Conditions for town resupply

[caldera]

Making base taking harder only makes the hordes bigger.   

In "the good old days" the (much smaller horde) would smash the town in 110s with a few heavy fighters for air cover or stray tanks.
Now it's flatten every pixel on the base, vulch them into submission and then worry about the town.  Multiple 20k buff formations and a dozen or more heavy 51Ds are the steamroller methods du jour.   Defending isn't as fun for me as it used to be.  To have a chance now, I need a fast cannon bird and BnZ to stay alive.  Yawn.

[Lusche]

You are going to have to explain that one to me...

Really?

It's almost impossible to have a civil discussion on gameplay mechanics / design without people instantly making ad hominem attacks instead of using arguments. "You horder", "furballer", "stop whining". Easily making assumptions and coming to conclusions why people "really" want this or object against that. All that "hidden agenda" stuff. You have something against he town resupply? I don't care what you say, you are just a whining hordeling! If you want the 1h side switching limit back, you are also only a horder, there can be NO other reason! A few days ago someone spread lies about me "taking advantage of a bug for years" just because he had no proper arguments

I'm so entirely sick of it.


Back to topic:

Hordes have always offered me much enjoyment in the way of offering me lots of targets without being required to travel far to shoot at the red guys.  Even better, now that it is harder for them to take the base if town is being resupplied.  hat means the base isn't rolled so quickly and the horde stays longer. , prolonging the target-rich environment.

As I explained above, often it's exactly the opposite. The 5 min NOE smash & grab horde isn't affected by it. Town down for 5 or 50 minutes, it doesn't matter. The guys that try to take a field with only a few people are. And prolonged battles are somewhat more  probable to be aborted when you see you have to destroy the entire town again and again within just a few minutes.
If you reduce the time window of a successful capture, the simplest way is to horde MORE not less.

[VonMessa]

Really?

It's almost impossible to have a civil discussion on gameplay mechanics / design without people instantly making ad hominem attacks instead of using arguments. "You horder", "furballer", "stop whining". Easily making assumptions and coming to conclusions why people "really" want this or object against that. All that "hidden agenda" stuff. You have something against he town resupply? I don't care what you say, you are just a whining hordeling! If you want the 1h side switching limit back, you are also only a horder, there can be NO other reason! A few days ago someone spread lies about me "taking advantage of a bug for years" just because he had no proper arguments

I'm so entirely sick of it.


Back to topic:

As I explained above, often it's exactly the opposite. The 5 min NOE smash & grab horde isn't affected by it. Town down for 5 or 50 minutes, it doesn't matter. The guys that try to take a field with only a few people are. And prolonged battles are somewhat more  probable to be aborted when you see you have to destroy the entire town again and again within just a few minutes.
If you reduce the time window of a successful capture, the simplest way is to horde MORE not less.

You have been here long enough to see the whines yourself.  They will never go away.


Someone always has to whine when there is a change that makes the game more difficult instead of adapting their gameplay, something I am entirely sick of...  There is a difference between a whine and a request.

Someone that runs in a horde is a hordling.  Would it be more PC to call it a gaggle or a pack?  Perhaps a flock?  We can call them flockers...

There will always be the diehards that will keep trying at a base until they realize that it is futile, the horde didn't make it in time and then they go away.  Base defense will always make for a quicker way to get into the fight.

If you know you haven't been "taking advantage of a bug for years", why let it bother you if you know it is untrue?  Would it bother you if I said you had a big arse if you knew it to be untrue? 

[Chalenge]

Because the facts speak for themselves. The perks didnt change until the "whine" about perks awarding resupply more than the bombers. Well the fact is that bombers should not have ever got more perks than resupply because the reward of degrading the enemies ability to wage a fight (ord down, troops down, radar down) is supposed to be the bombers objective and not perks. Yet the whine was that the resuppliers get any reward at all beyond getting the factories or HQ working. Snailman himself posted the resupply periods and frequencies required for one person to get factories up. For years you could do the same resupply and get the same perks but now he has his (as does Fester) but thats too good for anyone that comes along behind them! Now because of their collective whines resupply only awards 3.75 perks no matter what object is resupplied. Well 3.75 perks is not enough because after one or two flights resupply gets old and its not worth it for the reward involved. The only thing worth resupplying is HQ. Resupplying with a goon involves a weakening rank/score position because of the damage/sortie category and driving a vehicle is beyond question because of the time involved.

