Strat.

[Scherf]

As part of the "how can existing maps make use of changed strat rules", perhaps the amount of buildings which need to be destroyed to get the white flag at town could be at least partly dependent on whether the field's supply routes were open or cut.

[Lusche]

A roughly estimated comparison of effort in attacking and resupplying strats:

Premise: Strats are at 100%, attacker going to kill off the city and the ammo factory.
Assuming 2h total flight time for every sortie (I could present you detailed mission profiles, but 2h is a good approximation for this purpose) it would take that many "perfect" sorties (no wasted bombs, absolute coordination between palyer, no losses to AAA or enemy fighters):

B-29 - 3 sorties - 6 manhours
B-17 - 7 sorties - 14 manhours
Lancaster - 5 sorties - 15 manhours

While the B-29 assumption is quite realistic when only one or two very good buff pilots are doing it (I did it myself a lot of times), it's highly unrealistic for the 17 or Lancaster, which are going to have much greater losses and (with more players needed) a lot of coordination issues. For them we could easily triple the effort needed, which still would be on the optimistic side.

So in the end, it takes anywhere between 6 and 50 manhours to kill city and the ammo factory (side note: additional factories come at a huge discount, as the city stays down for 6h)
In contrast to that, assuming it takes between 5 and 8 C-47 sorties to fully restore the factory, we come to just over 1(!) manhour of work for the defending side to redeem the strat raiders work of 6-50 manhours.

(By the way, it takes the same 5-8 C-47/M3 sorties to restore ords on a base, for which the standard suicide porker was investing only 10-15 minutes!)

So bombing the strats, with it's already only subtle effect on the arena, is finally made totally futile by that, comparable only to HQ raids. And it's not even worthwhile in terms of perks or score compared to town center milking....

[Scherf]

^ this.

Excellent post.

[Lusche]

Excellent post.

With a glaring math error - 5 Lanc sorties á 2h equal 10h total, not 15 

[icepac]

After bringing the city center down to 36%, I launched a ltv to hang around and see what happened.

I did notice the city came from 36% to 100% in less than 2 hours after taking 30 minutes to bring it down.


There should be some reward for the side who is resupplying thier strats but it seems that one C47 load is almost the same value as an entire train.

Maybe a happier medium can be found.

I want to both apologize to DropEm and commend him on his honorable way of dealing with me PM'ing him that I thought someone had told him where our cv was when it was just pure chance he did a AFK keyboard climb that beelined our CV as it approached the city complex.    The commendation is for not spoiling our testing by alerting his countrymen of the CV once he realized how much work was being put in to our finding out how the strats are working.

[Lusche]

After bringing the city center down to 36%, I launched a ltv to hang around and see what happened.

I did notice the city came from 36% to 100% in less than 2 hours after taking 30 minutes to bring it down.

I hope you had film running?

[Lusche]

I'm testing it in EW right now, and apparently I am not able to resupply the city - as it should be and always had been.

[icepac]

I will check the films.

I got disco'd in the ltv by a lightning strike near the house so I pulled cell phone battery, restarted the computer, logged into the main arena, and was put back into the ltv.    Thank you hitech.

after viewing them, the films were useless for what we are trying to find out.

I wouldn't mind hearing from "wolfe" who was another pilot resupplying the strats and find out how many drops he made.

[Lusche]

(...)
So in the end, it takes anywhere between 6 and 50 manhours to kill city and the ammo factory (side note: additional factories come at a huge discount, as the city stays down for 6h)
In contrast to that, assuming it takes between 5 and 8 C-47 sorties to fully restore the factory, we come to just over 1(!) manhour of work for the defending side to redeem the strat raiders work of 6-50 manhours.

(...)

I want to add that one of the main problems with resupplying facories is that each set of supplies is not a finite amount of material. It's essentially buying time. It takes repairs every destroyed item in a radius at the same rate, no matter how many there are. Regardless if the factory has been bombed to 95% or down to 20% in a single raid, it takes the same number of loads to fix it.

That's what makes it so terribly disporoportional in relation to bombing the factories, as laid out in my earlier post.



I also just resupplied a factory myself. Each goon flight took me less than 5 minutes. Compared to the time the enemy had to invest, the factory was back up in a blink of an eye.

[Midway]

See rule #4

[The Fugitive]

See rule #4

I love seeing this!

[ET]

Resupplying factories
AAA was 51% city 87% first 2 drops, no change 3rd drop AAA 100%
AAA 88% city 84% first 2 drops no change 3rd drop AAA 100%
AAA  80% city 80% first 2 drops no change 3rd drop AAA 100%
Training 93% city 92 1st drop nochange 2nd drop Training 100%
Refinery 82% city 92% 1st drop no change 2nd not made, Icepak said train brought it to 100%
What order does train supply the factories ?
How often do they run ?
Why doesn't the % change with each drop ?

[Midway]

See rule #4

 

  HiTech

[Lusche]

Why doesn't the % change with each drop ?

Because of what i wrote in my last post  


Each set of supplies that reaches the factory, regardless if by auto resupply train or field cargo dropped by players, is reducing the downtime of items in a certain radius. So the amount of cargo it takes to bring the factory back up depends on how long it has been down, and how much supplies the trains are bringing in.

[Lusche]

I just was able to get some reliable numbers.

An enemy Lancaster dropped our refinery from 57 to 26%. I immediately started my resupply runs, and was the only player doing so.
It took me 6 loads to fully restore the damage inflicted within 36 minutes. The Knight City was at 81%, which means that without my resupply it would have taken about 90 minutes  until the refinery would have been back at 100%.

I got a total of 61 perks for that 36 minutes of no risk flying. IMHO that's almost ridiculous if you think how much actual 'combat' flying it otherwise would take to get that many bomber perks  


And with that knowledge, I will stop my strat runs, for they are nothing but easy perk generators for the other side. Stuff is working as advertised, but that's still a problem.

Back to waiting for the next evolution of the strat system