Anti-hording, pro-strategy idea

[68ZooM]

That is the biggest reason I'm in favor of making them defend the base after they take it. Ack (at the very least) should stay down after capture until resupplied. As it is right now, Aces High is more like playing 'whack a mole' as the horde moves from one base to another after they take bases.

Last night was a great example; 3 or 4 of us were defending the base against 25+. As soon as the base was taken, all but a couple landed and went to another base 75 miles away.

i do agree with once the ack is down it needs to stay down till it gets resupplied, this instantly regenerated ack is utter nonsense and gives the defenders no chance of retaking the base.

[PFactorDave]

BTW I'm not a player    

Of course you aren't!  You're a "Playa"!

[The Fugitive]

I have a film I took Saturday that shows the bish taking a45. There were so many that they don't show.up in the film. There was 40-48 of them with about 20 in b17s for a grand total of 80+ planes against 8 defenders.

Yup sure was fun! 

[SEseph]

I don't think the ack will change the mentality. Regularly you see a base taken and no defense period. The groups move on and so what if the enemy is retaking it? That means they aren't defending where the masses go next. I personally like defending, but there's not always near enough people because they are all off on those dual 30 man missions that are going to neighboring bases while ignoring the two that were just taken because: "Who cares? We'll just all go back and retake it!"

That is why I don't do many missions anymore. Heck, half of the missions when it comes to operations, are like this:

Pilot: Are we being assigned targets?
Mission Leader (ML): No. Just go in and bomb, we have more than enough people.
Pilot: Okay!
ML: I call the (type) Hangar!
All 20-30 Planes Drop.
ML: We need these hangars down!
Pilot(s): We've all dropped
ML: We need more people to take out those remaining hangars and then we need them to kill the town!

Audience: That's a small base... and you need more? No one is defending it...

That is the life of a Horde Watcher. Your head learns to shake a lot.

(The names have been changed to protect the some honor and dignity. No other facts were changed in the making of this post)

[Wiley]

Wednesday/Thursday of last week, I saw a mission similar to what Fugitive described.  They came in and carpet bombed the town, dropping troops as they did.  To me that seems to be the surest way for a large group to roll bases.  More buffs than can be reasonably shot down unless a huge defense is mounted, many goons in the mix to drop their troops...  A few escort fighters to bust up whatever defense may be there...

I think it would take a fairly decent size defensive force finding them in transit to stop something like that.

My only frustration with the situation was that I didn't have enough ammo or time to kill more buffs.  I only came out of it with 2 or 3 buffs and a fighter...

Wiley.

[bustr]

Place CV style puffy ack around towns and triple the numbers. At least the hoard will have to stay below 3k to get near the town. Defenders will be able to BnZ them with impunity. Then if they bring their own mobile ack barge inshore everyone has to stay below 3k.

Maybe it's time to increase the town percentage down for white flag to 30-100% and shorten the ack and building respawn time. Then tack on 1-2 required captured feilds to reset the map. Or those 1-2 required feilds have the additional ack and modified times. My reasoning for the modified times on 1-2 key feilds is this being a game, the hoards are being used to circumvent having to fight for an objective by weight of shear numbers. Not to pick a fight to draw up defenders to play with as part of the reward of ultimatly taking the objective.

The WW2 Operation Corkscrew, the capture of Pantelleria was one of the first authentic aircraft hoarding operations in the world. Over 10 days 14,000 bombs were dropped on the island. Our hoarding is not without precidence. But, in the real WW2 men died and it was understandable trying methods to save lives while attempting to shorten the war.

A polar difference from our established near nightly hoard is when some of the older established squads from thier country decide to roll feilds once in awhile. The fights are vicious due to the veterens involved and the coordinated timing and delivery of assets against the objective leaves littel room to make mistakes while defending. It's as adrenalin pumping and white knuckle as randomly getting into a 1vs 1 with no interuption against a hot vet who knows what he's doing. We simply don't see as much activity by older squads in hoard numbers anymore as our ever constant near nightly RollemHarry Hoard.

Every few years Hitech has tweeked the game in minor and major ways, ostensibly to influence player motivation and subsiquent activity methods to achive in game goals. In each instance these were either in response to obvious community degenerative issues or seemingly capricious, resulting in at least one large ingroup being deprived of their game dominance. The resulting howling in this forum in itself was often worth the short adaptation period inconvienence of the Hitech induced change.

At the moment we seem too stable and complacent.

Our complaints are more ritualistc now as if a requirement to belch during a meal to compliment the host. This game is not a contest to see who can complain the loudest or most. Or a contest to see who can cause the most trouble in the forum while escaping official sensure. At the moment these activities have more passion in them than what takes place in the Arena. 

