Goal-Oriented-Combat
Well yeah Wabb.. That's what I'm saying. Not free for all combat.. Not "low quality combat" - who wants that?
but it is devoid of a high level goal, of context, of purpose, of meaning.
You could have that but it requires coordination between players. It means the players have to agree amongst themselves to set the goal posts in a certain spot and agree that you can't just offside or go out of bounds, etc. That just doesn't work on its own, not in any game with MMO level population.
That said, what happens in AH IMO is that there's enough developer-provided material already, for players to have plenty of goal oriented combat. If you add too many more "rules" forcing "goal orientation" you start to take away players' freedom to do as they please and that hurts fun real quick.
EG right now in AH nothing stops you from doing fighter sweeps. There's already more than enough for a whole country to organize into a lean mean fighting machine, while still not at all diminishing furballing fun. But it takes self policing (e.g. not attacking a base with 30 players when only 5 players are going to be defending) and again, that just doesn't quite happen.
The reason you don't see attacks to the starts is because they don't know "how" to do it (no body learns how to play the game these days) and the second reason is because its too hard. It takes skill to get the right places bombed, and organized well enough to get there and do the job.
I don't think so. Take the same numbers and organization that we have now focused on real estate and put em to work porking Capital and strats. It'd mean learning something new and most likely a string of failures before it started to become the kind of acquired knowledge that straight base-taking has come to be today, but eventually you'd have a similar ease to organizing it. There would be set jobs just like there's set jobs for the essential elements of base taking today - a goon, goon escort, air superiority, deacking, town razing, hangar killing, etc. Of course a Capital destroying mission and a strat destroying mission would be different animals from a bas taking mission, but I don't see why, as the strat system and maps are right now, it couldn't become as well oiled routine as base taking.
The only serious obstacle to this IMO is that it depends much more on A2A dogfighting. The very far end of the strategy/tactics spectrum IOW furballer skills, not macro level mission planning skills. And of course players have a harder time (note I'm not saying it really is so much more difficult that it's anywhere near unfeasible) learning that.
There are a lot of things that were done in the "war" that people are not going to do here. Flying defensive cap over a base for an hour only to land because your shift is over. Or pork troops along a front. Smart yes, but how often do you see it happen? Not very, why because it's boring. This is a game, and most people here are here to have fun.
But if everyone on both sides were doing it, I reckon there
would be more combat action. Really. The fields aren't that far from each other.
I might be wrong but I don't think anyone suggested changing the fundamental way the strats work; only making them more valuable ( somewhat harsher reality when they are down) and not being able to resupply them.
The reason no one hits strats anymore is that no one wants to fly 15 sectors into a counties backfield only to have them back up before they leave enemy territory. I used to play around the strats all the time, both offensively and defensively. I've only seen the strat complexes twice since they changed. Why? BOOORING.
And again, no ones suggested anything different; only making it more valuable to do so.
leave those strats deep in the backfield next to some friendly bases so they can be quickly resupplied, then we won't have to fight to defend them. If they do go down we'll just wait for the enemy to leave then go resupply them.
Maybe make only the forward strat locations resuppliable? And/or make the strats larger so that they take a little more explosives/strafing to destroy (IIRC one or two bomber formations already have enough to raze a strat twice over.. ?) but a significantly more resupplying to repair? The former so that off-hours porkers can't so easily disable a whole country's resources so easily (and maybe strats could have wider proximity flashing range), the latter obviously so strat attackers efforts aren't so vain.
