Disable resupply of City/factories and reasons why

[Citabria]

the furballers are not affected regardless.

aside from HQ none of the strat targets affect the furball. they affect the win the war game but only slightly. they have no effect on towns.

towns should have downtime affected by the city directly I think. all the construction company workers live in the city. they have to rebuild the town. gives a direct benefit to bombing the city.

half of the the factories are defunct and broken when looking at them as legitimate targets that should be hit. add that the factories are almost all on an instant respawn timer even with city at 0% and you can see how useless it all is. there is no reason to bomb this stuff when the stupid towns are better score padding damage per bomb targets. and they have no flak and are on the front line.

fuel can be dropped to 75% this makes dropping the refinery that controls how long fuel bins are down a meaningless target.

barracks are so numerous they are almost impossible to stamp out compared to the old 2-3 barrack objects per field. thus disabling troops at a field is largely irrelevant.

ammo bins are decent targets at the tactical level because it robs the enemy of its ability to obliterate ground vehicles with bombs. and it slows an offensive by not giving it the means to pork their next target. but with short down time of ammo factory dropping the factory at the strategic level is meaningless.

aaa is down 45 minutes and town is down 45 minutes. no reason to pork aaa unless you want to vulch. which with manned guns on a tiny respawn timer this makes hitting aaa factory with its also short respawn timer entirely meaningless. its all fluff and better score pad targets are at the front line in the form of the town.

radar is the one tactical target that is a big priority and will almost always be hit and hit many times. at the tactical level its important to hit the radar so the attacking side is not at a huge disadvantage with the defending enemy able to zero in on their position in force. on the strategic level the factory is down ona  tiny respawn timer and comes back instantly. no reason to hit it either.


you see the problem is once the factory pops the targets it affects pop back up. if the factory respawn in 45 minutes and so does the radar you efectively do not need to hit the strat factory because it will respawn in 45 minutes and so will the radar. to have the same effect as dropping the city to 0% and the radar factory to 0% you only have to use a few cannon rounds on a solitary radar target to have the same effect as a massive 30 bomber formation and its escorts doing a many hour long mission.


now you talk about balance and what not where is the balance of 1 jabo having the same effect on the downtime of a radar as a massive coordinated high altitude bomber and escort mission deep into enemy territory?

chew on that will ya?

[IrishOne]

+1  would be sweet if strategic bombing missions actually had a noticable effect on the way the war could be fought

[FLS]

Knocking out 1 radar at 1 field is the same as knocking out all radar and friendly icons on the map? Seriously?

[guncrasher]

Knocking out 1 radar at 1 field is the same as knocking out all radar and friendly icons on the map? Seriously?

the only radar that matters is in the field that you are attacking, or perhaps another field nearby  who cares if there's another 1 zillion fields with dar somewhere.  you are not there attacking so its irrelevant.

semp

[moot]

But that still doesn't size up to losing all radar info from your clipboard.

[SlapShot]

I like tactical resupply of c47s and m3s to airbases vbases. these resupply sorties have risk. they are often visible to enemy aircraft/tanks therefore add to the ambiance and depth of the game.


3-4 idiots 200 miles behind their own lines droning supplies from an airbase (lowest link in the supply chain to a destroyed strat target (second highest link in supply chain below city) that will resupply itself on its own over time adds nothing to the game and isn't very fun for the 3-4 idiots doing the no risk resupply either.

there is no tactical urgency that requires the strat target to be resupplied. it can not be captured.

there is tactical reasons for urgent resupply of bases however

this would be a case of saving players from themselves.

Make it so one link in the chain cannot be re-supplied (no matter how many supplies are dropped) until the higher link is completely rebuilt.

Take out the City, take out the troops factory, take out troops at the field.

You cannot manually re-supply the field to get troops up until the factory is completely rebuilt ... you cannot manually re-supply the factory until the City is completely re-built ... make the manual supply of the City/factory a lot less effective than it is right now.

Now those 3 or 4 idiots (which I am sure you will be more than willing to participate in) ferrying C-47s will be busy for quite some time, first trying to rebuild the City and then on to the factory and then finally onto the field(s) that were effected.

[SlapShot]

But that still doesn't size up to losing all radar info from your clipboard.

I don't think he understands that taking the HQ/Radar down means total blindness ... regardless if a fields individual radar is down or not.

[moot]

Fester?  I doubt it...   Either way I agree with the intent.. Haven't really thought about the methods yet.

You cannot manually re-supply the field to get troops up until the factory is completely rebuilt ... you cannot manually re-supply the factory until the City is completely re-built ... make the manual supply of the City/factory a lot less effective than it is right now.

What I was thinking too.  A good compromise.

[bustr]

If winning the war to reset the map was changed from 20% of the other two countries bases and whatever of yours to owning zones in each country......wagon wheel comes to mind with a strat in each independant of the others but related to the HQ.

At that point you don't engage in tyranny of the monority denying the furballers their choice to ignore the war winners. You just loose the resources in a zone on the other side of your country because the hoardlings and tool shedders want to take undefended things anyway. Players can choose to resupply or defend. You know where to up and find bombers or look for NOE missions. Strats then have a purpose to keeping an individual zone. Some genius will probably up b29's and spend an evening taking away all of the zone strats in a country anyway but, resupplying them behind him will have meaning....