The more realistic town does require a hoard to efficiently take it down opposed to the old style town that 3 players late at night could drop with 2-110 and NOE a goon to drop troops. Or one box of Lancs in one pass and a goon. We were complacent and stable back then complaining about many of the same issues. Hitech invariably would tweek something making us uncomfortable while we adapted. But, during that adaptation period we would change for awhile. We took risks and fought more outside of being part of comfortable groups while we attempted to game the change and become comfortable again.

I for one would vote for some Hitech induced game discomfort about now. At least the forum complaints would have some new life to them.

[Daddkev]

 

[Volron]

This is why you see me stating time and again that the industrial capacity of the enemy nations should be included in the win the war requirements.  No, it won't stop the horde from doing the hording, but it will take us away from the, "Capture X number of each nation's bases and you win the map." routine, and maybe give us more fighting across the map.  It'll be, "Capture x number of each nation's bases and reduce each nation's strats to less than 20% and you win the map.".

Also, the inclusion of HiTech's Concrete Factory that affects the town's down time in their respective zones and Railyards that affect the spawn time of the AI supply convoy's in their respective zones, could prove to be helpful in some form or another.

I remember reading in a topic somewhere that Towns actually had puffy over the field in the past.  So bustr's idea to bring it back may help in this as well.  If they brought back the zone base system (while keeping the Capital), those key bases you are talking about bustr, could be the modified (key) bases with the beefed up requirements to capture.  This could work out nicely as well.


Using Compello as an example:

There are 4 Zones, 1 on X side, 1 on Y side, 1 "in the middle" and the Capital/HQ zone (or maybe just 3 zones, in which case you just eliminate the "in the middle" zone).  To win the war, you need to capture 20% of each side's bases, INCLUDING capturing the zone bases (which will not be included into the percentage required for bases(?)  This may make it TOO hard to win the war at which point, having them as part of the 20% would be acceptable) in each zone AND reduce the industrial capacity of each nation (all strats, concrete factory and railyards included if they are added) below 20% to win the war.

For a small map like Grinder:

The industrial capacity requirement remains the same.  There would not be a Capital, but the old strat system layout, scattered strats with the City near the HQ, and the others not so close to the front to where they would be surrounded by bases taken, with 2-3 zone bases (1 zone base towards each front and possibly one near-ish HQ).  Or, the Capital stay's and just make 2-3 bases a zone required base (which would be the easiest to implement).


This MAY thin out the horde, but probably won't.  However, we are likely to see more fighting across the map vs the usual bottleneck fronts we see.

[cattb]

That is the biggest reason I'm in favor of making them defend the base after they take it. Ack (at the very least) should stay down after capture until resupplied. As it is right now, Aces High is more like playing 'whack a mole' as the horde moves from one base to another after they take bases.

Last night was a great example; 3 or 4 of us were defending the base against 25+. As soon as the base was taken, all but a couple landed and went to another base 75 miles away.

Yup, take the base and leave. Win de War.....Good idea delirium.
To the OP  The hordes have been here since the beginning.

[IrishOne]

the hordes represent the mindless masses.   in RL, 95% of people you meet fall into this category.   no surprise it translates into an MMO.    mindless masses.........                 

[The Fugitive]

Well buster, you can still take down a town with a couple of guys. Now you have to use buffs, and you have to have enough SKILL to space your drops properly on the right headings. Something that is WAAAYYYYYY over the heads of most of todays players.

Instead of precision dropping town building with "just enough ord" we get 50-60% of the population of one country to drop as many bombs as they can and "hope" they take enough down.

[bustr]

Never underestimate the power of Hitech to influence the masses in his small universe over time. Personaly I beleive it's time again. Frighteningly my give a woot value is so low just about any change by him will be something to get excited about. Especially if it makes all of the masses uncomfortable and have to learn something new. Or even remember something old.

At least we will have to act clever for awhile untill we figure how to game it into the lowest common denominator while cycling back to this point again. I've watched this a few times now. Hitech makes a significant change to the game. We go through the learning and whining process along with Hitech making subsiquent tweeks while listening to the whines increase or decrease. An ingroup discovers how to finess the change to their advantage. A year or two later everyone is bored and we have more fun attacking each other here in the forum than being bored chasing around the group of players who figured out how to leverage the last social engineering change to their advantage.

