You are looking at suppression in a very microscopic light. Instead refer to the maxim "Divide and Conquer." You want to isolate the base--not make it a beacon for reinforcements.
Nah, that's just beyond the scope of this discussion - you're talking about which FHs to bomb, not whether to bomb them at all, or when. And it depends on the situation. If a base is already isolated by geography it's best to hammer it directly, and if it has several large and medium fields nearby, isolating it is doomed to failure.
When you destroy the FHs at your target base, it forces every enemy fighter to launch from further away, and gain altitude and energy. Since fights naturally progress towards the deck, your attacker's energy will be spent by the time reinforcements arrive.
Not true. The closer base always has the advantage, because as you mention below, time is everything; if you have time, you have alt. A defender can up, HO one attacker, die, and be up again inside 20 seconds; even if he only kills one attacker every 3-4 times he ups, he's doing more damage than a pilot who kills 2-3 enemies but is out of the fight for 10+ minutes when he dies. If the defenders manage to gain a numerical edge it's very difficult to lose it, beause at any given time half or more of the attackers are in transit. If the hangers are flat and the attackers have a CV a mile offshore, the reverse is true - the attackers can both gang up on defenders and climb at their leisure when the defenders are dead.
If the VH and ack are destroyed, there is no way any threat is upping from the base in question.
True, to some degree, but it's easier and just as effective (see above) to take out the hangars. Give me two other good buff pilots and a formation of Lancs and we can flatten a small base in one run and the town in a second (one if the angle permits one run for both). Two or three fighters can deack a port or V-base, but not an airfield and town, and some of them are likely to be crippled or shot down in the process.
Base captures don't (or really, really shouldn't) fail because of the "sole La7 that ups" but because attrition works against the attacker,
Sometimes killing two goons is enough, if it's a long flight. But more impotant, precisely: it's all about attrition. But why does attrition work against the attacker? Because he has to spend time coming back and the defender can use that delay to his advantage. If your contention above were true, that would be an advantage, because the attacker has all that time to grab alt. But it isn't, because the defender can spend that same time shooting the remaining attackers down and then grabbing alt, or having several planers do each.[/quote]
and that attrition is multiplied by losses to GV's, ack, and higher enemy reinforcements.
I don't think anyone who's played the game more than a month would dispute that the VH is the first priority (with the possible exception of ords, if you're attacking from a CV close by). As for ack, as I said, taking down six hangers is quicker, safer, and requires fewer people. Sure, if you have 15 or 20 attackers, de-ack and vulch, but who needs 15-20 people to capture a base? And unless you've got 20 attackers capping, in which case it's a moot point, ten or twenty uppers are better for the defense than reinforcements coming in high one at a time.
Further, speed is vital, and at the end of the day what that translates to is how quickly the town is taken down. Every bombing pass spent on something else kills speed.
Your second statement does not follow from the first, because however you slice it it is necessary to take the town down and suppress the defenders to take a base, and because bombing six neatly lined-up hangars is quicker and more foolproof than hitting 20 scattered acks and quicker than bombing 12 or 18 hangars at nearby bases.
(It is possible to take a base by having 3 sets of buffs come in NOE and pop at the last second to flatten the town without going near the field, and having a goon follow immediately behind, but that depends absolutely on surprise and few or no defenders being up when you get there. It's also possible to take it in a GV rush without touching the field, and we do that sometimes, but if the defenders are even mildly alert it's a low-odds proposition for the same reason given above re: attrition - attackers who die take much longer to return than defenders.)
As an aside, it would help if base-taking players took a more keen interest in their personal development in dogfighting, as a key reason many plans don't work is because 4-5 fighters invariably try to simultaneously tackle the same enemy con.
Judging by the number of players who act that way, especially in the giant endless furballs, I don't think that is any more common among those who like base-taking than anyone else.
