I spoke of this in the MA one night, I will re-iterate it here. Each country has a particular 'feel'. That 'feel' is largely determined by the character, playstyle and personality of the individuals that comprise that country regularly. It has been since I've played AH and continues to be Bishland's first priority to take fields. Taking fields is paramount even at the expense of fun, fights and surviving. While this may be attractive to some people, especially buffers , GV'ers and pork n' auger types it is not attractive to your upper echelon fighters jocks and new players who really just want to fight air to air and could care less about the land-grab game.
Compound this land-grab-centric playstyle with some weird pre-pubescent ostrasization of anyone and everyone who attempts to join Bish to help out and you have a recipe for disaster. There are two things Bish can do collectively to remedy the situation.
1) Stop being salamanders, stop accusing everyone of being spies who decides to switch from their regular country to help you for an evening. Take is from someone who fights you all the time, you need all the help you can get, especially in the fighter pilot dept.
2) Here's your new mantra, live by it, breathe by it, tatoo it onto your forheads and your numbers probelm will soon be rectified...
"Fly for the fights not for the fields!"
The single biggest distinction between the Rooks, Knights and Bishops is quite succinctly this...Rooks and Knights preceive and treat the land-grab aspect of AH as the superfluous back-drop to the far more important air to air combat aspect. Bishops treat and perceive air to air combat as the superfluous back-drop to the far more important land-grab game. This may seem like a subtle difference but it has profound implications from individual egagements with and for Bishops all the way up to the entire war itself and how it plays out and 'feels'. People like myself who have played these games for well over a decade are privvy to these subtle nuances and are affected by them and make our playtime decisions largely based on them.
The incredible irony for Bishops is that they are so land-grab-centric and have such a reluctance and/or disdain for actual air to air combat that they lack the skills necessary to hold onto their precious land. So, in a very real way, in a funny twist of logic, if Bishops collectively decide to become more fight-centric like Rooks and Knits they will actually become better at holding and keeping their land and as an ancillary benefit their numbers and quality will improve proportionately.
Zazen
