Defending the strats - a case study

[The Fugitive]

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
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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
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Even without A35 the AA factory has no chance being defended unless you put up a constant cap.


NDSILES
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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 approach

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...

Yes, because what you type usually makes sense.

I agree that the balance is off and a "tweak" is needed.

[Tinkles]

Yes, because what you type usually makes sense.

I agree that the balance is off and a "tweak" is needed.

I concur.

I also agree with drediocks post quoted in lusche's 'wall of text'. 

And yes, I read it all, for the same reason as lusche, for you make sense. 

[save]

On a big map with low-intensive fights, HQ down means a percentage of the affected country players simply log off. Harden the target(s) is by far the easiest way to keep them online.

[Lusche]

On a big map with low-intensive fights, HQ down means a percentage of the affected country players simply log off. Harden the target(s) is by far the easiest way to keep them online.

This is not the HQ thread 

[icepac]

Dar bar appears at high altitude enemy field.

It slowly creeps toward my country's strats.

Word goes out on 200 of possible start raid with suspected yummy b-29s, updates given every few minutes.

Strats start flashing after many updates over the last 75 minutes.

On country channel......."oh my god!" "Our starts are under attack."

I guess you drive the bus for 11 one-way trips and surrender many a proxy to the pistol wielding chute standing below your bailing c47.

OR..........you can up a proper cap while afk climbing, check back on enemy dar bars while you do something productive, and then sit down to a 400mph interceptor with a chance of tasty enemy b-29s nearby.

You would be amazed how far some planes will go "up there"

Some planes are so long legged, you can hunt high buffs over enemy starts and maybe bag a defender on the way out.

It's not hard to find entertainment in this sim and most have barely scratched the surface.

[scott66]

Personally...the first thing I do when I log on is check strats. ..it lets me know how difficult defending will be and who's bases to try and take..I would love to be able to defend our strats but I have a bad habit of thinking the best way to hit a bomber is to get saddled up on there six...never works out..some of the bomber pilots are extremely accurate...one in particular..we know who he is..when I know it's him flying the bomber I run away...I mean mean extend

[molybdenum]

Well done Lusche.

Greebo is on the right track.  There should be a price  to pay for the bombers seeking high altitude safe haven by way of bomb hitting results.  

There already is an accuracy price high alt bombers pay, as well as a more important one: time to target.
As much as some of us might want to, we can't be playing this game 24/7. We have a limited amount of time in our lives to devote to AH, and strat runs are time consuming, especially the ones in which you grab those extra 10 or 15k of alt. High alt strat runs are already "costly" enough without adding some arbitrary penalty just because they're difficult for the minority of players in the game who actually care about them to stop.

[bozon]

There already is an accuracy price high alt bombers pay

Barely any. Bombing accuracy is a total non issue in bombers unless you have no idea what you are doing. In AH most players will achieve better accuracy with a 25k level bomber than they will with a dive bomber, unless the latter rides the bombs into the target.

[GhostCDB]

You are all poo. 

[molybdenum]

Barely any. Bombing accuracy is a total non issue in bombers unless you have no idea what you are doing. In AH most players will achieve better accuracy with a 25k level bomber than they will with a dive bomber, unless the latter rides the bombs into the target.

I'm actually a pretty good bomber pilot, and accuracy at 30k is by no means a non-issue. I can do ~30% more damage to city strats at 10k than I can at 30k, for example.
But time investment is my larger point, and it just seems a bit funny to me that a lot of players won't take the 20 minutes or whatever it is to climb to alt to have a decent chance of intercepting high alt strat raiders, when we buff pilots often took an hour or more to get to the same spot on the map.
I understand Lusche's point that spread out strats on some maps means that some targets are virtually indefensible--at least before the buffs drop on target--but to me that adds an interesting different dimension to the game, not just an easier target. With towns and AAA out of action longer you--as a player and as a team--have to adjust your tactics in order to succeed. I like that.

[shotgunneeley]

I'd like to point out that earlier today, thanks to a timely intercept by the Snailman and his trusty ta152, the only thing my b29 was able to destroy was a knit farmer's field...