Hey, I'm trying to come up with sumptin here....gotta admit the game play these days is a wee tad missing something.

If I'm going to get a map reset out from under me due to furball myopic indifference, at least make the hordlings work for it behind my back. When a zone is lost have big red letters in the chat buffer announce country X has just won zone B and give everyone from that country in that zone at that time 5 points for being there. Like a minni map reset. Hey a new squad monthly stat. Most Zones Taken.

Fester wants the strat to mean something. Ok, zone to zone minni wars where a raid on your radar strat blinds you in that zone. HQ raids still blind you for the whole country. Kill strat in one zone to affect a localised ENY so you have to up a few bases away to get back your late war rides or until you resupply your zone strat to get production back up to late war rides in the zone.......ahhh this will never flyyyyyyy.....

[W7LPNRICK]

This, I believe, is the answer.

+1   

[SlapShot]

Fester?  I doubt it...   Either way I agree with the intent.. Haven't really thought about the methods yet.
What I was thinking too.  A good compromise.

Me neither but it made me think about what HT said in a thread of the same vein ...

This is classic player based game design. Players center design around what they perceive as fun  and expect other people to fill in the other roles with out putting themselves in that roll. I.E. you do not hear fullmetalbullet saying that he wants to circle his city for hours waiting for some one to attack it. Then he would say something to the effect. I want cities and factories to have more of an impact so "I" can defend them. He makes a classic player assumption that a change will only effect what he wants it to effect, and does not think "what would I do if that was done to me".

[bustr]

SlapShot,

Hitechs whole response in that thread makes much more sense to our current discussion.
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Quoted from Hitech:

Strat will NEVER be designed in a method in which fullmetalbullet could go out and do major impact to a country. Possibly him and 10 of his friends could have a significant impact. The reasons fullmetalbullet gives for wanting a change are directly opposed to good game design. You can aggravate a player or country , but you can not remove his ability to have fun fighting. Multiply times fullmetalbullet states he wants people to defend a target while he wants to go attack it.

This is classic player based game design. Players center design around what they perceive as fun  and expect other people to fill in the other roles with out putting themselves in that roll. I.E. you do not hear fullmetalbullet saying that he wants to circle his city for hours waiting for some one to attack it. Then he would say something to the effect. I want cities and factories to have more of an impact so "I" can defend them. He makes a classic player assumption that a change will only effect what he wants it to effect, and does not think "what would I do if that was done to me".

The fact is that strat must ride a fine edge of having an effect on a country with out removing the fun of continuing a fight. If you take a close look at the strat system you will see that it is designed to remove a countries offensive ability but does not remove the roll of continuing to fight. It is folly to think people will spend time in the air guarding one area. People will do what is fun, flying a defensive patrol in an arena style play is not would most people would consider fun on a regular basis.

The only difference to the current strat system from what is written on the web page is that city buildings stay down for 6 hours instead of 3.

The only change I have been considering , and had starting to look at previously, was lowering the effects of supply drops. I believe it should take an equal or greater amount of time flying supplies as was spent attacking the target. So at some point I may lower the effect of supplies.

HiTech

[Citabria]

you think I care about winning the war? i have 7000 fighter 7000 bomber and 4000 vehicle perks. I could care less about winning the war.
am I a regular bomber pilot? no fighters.

so what do I want? I want bomber pilots to fly into my sides strat targets en mass so I have more bombers to shoot at.

because I like shooting at bombers and I like them having a reason to feel good about attacking a high value target in spite of being shot down x3 after their bombs are dropped.

[moot]

Slap-

I think it's good.  Can't think of anything that fits better.

It doesn't change the Me 163 situation : they're left as free to fly as ever (their side of the "fun" equation) so you still have to contend with em, but a handful of players can still be sure to knock out HQ and carpet the city if they play it right. There's good odds they don't make it out alive, but their target goes with em. No changes there.   In that respect I think the B-29 becomes a very valuable pillar for HQ/City raids.  So no changes there, no fix for what aint broke.

On the other hand the damage they do, if they hit city as well, means HQ rebuild will take long enough to be worthwhile, and on top of that will take longer proportionately with home team's resupply effort.  That should be enough to open the door for strat hits at both HQ zone or at frontline factories.  This setup should be near enough optimal that with a little tweaking it'd give you enough time to launch factory raids when HQ goes out.  

Then adjust factory down time [edit] and airfield/vbase strat items [/edit] as needed.  There's definitely a bug as Fester describes.. 45-60 minutes seems good for 100% City health, I dunno about 0%.  6 hours seems a bit long.  Anyway, that's up to simple tweaking.

If this works you get a healthier system where both bombers and fighters get more gameplay.  Bombers get to have meaningful targets, and fighters as well.  And the mission guys probably get more of a direction to work in, instead of focusing on nameless faceless identical fields to capture.

[FLS]

you think I care about winning the war? i have 7000 fighter 7000 bomber and 4000 vehicle perks. I could care less about winning the war.
am I a regular bomber pilot? no fighters.

so what do I want? I want bomber pilots to fly into my sides strat targets en mass so I have more bombers to shoot at.

because I like shooting at bombers and I like them having a reason to feel good about attacking a high value target in spite of being shot down x3 after their bombs are dropped.

Bomber pilots will fly bombers regardless of supply. You could even argue that resupplying gives bombers more targets.