But it's all even more difficult. We have many maps, on which crucial factories are placed at practically indefensible locations near the front. This might even be very unbalanced between the countries as well. For example SMpizza:
SMPIZZA
Ammo factory right in front of an enemy 3.5 base. The other two countries have their ords factory far more removed to the rear.
SFMA
Even without A35 the AA factory has no chance being defended unless you put up a constant cap.
NDSILES
TT insures there are constantly darbars up in 9.9 and 10.9. A low/medium altitude bomber formation can easily go through the south of these sectors. No skill or rocket science required, when you cross into 11.9 to attack the AA factory it's too late for any defender to up.
He will possibly catch you if he tries, but only after the attack happened.
But why you don't just fly cap then? Three hours downtime.
If you fly cap there, 'they' just will strike elsewhere. It needs only one or two sets to break the factory for a few hours. Flying cap would need like 3-4 players hovering over the factories for hours without any combat.
But it's the same with bases! You can't stop 25k bombers unless you fly cap!Most bombers attackind bases fly lower than this, because with shorter downtimes of local objects and fluid battles it doesn't pay off as much to climb to 34k. Getting your hangars down for 10 minutes is also just a short time local effect.
IMHO it's again a matter of balance and concentration of combat (I will elaborate on that)
We had dispersed factories before, which often could, like these ones, easily be hit by medium bombers with little risk of being intercepted before the drop. But theres a big difference:
Old dispersed strats: Zone system, local effect only with also smaller impact - Short factory downtimes (45 minutes, well resupplyable)
New dispersed strats: country wide effect, much harder impact on the bases - Long factory downtimes (180 minutes) - resupplyable, but only at a small pace (4 mins per drop)
These new settings had been great for central strats, which were somewhat more difficult to attack and required much more time investment by the buff pilots.
But then the strats were dispersed and not a thing was adjusted. You still have the same huge impact, but now often little chance to defend them at all.
Please take also into account that there had been much less strat defenders than strat attackers. With the strats all over the place, it's often like 1 player trying to cover them all the time.
And finally the the mission magnet:
The central strats, particularly on large maps, were a nice tool to create large bomber raids, it was even big enough for a nice B-29 mission. I personally loved battling against huge high alt escorted raids.
The largest single target left is the City, which can easily put to 0% by two B-29s alone. For any factory, two Lancasters or B-24 can do about the same.
Taking all of this into account,
I'm all for this approachI think as per my suggestion a couple of posts ago they should do both. That is have local and national strats. National would have a more drastic effect but be both more dangerous and difficult to achieve
That would leave still targets open to bomb with shorter ranged, more vulnerable bombers like G4M, He 111, Ju 88
I wonder if anybody actually reads all this wall of text...
