Weighing in again:
I've been thinking about this a little.
I don't have any problem with planes bombing vehicles. I do it myself, although not at tank town, and when I'm defending a VB or airfield I expect it from others. No problem.
What makes this a little different I think is that at tank town now, you don't even have to move to spawn camp. You spawn, turn your gun and open fire. That makes the GV's (evidently) very popular, easy targets for attackers and even more so for bombers. After all, they're all just sitting there in a little pile.
Thats what made me think the whole idea was so lame... similar to vulching but almost more so because the targets are all just sitting there, already up, not moving, waiting to be dead. Making it seem worse was the fact that all of the planes that were up while I was on were from one country, analagous to the hoard attacking an undefended base.
On this map, before the town was put in, the vehicle spawns were near the ends of the valleys leading to the VB's. If you wanted to fight other GV's you had to dive across the center plain to get close enough to shoot at them and as people drove to their various attack points they spread out. This in turn made more work for the attack planes who had to at least fly some distance to get to the next GV and almost no one brought in bombers. They'd have been flying around all day trying to get GV's with 1 bomb at a time. Therfore, while planes did drop bombs on vehicles, it was more difficult for them thus the ground wars were much more fun.
In addition to this, because the planes had to fly around more, there were more defending planes wanting the relatively easy kills on the attackers helping to reduce the bombing problem for the GV's. Now, to bomb at tank town, all you'd have to do is come in high, dive for the spawn, drop, extend back out and up and leave making the job more difficult for defending fighters.
It's really interesting what a town and the relocation of the vehicle spawns did to this map. It totally changed it and, at least in my opinion, for the worse.
I understand people probably like this style of play. While I was thinking about this I finally grasped "whack-a-mole". I like that description and it really fits here.
I'd like to see 2 versions of this map in rotation, one with the town as it is now and one without, as it was, then let the players decide. On the other hand maybe they already have. Maybe HT's got stats that prove it. I don't know.
I hope that better explains my thoughts as I posted this thread. As I've said it really had nothing to do with losing my tank. It had much more to do with the changes that have occured in this map.