From the Rook side, I upped a single B-29 with the intention of getting to 25k and pounding knit ammo and AAA factories. I was able to get leveled out at 25k just before I hit knit airspace, certainly the bare minimum of climb distance and time to reach my goal. As I lined up for the first target (AAA I believe it was), I noticed an enemy dar bar was looming in front of me. Sure enough, as I calibrated and got the AAA factory in my sight, a 190 class aircraft appeared at my 12 o'clock level thundering towards me. I manned my nose gun and managed to get a brief ping with no apparent damage; he however oiled my #4 engine. At this point I was too far past the AAA factory and could not drop my eggs. He made several more passes at me, damaging my #3 engine as well as I desperately tried to fend him off. Knowing that I could not possibly reach the ammo factory, I jettisoned my bombs to loose weight on the hapless knit countryside below. On the fourth pass I managed to deal a deathblow to the 152, sending it into a tailspin. My journey was not over, as I was fighting to keep a level and true course home on two functioning engines with a bf-109g6 dogging me. Ultimately I was able to critically injure this plane enough for it to make a retreat down to its field with no more damage to myself. The landing was precarious. Knowing that perk points were on the line with only my port engines working, I lowered the flaps and barely managed to clear the trees on the edge of the runway before dropping down to the pavement. All told is was a harrowing 1.33 hour flight.

Though I had won but a small tactical victory, Snail claimed the much larger strategic victory by saving the knit factories... for now...   

[Lusche]

The final deathblow to the Ta 152H was preceded by an earlier PW to the same plane, so the interceptor pilot decided to make some fast, more aggressive attacks before finally losing consciousness.

It didn't work out 

[EagleDNY]

I doubt HTC are going to go back to a single strat city having just got rid of it. So what else could be done to rebalance the game?

Real radar's range increases with altitude and also for larger targets. So have the game generate a greatly increased radar dot radius for bomber formations, either all the time or for formations over a certain alt.

Hopefully we will get large cloud formations back in the MA in the new version. If so it might be possible to arrange a 50% chance of cloud cover over each strat at say 15K. Higher bombers would then be forced to try an alternate strat or make a second pass when it has cleared.

More vicious or variable high alt wind shear effects could be introduced that make very high alt bombing really inaccurate and so forces bombers down to where fighters have a better chance of intercepting.

I'm still trying to figure out what the thinking was on that - I liked the big city with all the strats as it made big buff missions fun thing to do on squad nites.   What the big city strat complex lacked was any real ack protection - same thing we get with the CV group.   A single box of bombers flying into a well defended strategic target should be blown out of the sky at least 50% of the time. especially if you are coming in low.   As it is now all you get is a couple of pings and you fly away and get your paint touched up.  Fix that issue and a lot of the single box noe strat raiders will go away. 

[Lusche]

I'm still trying to figure out what the thinking was on that - I liked the big city with all the strats as it made big buff missions fun thing to do on squad nites.  

That's what I miss most on a personal level - large, escorted, high altitude bomber missions.

What the big city strat complex lacked was any real ack protection - same thing we get with the CV group.   A single box of bombers flying into a well defended strategic target should be blown out of the sky at least 50% of the time. especially if you are coming in low.   As it is now all you get is a couple of pings and you fly away and get your paint touched up.  

The old central strats (and the leftover City) even still was quite well defended by ack VS noe raiders. Today's single factories have just a few light ack guns left, and not even a single puffy ack at all.


Puffy ack over the City/central strat was also nice, but (like CV puffy as well) suffered from the fact that puffy can & will hit the lead bomber only:
From Sep 12 to Dec 13 I did 549 attack runs on the Central Strats losing 51 bombers to puffy and got various degrees of damage on maybe twice as many. But not even once a drone was visibly hurt by puffy, no *boom*, no smoking engines, no fuel leaks, nada.
No wonder puffy doesn't do much against bombers when 2 of 3 planes in a formation are invulnerable to it.

[Scherf]

Less than 1/10 losses over the strats? Hmmm, my mossie got PW'ed one time in four, each time at the same moment as a flak hit in the port wing.


Grump.