So the solution is to bombard the enemy with 35k bombers that drop their ord and bail. With the bombs delivered there is no reason to stay in the bomber, right? You can get back to the factories faster than the factories can be resupplied because no one is going to fly or drive that far the number of required sorties and eventually the factories will be flat. Except we havent seen that happen yet I feel the day is coming because the stage has been set.

[bustr]

1. - It's probably easier for HTC and the average player that the M3 will only have to be on the first road\concrete they find to drop supplies. At least the M3 will have to expose itself in the dash to the road.

2. - There has always been "The Formula" for capturing an airfeild. Everytime Hitech changes the requirments, we adjust the formula through trial and error while fighting a war of personality differences and ancient game grivences like drunken relatives at a family reunion. It's a healthy sign that we still care about the game and the second most popular combat aspect of Aces High. Girl fights in the forum.

3. - Hitech as usual is moving at his glacial speed before changing even the tinyest aspect of the game. You cry at him for the devil you don't know and he's trying to make sure when he unleashes it on you, which he will. It's at least no worse than the one you know. His changes are very often sudden, drastic, and perminent when they happen. Very rarely does he roll them back once the crying starts.

4. - In WW2 long distance strategic bombing missions were not fun and the men suffered through them because they were following orders and felt they were saving their world from tyranny. Sometimes there are parts of a game that can never be forced into being fun or very rewarding unless the rewards are beyond any reasonable proportion to all other rewards in the game. If players don't feel the reward for play acting strat bombing runs and resupply missions is worth their $14.95, they won't play along becasue it is not fun or rewarding enough. If winning the war was a sliding scale combination of 2 parts. The extreems, either bomb the total strat down to 75% or capture 20% of all feilds in the two other countries. But, with some hybrid combinations in between.

Just an example for winning the war:
1. - (total strat destroyed 25% of 100%)
2. - (total combined 15% strat & 15% feilds)
3. - (total combined 12% strat & 18% feilds)
4. - (total feilds captured 20% of 100%)<---- Our current standard.

If bombing the strat had a simple percentage attatched to it for winning the war. It would be more relevant to the average player as a mission worth taking part in. You would still have base taking for those who wanted quicker action. Resupply missions to the strat would be as irritating as M3 resupplying town ack. And eventualy the bomber guys and a few escorts would succeed in winning a map totaly through strategic "Maximum Effort" bombing. Think anyone would volinteer for the NOE Mossi16 raid to kill the 163 feild's fighter hangers ahead of the bomber stream?

[B4Buster]

This has become the most dramatic game changing aspect of the revamp of strat and resupply.

You cannot capture towns now at the very last moment while you take time for your lazy vulch period just becasue you have CAP. I've been at so many of these recently where the CAP is a lock and the traditional vulch lamp is lit. All the fighter jocks are busy padding their score and kills landed message with no one watching the spawns.

Yes now it's the tank divers, or LVT drivers, or medium bombers job to keep track of the active spawns. The fighter jokes are too busy watching the runway like hawks. And it's always the same. Some one yells M3, I see an M3. Get the M3.

By the time anyone bothers to wander over to look for the M3, town ack is killing them, the C47 that just dropped troops or the M3 or LVT that was sitting just short of town. And where there is one M3 with town supplies there are more running in becasue the first thing up is always the auto ack. Very naughty of Hitech to toss such a tiny but, very powerful stick into the well oiled gears of our soo lazy war machine.

Now you don't need to flood the just captured town with M3 in the hopes of retaking it. Just flood the town during the whole attack with M3 and keep dropping supplies. The effort to suppress resupply M3 will tie up fighters who should be suppressing the uppers. Especialy if M16 run with the resupply M3 succering the fighters into attacking them. Heck get a good wirbel patch going at the M3 spawn and fighters will feed themselves into a wirbel storm.

So our long standing town capture by numbers has a minor HTC introduced glitch after all of these years. If you don't show up with a hoard and flatten everything in the first 3 minutes with troops out by the 5th. A lone M3 may well screw your pooch if you didn't plan for intitial strikes at the VH of every enemy feild that spawns to the one you are trying to capture. No more need to mount heroic futile defences while padding the vulchers scores. Let them kill the feild, then bite them in the kester with a herd of M3s carrying Ack-Viagra...........

Now you need to apply a bit more strategy and fore thought to taking airfeilds. Sounds like Hitech has given us some strategic nuance to chew on. And someone is already crying foul becasue they have to work a teensy weensy bit harder..........

I have noticed a ton more GVs taking part in base assaults now. It has to some degree antiquated the old base taking doctrine of flooding a base with vulchers and flying a goon in behind them. GVs really are an essential part of taking bases now. I think it's great - anything that causes folks to work together is good imo.

