Drones

[Anaxogoras]

Fix the warping, exploding bombers first.  I'd rather that the drones keep on flying if their flight lead makes high-g evasive maneuvers, but with no warps.

[Arlo]

Dunno if that's a "fixable" (from the vantagepoint of just a player theorizing how the drone thing was coded). I mean, the drones are coded to follow and form up on the lead but then suddenly the lead is missing a wing and "flying" in a manner that makes it really hard for them to stay formed up. Seems to make sense that since they're programmed to stay with that lead it may lead to some rather funky and erratic behavior on the part of planes left under drone control. Players who seem more on the ball or know how to switch to one of the intact drones seems to be our best answer to that, presently.

[blkmgc]

Fix the warping, exploding bombers first.  I'd rather that the drones keep on flying if their flight lead makes high-g evasive maneuvers, but with no warps.

Drop dial up support, or set a latency limit, and you'll see that go away.

But thats for another topic

[Anaxogoras]

Drop dial up support, or set a latency limit, and you'll see that go away.

But thats for another topic

ummm, I have cable internet, and others with the same see the same thing.  You're saying there's a fix for this on my end?  Please, enlighten me.

[blkmgc]

ummm, I have cable internet, and others with the same see the same thing.  You're saying there's a fix for this on my end?  Please, enlighten me.

Umm, no. I'm saying the ones you see warping are on dial up. Unless it is you, then its between wherever you are and HTC's servers.

[Arlo]

Umm, no. I'm saying the ones you see warping are on dial up. Unless it is you, then its between wherever you are and HTC's servers.

When the lead bomber if falling (generally from missing too many critical pieces to stay in level flight of any kind) and the player controlling the formation doesn't switch planes (whether it's because they don't know how, won't or are AFK) then the drones will still attempt to stay in tight formation (at least for awhile). Due to the critical and sudden departure the lead takes toward the ground (not like just turning tight and shedding one's drones) this can .... and will .... cause the method the auto-bombers use to maintain formation to appear rather supernatural. I'm not of the opinion that it has anything to do with either side's connectivity. And I'm not so sure it's a fixable thang ... being more an observer of the result of code and not a speaker of their language.

[Anaxogoras]

I'm pretty sure it is fixable.  I've played all sorts of boxed sims where your AI wingmen can fly in formation, break away to dogfight, and then form up again.  The problem is that they are drones and have zero AI.

[Arlo]

Pretty sure ... and sure ... are actually two different realities when comparing AHII online MMP buff drone coded oranges to offline boxed sim fighter drone coded apples. I'm not so sure ... you're pretty sure. But neither of us are really sure.

[moot]

Drop dial up support, or set a latency limit, and you'll see that go away.

But thats for another topic

That's extrapolation, not connexion throughput or speed.  Drones should just fly level till the player gets a clue and bails out of the lead, it'd negate the warping advantage (from a defensive pov for the bomber) and the collision risk (from the attacking planes' pov).
Extra drones won't be a fair feature so long as so many players have near-infinite perk point reserves.

[Strip]

Reset the perks......or set a number and take away points above it. Say 500 perks or so? Those that have 1000s wont be worried about it anyway.

Strip

[Swatch]

I also like the idea of being able to at least spread your formation.   This would perform twofold functions.  The first allows for more effective carpet-bombing, the second would help the gunnery.

IIRC guns from drones converge at 600, and if you allow spreading of the formation, then this convergence value could effectively be changed to some extent.

How I'd like to see it implemented:

As a dot command where the spread is a number describing wing length separation.

.spread ###

This number could range from 0 up to 2:
Not putting a number would set the bombers into trail formation (perhaps even allowing bombers to land and rearm )
Less than 0.5 would not be allowed since bombers would potentially crash into each other  [gunning extremely limited]
0.5 has the formation's tips sset at halfspan of the lead bomber (VERY tight formation, may not be realistic.) [tail gunners convergence ~200 allowing for close in pounding of fighters]
1.0 would have the bombers flying tip to tip, but still staggered (close to what they are now) [tail gunners convergence ~600]
2.0 would have the bombers flying at one wingspan outboard from the lead bombers tips (wide area bombing for carpet bombing) [tail gunners convergence ~1000 (NOT 1k)]

Anywho, just my 2 cents!

~Swatch