The war is designed very poorly, the biggest flaw is no matter how many times you bomb a base, no matter how many players you shoot down in a furball.....
The base never runs out of aircraft or tanks. You can have two sides furballing for hours.... Side A is a bunch of hot sticks and side B not so much, and are dying by the boat loads. But because of the fact that AH has unlimited plane sets side B can never run out of aircraft.
No, that is why the war is designed AWESOMELY. Being able to fight, die, rise again and fight some more, ad infinitum? That is at least one culture's vision of heaven (Valhalla), the only difference is that AH players have to provide their own ale and delicious pork products, BYOA&P as it were. But hey, that's still a pretty good deal, considering we only pay $15 and don't have to die in battle first.
If there was some kind of attrition built in, you'd see noobs criticized for trying to fly fighter at all and the player base at large would be discouraged from flying with any balls whatsoever. No thank you.
What makes air/ground superiority mostly irrelevant in the MA is the hangar dropping dynamic combined with the variety of difficulties in reliably intercepting jabos and especially heavy buffs on their way to drop hangars. It is far easier to take a base via hangar dropping than it is to take that base by beating all defenders down to the ground and keeping them there long enough for the troop transport to carry them in. Not nearly as much fun, but easier.
Whichever side first has a player who decides to end the fight via dropping hangars, and who possesses the small amount of competence requisite lack of a boredom gene for that mission, that side tends to win the fight. Thus, furballing/fighter-on-fighter violence IS mostly irrelevant to winntehwarzing. However this is not a problem, because feeling the need to be "useful" to an arbitrary chess piece side in a video game where no one ever really wins or loses anything tangible, that is a bit mental wouldn't ya say?
I am entirely content with being completely useless to the pixelated territorial ambitions of armchair generals.
This leaves only one problem with the game, namely the fact that this statement
You can have two sides furballing for hours...
Is hardly ever true anymore, and this lack of action is the main reason behind the player numbers death-spiral.