[bustr]

The game is evolving into a strategic war with a longer list of available tools and tasks to achive the primary objectives. The old days of everything in the air and gentelmanly combats is morphing into the fortunes and caprices of war. Not everyone really wants to duel as much as they want to be part of a large scale "something" with opportunities to shoot at other players.

The fog of war is more attractive than being singled out and testing ones self against other individuals. It's less personal while the existing Kill Message system is now more like everyone gets a trophy for showing up. You can already see our aircombat skill sets struggeling with evolving from knights of the skys jousting, into support skills for group war efforts. Eventualy individual hot ACM lone eagles will be relegated to the status of honored recognition for their skills. Valued for their support of war efforts. But, viewed as nuisances and griefers if they are picking away at the edges of a war effort in their perk rides just becasue they can. 

If HTC feels like keeping this franchish going for another decade. We will be a world at war with WW2 toys right down to the single FPS shooters fighting other FPS shooters to capture a town. While calling in air support to kill tanks to clear the map room for 10 player controlled FPS troops to capture the Town's flag. School vacation will become sqweeker ground wars.

At that point what will a Kills landed message mean to players who only like being an FPS shooter? Who will care if you are death in a K4 while the sqweeker FPS hoard rolls over 20% of your bases to win the war.

[Nathan60]

The game is evolving into a strategic war with a longer list of available tools and tasks to achive the primary objectives. The old days of everything in the air and gentelmanly combats is morphing into the fortunes and caprices of war. Not everyone really wants to duel as much as they want to be part of a large scale "something" with opportunities to shoot at other players.

The fog of war is more attractive than being singled out and testing ones self against other individuals. It's less personal while the existing Kill Message system is now more like everyone gets a trophy for showing up. You can already see our aircombat skill sets struggeling with evolving from knights of the skys jousting, into support skills for group war efforts. Eventualy individual hot ACM lone eagles will be relegated to the status of honored recognition for their skills. Valued for their support of war efforts. But, viewed as nuisances and griefers if they are picking away at the edges of a war effort in their perk rides just becasue they can. 

If HTC feels like keeping this franchish going for another decade. We will be a world at war with WW2 toys right down to the single FPS shooters fighting other FPS shooters to capture a town. While calling in air support to kill tanks to clear the map room for 10 player controlled FPS troops to capture the Town's flag. School vacation will become sqweeker ground wars.

At that point what will a Kills landed message mean to players who only like being an FPS shooter? Who will care if you are death in a K4 while the sqweeker FPS hoard rolls over 20% of your bases to win the war.

It almost sounds like you disapporve of  a more complicated game. So now you have to be organised to take a base I applaud that fact. As for the squeeker horde? I've been playing FPS' longer then they have and how many of them will you take out by bombing the town?

[bozon]

The game is evolving into a strategic war with a longer list of available tools and tasks to achive the primary objectives. The old days of everything in the air and gentelmanly combats is morphing into the fortunes and caprices of war.

It almost sounds like you disapporve of  a more complicated game. So now you have to be organised to take a base I applaud that fact.

Excuse me for cutting the quotes, I wanted to emphasize the points that I refer to.

While the ground game is fine and all, I do not find the shift in emphasis from full on air war to a combined arms game a positive thing. It is not the added complication that bothers me, it is the change of focus from air combat to ground combat. If the game gets any more realistic, we will face the fact that real estate is captured by ground forces and that wars are won from the ground. In the combined arms war, the importance of air power is often overrated, especially with WWII technology. With the current development direction of strengthening the importance of the ground war, the importance of air power will diminish. AH will turn from an air combat sim with a GV side show into WWII online game that has planes in it.

Lets face it, base capture is a critical component of the arena fun, often indirectly. In AH everyone choses their own goals. The guys that go out to capture bases keep the battle field changing, which means that the furballs change for the furballers, start targets move into range of the strat people and the ground war front moves for the GV people. Stagnant maps are very boring. Base capture attempt incite battles, joined by players not interested at all in the capture, just in the fighting itself.

However! the dependence on GV for capture removes from the air war. When the main force comes in GVs, the figter jocks have nothing to do. It happened to me the other day. Ords were porked and the only thing to do was to strife GVs, or a bunch of flaks to be exact. Hunting down 1 or 2 GVs and taking out the flak in a coordinated attack can be fun. Doing so for 10 of them gets old very fast. Dieing in a good air combat can be part of the fun, dying in a flyby to a hidden flak is not fun. The "right" thing to do was to spawn a tank, but I am not logging into AH to drive tanks or to dogfight them in a plane. I love planes and want an air war, sorry.

