Not wishing to cause
months of recoding I think the strat system could be tweaked with the arena settings thingymajig....guys! please read the whole post before jumping off at the deep end.
Leave field strat hardness as is with the exception of troop and fuel cells. Make them harder to a minimum of 500Lbs worth of damage. Leave resupply amounts as is IE 8 boxes of sups for a fully porked field. Lengthen strat down time by a 1/4 to a 1/3 again. However, make strat factories and Cities harder. Instead of each building being destroyed by a 250 Lb bomb make it 500Lb. Remember bombing strat factories alone won't accomplish anything down time wise without actually destroying the corresponding target at the field level.
This has a 2 fold effect. The defender knows he's in for a hard time and may wish to defend against it. Either killing the strat destroyer or field porkers. Elements of combat either way. The attacker gets something for their effort.
My own sense of fair play would implement hardening of factories for a fully functioning strat system. Using my own abilities in bombers as a guide line, above average on a good day. I can take any strat factory below 50% easily with 3 passes and Cities are even easier. However, using HTC's guidelines, without coding there is no way to meet this criteria other than hardening.
unless you make sure there is a way it can be defend with out standing guard
Now the dreaded "fuel" strat topic. I'll jump straight in at the deep end. You can guess whats coming I bet. That's right folks........50%. Once those fuel cells are destroyed there's no drop tanks and only 50% fuel. Once the fuel factory is severely damaged it's even longer to regain unless manually resupplied. Blown ya stack at the very thought? Calm down a bit lads...think about it a minute. It wouldn't be and the fuel burn isn't as bad as AH1. Even LA7's could still function as base defence within this remit.
The same would go for eliminating some plane types it would give one side an advantage in the actual fight , not the war game. Look at this fuel proposition objectively. Large fields have 8 fuel cells. medium have 5 and small have 4. The vulnerable fields to fuel porking are only the small fields. Hence suggesting hardening of that particular strat to 500Lbs worth of damage. Even a small field is going to take a considerable amount of effort to disable fuel wise. As a defender it virtually eliminates the straffer suicider. Fuel porkers would have to bring ords or a pack of friends or be good in bombers. However they do it isn't going to stop the defending team using an adjacent field which may well be a medium or large field. A field impractical to be fuel porked.
The other side to that coin is if the fuel is porked and the field captured the new owners would have to resupply before they could roll either the hoard or co-ordinated attack depending how you view it:D Those that were evicted would get breathing space so's to speak. Which I feel fits this guideline.
Any strat design must not have a steam roller effect that once a threshold is crossed , the defending side becomes hopeless. HQ is an easy one. I would leave damage effect and resupply criteria as is but make it weaker. Make it that 1 set of Lancaster's could knock out HQ with 14 big ones....42k's worth.
Anyways lads my idea isn't about killing the fight at the hanger banging level. Neither is it about beating the watermelon outta ya just for the giggle. It's about bring the fight up into the air over strat factories. Hopefully adding another area of conflict for
those that want to participate.
As for actually recoding the strat system .....the skies the limit if the man wants to go that far.
Here endeth my dissertation for an Aces High diploma
