CraterMA revisited

[JonDoe999]

Good job, sir! You never stop amazing me, sir! I can't wait until you get another good idea, sir!!!

[Greebo]

New terrain link, weather wasn't working in the last one. craterma1.zip

[haggerty]

I think that limiting air access will actually hurt the activity in tank town.  Alot of people like to fly close air support, and there are the groups that like to fly air cover for GV's as well.
As far as the normal bases, it looks like you have alot of one way GV spawns from air bases that favor one front on each side.

[Greebo]

I welcome your feedback haggerty as I don't GV myself. From my POV its difficult to know what the balance of GVer opinion is though. I was basing my perceptions of what GVers wanted on the constant complaining about "bomb****s in tank town" I read on ch200 and on the BBS.

I deliberately limited the number of spawn points as I wanted to make the V bases important strategically. Once you own one you get access to most of the nearby airfields. When you can get everywhere from everywhere then no field is more important than another. Also I feel too many options with spawn points just dilutes the action and encourages milk running.

The clockwise and anti-clockwise borders are different to each other but are the same layout for each country. So any disadvantage you have on one border is an advantage on the other.

[DrBone1]

I welcome your feedback haggerty as I don't GV myself. From my POV its difficult to know what the balance of GVer opinion is though. I was basing my perceptions of what GVers wanted on the constant complaining about "bomb****s in tank town" I read on ch200 and on the BBS.

I deliberately limited the number of spawn points as I wanted to make the V bases important strategically. Once you own one you get access to most of the nearby airfields. When you can get everywhere from everywhere then no field is more important than another. Also I feel too many options with spawn points just dilutes the action and encourages milk running.

The clockwise and anti-clockwise borders are different to each other but are the same layout for each country. So any disadvantage you have on one border is an advantage on the other.

[The Fugitive]

I think TT should be just that, tanks only. The problem I see however is will HTC approve a strictly tank only TT? By making it so planes can't be used your cutting out part of the player base, allowing the GVers to isolate themselves from the rest of the players.

I like the idea, but I just don'r know if it will..... errr fly 

[Greebo]

This tank town is not invulnerable to air attack, it just means a long climb, coping with heavy AA over the crater and bombing through cloud if you want to hit the V bases. The tank town itself has no cloud cover. Three jabos could still close a V base if they really wanted to. Its not exactly uncommon to find jabos hitting fields from 15K approaches in the MA now.

If HTC do object to this setup it is no big deal,  I can remove the flak towns or cloud cover in just a few minutes. I could also put three gaps in the crater rim, which would then be obvious ambush places for any fighters capping the tank town crater.

[Greebo]

I flew a jabo mission to tank town in a loaded P-51D with 50% fuel to see how long it would take. From take off to bomb release was 13 minutes, which doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The time needed is more about rate of climb with ord than speed, so I imagine an F6F would do it faster than say a P-47. Getting an Il-2 to tank town will require a lot of patience.

The low clouds over the V bases were definitely a hinderance to accurate bombing, but I still managed to kill a VH in two passes.

Here's some more screenshots of the new tank town, click to expand:-

   

[Spikes]

Greebo, still takes about 45 mins to load the weather?  I think Ranger said something about building the weather into the terrain to make it load faster...

[Greebo]

I tried putting the weather file in the main download but it didn't take for some reason, so I went back to the old system with a seperate file. The clouds taking 45 minutes to fully deploy are not affected by where I put the weather file anyway, that is just down to the way weather works in AH.

Each weather front on an MA terrain has rows and columns of clouds which start at one point on the map, move to another point and then disappear. You are only allowed to have 900 clouds active over the whole map at any time to prevent overloading players' PCs. All of the 120 weather fronts in this terrain are set up to run over precisely 45 or 90 minutes so I can prevent surges in the cloud numbers where one front starts before another one has finished.

In the case of tank town when you start the terrain offline the first row of clouds generates immediately at one side of a V base and begins to move to the end point of its travel on the other side. Then another row of clouds generates, and then another until the V base is covered 45 minutes later. At that point the first row disappears. However I have a second identical front set up to run exactly 45 minutes after the terrain starts. These two fronts run at 45 minute intervals to keep the V base permanently covered in cloud. Any player joining this terrain online would only see the V bases uncovered if the terrain had been up for less than 45 minutes.

[Skulls22]

WTG Greebo!

Rollin a M4 down the street, take a left and a on the other end of town you see a Tiger at the end of the street. The clock strikes High Noon. The guns aim! (To be continued)

Looking forward to it!

[Spikes]

Greebo I love the towns you put near the non-tt bases as well...

[Greebo]

Thanks Spikes, thought it would add a bit of interest. One thing to note if anyone else is thinking of doing this on a terrain though. The roads and railways disappear if they cross the same square as a city segment. The trucks etc. still run, but across an invisible road. Apart from looking a bit bogus I'm not sure whether GVs might end up running into invisible bridges or be hit by trucks where there is no visible road. So I have now gone through all my roads and rerouted them clear of the city squares.

[Kazaa]

Greebo, I feel like you should create a lot of town buildings around the ports just like in RL, take Dover for example.

[Greebo]

The problem is the island ports (and other bases) are all on narrow strips of land between mountains and the coast which doesn't leave a lot of room for towns. The city tiles have to be on absolutely flat land and I have to fit roads for the bases in that area too. If I redo the coastline or mountains to make room this causes other issues as I have to redo the clipboard map (not a trivial job) and make sure the CVs have room to get past the bases OK. I'm also reluctant to change the coastline because of the cmpwater.bmp bug in the TE. As there are no GV spawns into the island ports this would just be an eye candy addition cases with no effect on gameplay and I didn't think it was worth the hassle.

I'll consider adding more buildings for the three central ports on the main landmass. However one reason I kept the towns midway between the bases and spawn points was to draw the fight away from players spawning.