My egoistic interest is that GVs stay a side show. The added complication to base capture that make them a central force detract from my game. Do I want everyone to play my game? yes. That is the truth, but it is not for me to decide.

So, some way to reduce the importance of GVs versus planes:
1) Make GVs carry less than 10 troops (5), so 1 goon can make a capture, but several GVs are needed.
2) Make GV base supplies significantly less effective than a goon supplies.
3) Require that GV base supplies to be dropped at the map room in order to resupply town. Relax the drop distance requirement for goons.
4) Add GV bar dar! When a base is flashing I want to know if this is because of the single plane porking the dar & ord there or is it because there are 20 GVs driving on it. Bar dar is supposed to represent spotters and intelligence. HQ knows something about enemy ground movements, not only about planes. The GV red bar will attract the GV hunters types to the right place. The current bars for planes none for GVs are reminiscent of the times when GVs were a side show.

[caldera]

1) Make GVs carry less than 10 troops (5), so 1 goon can make a capture, but several GVs are needed.

+1 on that idea.  Flying in a goon is way tougher than sneaking an M3.  Especially now with the reduced icon range.

As for scoring captures, whomever gets the most troops in gets credit.  If two players get 5 in a piece, each will get .5 base captures and a "base captured" (or whatever it says - my last capture was tour 97, so can't remember) in the text buffer.

[JimmyD3]

+1 on that idea.  Flying in a goon is way tougher than sneaking an M3.  Especially now with the reduced icon range.

As for scoring captures, whomever gets the most troops in gets credit.  If two players get 5 in a piece, each will get .5 base captures and a "base captured" (or whatever it says - my last capture was tour 97, so can't remember) in the text buffer.

I would leave the GV quantity at 10 per M3, but increase the Goon quantity to 15. This would increase the chances of success in the Goon over the M3 but still make Base capture possible either way.

Of course the bottom line is why you play the game. There are the Fighters who want to do nothing but fight, the GVers that want to do nothing but GV's, then you have the Map Rollers that want to capture bases and roll the map. We all pay our $14.95 to play "our way". Hitech is providing a service we ALL enjoy or we wouldn't be here, I'm sure he is also attempting to enhance the attraction of the game to increase the number of participants. More power to him, and more fun for us.

[bustr]

The players who form the core of most indepth discussions on this forum are also the kind of player who can be handed a 3 page HowTo writeup about a new ACM manuver. Read it, then execute it in the game without seeing pictures or spending time with a trainer showing them the manuver.

A vast specrum of personalities, risk tollerance, attention span tollerance and give a rat'sA tollerance looms in the game in contrast to this core. If we were the norm the muppets would have multiple wings of muppets. Top Gun would have franchises in each of the three countires. If we really only wanted to be Knights of the Sky's, the DA and the AvA would be packed 7x24. While the LWMA would be full of GVers, bombers and HOing runners. And how did AW's Full Realism and Relaxed Realism Arenas work out for them?? Look at all of the arenas Aces High offers..........

We lie to ourselves and publicly in this forum to avoid ridicule with dripping Hubris. That we don't want to be the top of the food chain in the LWMA harvesting everything we see and screw everything else. Then land those "UberDork Killed 1000 Baby Seals" messages anytime we can. But, enhanced with the chaos of an Air War to cut the boardom while we don't have to directly participate in that War from the vaunted harvesting perch of our uber War Horses.

The odds are in our favor that 80% of our fights won't cause us to break a swet with that roll of the dice thrill we might meet another Uber Knight in the middel of our harvesting. Otherwise we would never play anywhere else but the DA. But, in the DA most are not gauranteed winning 80% of their fights becasue even it has harvesters of harvesters. And it gets boring after awhile, and everyone knows all the dance moves and the counters to each move. Harvesting inferiors is just good mindless cathartic fun if you can hubristicly rub it in ther faces later when you land those self validating strings.

So yes, if the game changes away from an Air Combat focus of Knights of the Skys. More twitch and shoot new players will be attracted increasing revenus because most people are not cut out to involve themsleves to the depts it requires. And edure the frustrations and constant abuse of the EGO it takes. To learn how to fight with WW2 fighters in a realistic physics simulation. Especialy with all of the harvesters circling the baby seal feilds waiting to kill them the moment their gear is up.

A full spectrum WW2 hardware war means everyone has more toys to kill with, while attracting new boys to play. And choices to what kind of war suits their personality and tollerance to invest their EGO being abused. And then those in the skys will be the ones who realy want to be in the skys. Kind of like the DA. The game has to change to survive.

