the NOE type mission you see so often, is not a problem, it is a solution..
fact of the matter is the game is so gamey, that NOE are the end result..
ortherwise what happens? your massive air armada arrives.. 2 or 3 guys up LA7s disregard everyone else and go straight for the goons, or running troops, getting shot down over and or ramming if necessary.. boom, mission fail..
30 guys beaten by 2 or 3 suicidal people..
so Yea, the NOE is a gamy way to take a base, because AH is a gamy game.. well more fairly, it is played gamy.
the NOE 110/goon missions are just the natural evolution of tactics in the game..
what would help?
if you get shot down you have to wait 1 minute to up from the same field again (or you can up immediately from a different one)..
that would eleminate the ability for 1 or 2 suicidal people to defeat an entire mission, and NOEs would no longer be the only really effective way to take a base, and would not be as prevalent.
currently there is absolutly no penalty to for death, you can up and die over and over as fast as you can, so goon drivers are dead meat, no matter how many escorts they have, 1 guy can usually still kill them, sure he dies almost instantly as a result... but so what? hes back in the air in 5 seconds.. that situation happening over and over has lead to what we have now.
people bark and cry for more and more UNREALISTIC features in the game (cant pork fuel to 0, bomb craters dont hinder takeoff/landing... etc etc) then the same people piss and moan when as a result the type of play needed to take bases evolves into a more gamy way of accomplishing that goal..
introduce more realistic ways to capture bases and you will see people use them, make it so you have to do "tard" things to do it, and that's what you will get..
but I still find it less lame to be the NOE mission, than to be the 1 guy dieing 10 times in 2 minutes trying to suicide into the goon... well unless its in a Japanese plane, then it sort of makes sense.. not really.