not available on the continent. Players that wanted to carpet bomb had to be willing to fly a while.
For the Axis, it was the Me262. They were available in Germany, but only so many per 24 hour period. You could take one from Germany, and keep it all day long so long as you stayed alive and RTBed for fuel successfully - but, once killed, crashed, or landed in France, you "lost" that plane for the Axis that day. I played with the total number available per day based on what kind of numbers of players were using the arena at any given time. What I was shooting for was to allow them to have a few jets in order to counter any huge buff raids the Allies might mount, but not enough to dominate the F2F action.
Then, each team lost additional planes the farther they advanced the front. They could get B25s and Ju88s in France, but not in the other team's homeland. They each also lost some premium fighters in the other team's homeland (this varied due to whether we were in "early war" "middle war" or "late war" mode since the overall plane sets varied according to date of availability).
The result worked pretty damned well. When we started this 2 country concept it was common we'd get our chains yanked to come reset the arena because one side or the other had rolled it up. Once I got this setup fine tuned that never happened not even once - even when one side would really outnumber the hell out of the other, the dwindling resources that I attributed to "logistics" worked to slow the large side down enough that the other side could cope. The fights stayed mostly in France, and no matter what everybody had a fighting chance.
Oh well, just some old crusty centavos thrown in for consideration.
culero