[SmokinLoon]

+1 on that idea.  Flying in a goon is way tougher than sneaking an M3.  Especially now with the reduced icon range.

As for scoring captures, whomever gets the most troops in gets credit.  If two players get 5 in a piece, each will get .5 base captures and a "base captured" (or whatever it says - my last capture was tour 97, so can't remember) in the text buffer.

I dont want to completely veer this topic of course, but that is a whole different issue in itself.  Remember that the "10 troops in the MR" is a completely arbitrary number set by HTC.  I personally believe that there should be a need for multiple troops carriers for a base capture.  The lone exception would be the C47.  Currently, the M3, SdKfz 251, LVT-2, and C47 all carry the same number of troops even though in the real deal they were able to carry a wide variety of combat troops. HTC gives everything else the proper credit in terms of ability to carry ordnance and firepower so why not allow these troop and cargo carriers the same luxury?  The C47 could carry 27, the LVT-2 could carry 18, the M3 could haul 13 troops, and the 251 could carry 10.  Also, if we compare the abilities of each troop and cargo carrier to haul weight, we will see that the C47 should be able to haul quite a bit more that anything else in the same category.

I vote for HTC to up the requirement for a base capture to be 15 troops, then allow for a more accurate representation of the transports in AH, meaning perhaps a scaled effect of 18 troops for the C47, 15 for the LVT-2, 12 for the M3, and 10 for the SdKfz 251.  Also, I say to offer some variety to what the transports can carry.  Why not allow the 251 to carry 4 troops and 3 gv supplies?  Etc. 

Now.. back to the scheduled topic at hand: I have no issues with M3's being able to resupply the town, it certainly adds another aspect to AH!  I'm liking it!   

 

[JimmyD3]

The players who form the core of most indepth discussions on this forum are also the kind of player who can be handed a 3 page HowTo writeup about a new ACM manuver. Read it, then execute it in the game without seeing pictures or spending time with a trainer showing them the manuver.

A vast specrum of personalities, risk tollerance, attention span tollerance and give a rat'sA tollerance looms in the game in contrast to this core. If we were the norm the muppets would have multiple wings of muppets. Top Gun would have franchises in each of the three countires. If we really only wanted to be Knights of the Sky's, the DA and the AvA would be packed 7x24. While the LWMA would be full of GVers, bombers and HOing runners. And how did AW's Full Realism and Relaxed Realism Arenas work out for them?? Look at all of the arenas Aces High offers..........

We lie to ourselves and publicly in this forum to avoid ridicule with dripping Hubris. That we don't want to be the top of the food chain in the LWMA harvesting everything we see and screw everything else. Then land those "UberDork Killed 1000 Baby Seals" messages anytime we can. But, enhanced with the chaos of an Air War to cut the boardom while we don't have to directly participate in that War from the vaunted harvesting perch of our uber War Horses.

The odds are in our favor that 80% of our fights won't cause us to break a swet with that roll of the dice thrill we might meet another Uber Knight in the middel of our harvesting. Otherwise we would never play anywhere else but the DA. But, in the DA most are not gauranteed winning 80% of their fights becasue even it has harvesters of harvesters. And it gets boring after awhile, and everyone knows all the dance moves and the counters to each move. Harvesting inferiors is just good mindless cathartic fun if you can hubristicly rub it in ther faces later when you land those self validating strings.

So yes, if the game changes away from an Air Combat focus of Knights of the Skys. More twitch and shoot new players will be attracted increasing revenus because most people are not cut out to involve themsleves to the depts it requires. And edure the frustrations and constant abuse of the EGO it takes. To learn how to fight with WW2 fighters in a realistic physics simulation. Especialy with all of the harvesters circling the baby seal feilds waiting to kill them the moment their gear is up.

A full spectrum WW2 hardware war means everyone has more toys to kill with, while attracting new boys to play. And choices to what kind of war suits their personality and tollerance to invest their EGO being abused. And then those in the skys will be the ones who realy want to be in the skys. Kind of like the DA. The game has to change to survive.

Getting to deep for a Cartoon war

[bustr]

Getting to deep for a Cartoon war

I agree.

But, the second most enjoyed combat in the game is these Girly fights in the forums. Not everyone remembers to bring a Mae West when they decide upping the anti means a sycronised swimming break dancing contest in the deep end of the pool. A man's gotta know the limitations of his imagination when the waiding gets deep. Becasue this is a tad different than pushing a button and going piu, piu, piu.