Let everyone in every country see everybody else anywhere on the map for awhile. The last time the radar circles overlapped you could see everybody upping off the end of the runway. There was alot of fighting in the arena and epic whining on this forum. But, for awhile you could hunt people down and have at them before they hid in the localisation nature of dar and avoided having to fight for their spoils.

In Hitech's Empire sometimes the Lions are in acendancy and sometime the Lambs are. Right now the Lambs do rule while the Lions starve and get bored. I've seen Lions lately declaire themselves nonplayers. A war game needs both Lions, Lambs and rousing good uncertain terror in between. Our current hoard seems to have definantly removed the uncertanty. Eliminated the terror uncertainty produces. While mastering the techniques of end running the lions before any massive war like responses take place to reduce their own chances of failure. No downsides most of the time if you just avoid the Lions who of late have gotten apathetic about chasing down 30-40 players who don't want to fight in the first place. A well oiled, effortless, almost infinantly reproducable win. Hitech should just give everyone the #1 rank standing and 5000 perk points for simply logging into the arena at this point if thats our game for now on.

I think it's time again to shake this sand box up and throw a wrench in the well oiled complacency and watch the antpile scramble. Players won't do it themsleves even if you pay them to change. But, if it's done to them, they will step out of their comfort zones for a time and ingeniously adapt untill they can beat or whine the new change into comfortable submission. The adaptation to a change stage has generated some of the best times in this game over the years. And some of the loudest and epic whining too. Ear plugs...........get your era plugs...all colors and sizes...get your ear plugs.....

[Rob52240]

I got a rare chance to jump an NOE 'horde' lol yeah I said it.

They just happened to fly across the ocean where we had a carrier nearby.  It was a lot of fun flying light in the mismatched plane that had the advantage from the start.  1 K4 is more than a match for a squadron of NOE P-47s.  I even got some squaddies to join in with the defense.

[TheAssi]

Never underestimate the power of Hitech to influence the masses in his small universe over time. Personaly I beleive it's time again. Frighteningly my give a woot value is so low just about any change by him will be something to get excited about. Especially if it makes all of the masses uncomfortable and have to learn something new. Or even remember something old.

At least we will have to act clever for awhile untill we figure how to game it into the lowest common denominator while cycling back to this point again. I've watched this a few times now. Hitech makes a significant change to the game. We go through the learning and whining process along with Hitech making subsiquent tweeks while listening to the whines increase or decrease. An ingroup discovers how to finess the change to their advantage. A year or two later everyone is bored and we have more fun attacking each other here in the forum than being bored chasing around the group of players who figured out how to leverage the last social engineering change to their advantage.

Let everyone in every country see everybody else anywhere on the map for awhile. The last time the radar circles overlapped you could see everybody upping off the end of the runway. There was alot of fighting in the arena and epic whining on this forum. But, for awhile you could hunt people down and have at them before they hid in the localisation nature of dar and avoided having to fight for their spoils.

In Hitech's Empire sometimes the Lions are in acendancy and sometime the Lambs are. Right now the Lambs do rule while the Lions starve and get bored. I've seen Lions lately declaire themselves nonplayers. A war game needs both Lions, Lambs and rousing good uncertain terror in between. Our current hoard seems to have definantly removed the uncertanty. Eliminated the terror uncertainty produces. While mastering the techniques of end running the lions before any massive war like responses take place to reduce their own chances of failure. No downsides most of the time if you just avoid the Lions who of late have gotten apathetic about chasing down 30-40 players who don't want to fight in the first place. A well oiled, effortless, almost infinantly reproducable win. Hitech should just give everyone the #1 rank standing and 5000 perk points for simply logging into the arena at this point if thats our game for now on.

I think it's time again to shake this sand box up and throw a wrench in the well oiled complacency and watch the antpile scramble. Players won't do it themsleves even if you pay them to change. But, if it's done to them, they will step out of their comfort zones for a time and ingeniously adapt untill they can beat or whine the new change into comfortable submission. The adaptation to a change stage has generated some of the best times in this game over the years. And some of the loudest and epic whining too. Ear plugs...........get your era plugs...all colors and sizes...get your ear plugs.....

Bustr post....

Eye plugs........get your eye plugs...all colors and sizes...get your eye plugs.

[Noir]

"And if we manage to do a breakthrough here, we may get into position to launch and offensive to Berlin next spring!"
"Screw that, the Germans will expect us there. Let's just grab 2 bases in Norway, 2 more in Sicily, one in France and we will get the reset."
Later:
System: Négligeable-sur-mer has been captured by the Allies. The Allies have won the war! Europe will change in 4 minutes.
German Country Chat: That's what we get for furballing over Berlin!

brilliant