Bombing Strats have become a waste of time...

[Chilli]

Coogan, I originally had agreed with your position UNTIL I saw it in action (which I sincerely attribute reduce in numbers of participants).

Take a strat down.... what does that even mean??  Okay, I will explain a bit what this means.  It means that the factories significantly prolong the damage done to key GAME resources.  Some of these resources actually help players find ACTION.

Why is it okay for your damage to be repaired before you land?  My understanding is that although the damage done to factory has been repaired, any damage to the actual base, for example AAA downtimes remains at the value that it was if attacked under the damaged factory condition.

What does that mean??  It means, instead of lone wolf action lingering over the heads of entire countries for hours and hours, a COORDINATED plan of attack is NOW necessary to take advantage of the damage done by your bombers.

Why is that BETTER for the GAME??  It places more bombers in the air at multiple locations and does not stagnate game play during low populated online activity.  Think of it this way, you are sharing the arena with all of its participants, why should you single handedly be allowed to treat the entire map as only your sandbox???

LocoMoto,  with downtimes of 180 minutes (yes 3 hours), 6 boxes of supplies does seem just about correct.  Reduce it significantly say even to 20 minutes and not many will bother to participate.  Mark my words, on many maps, the time and effort it takes just to get to the resupply region is bothersome enough.  As I should have stated in the beginning of this post, "be careful of what you ask for".

[molybdenum]

The current setting of 30 Minutes is simply an oversight that did not get set to the same as AHII when we setup the system variables in AHIII.
I'll adjust to to something lower that also reflects the less distance of flight to attack them.

HiTech

Very, very glad to hear that. I'd've been gone from AH3 because of the 30min resup if I hadn't discovered the Wirblewind was fun and useful, and I'm still only spending ~70% as much time on the game as before because the thing I like doing most matters a lot less nowadays...

Bomber pilots mostly play the game because they want what they do to, directly or indirectly, help their side achieve objectives (base takes/map wins). As others said before, if the strats can be full up before you even land your planes, why take an hour or two out of your life to bomb them?

One of the "solutions" offered to those buff pilots unhappy with 30min resups was (summarized) "Well, don't just bring one set of buffs! Bring a mission in!" That's ignorant, and paradoxically even less effective than the lone wolf strat runs in achieving persistent downtimes: someone--often many someones--always resups after a major strat run, and (except for the city strat, which is hit much less frequently nowadays) a c47 or m3's sup drop generally covers all the damaged areas. So what does it matter if you get the strat to 30% or 90%? The same guy or guys can bring it to 100% in the same amount of time if they want to. And the lower the strat %, the greater incentive to resup from your counterparts on the other side who also play the game to win.

Said another way, what took a single bomber pilot an hour or more of either watching the map or doing something afk, with no certainty of that hour spent being productive, to eventually do takes a resupper 20 minutes to undo in perfect safety! How much sense does that make?

Glad it's going to be fixed. I vote with the 10 minute crowd--that seems a reasonable balance.

[molybdenum]

Why is it okay for your damage to be repaired before you land?  My understanding is that although the damage done to factory has been repaired, any damage to the actual base, for example AAA downtimes remains at the value that it was if attacked under the damaged factory condition.

What does that mean??  It means, instead of lone wolf action lingering over the heads of entire countries for hours and hours, a COORDINATED plan of attack is NOW necessary to take advantage of the damage done by your bombers.

Chili, most players are in small squads or no squads at all, and coordination even amongst squad members is often sketchy, if not non-existent. It's unreasonable to expect people to be available as soon as you manage to hit strats to take advantage of the damage you've done to them; or to be waiting in tower to see if you actually manage to achieve said damage and then up to do something about it before resuppers can undo the damage.
In my previous post I said it can take one player only 20 minutes to fully resup a damaged strat. Last time bish were on the side of Mindinao rooks currently have, I timed it: took less than 4min for my c47 to not only reach the AAA strat, but for my sups to have effect. Bail and repeat. Boring, but if you want to help your team to win, you suck it up and do it.

[lunatic1]

HiTech, it WORKS as is now.... why fix something that isn't broken?   Just take the temperature of the number of posts in this thread alone.

The BALANCE is just about spot on, like someone pointed out the amount of time spent from a single individual spread across the impact on multiple players.  Leaving as is, puts more bombers in the air not less.

I actually attributed it to a spot of genius on your part    I seriously implore you to consider that any adjustment to lowering the resupply time might result in zero interest in resupply at all and in effect undo any "proportional" balance measures.

The real genius of the current resupply time for strats, places the downtimes (which is really the conversation) around the time envelop in which a coordinated attack would be needed to benefit one country over another.   Screw with this and the country side balance will seriously skew.  Been there and done that..... Log in and see a pointless country situation and simply log off.

 

[lunatic1]

This.  Please no change to resupply values.

 

[lunatic1]

you know this just occurred to me--don't know if somebody said this,but here goes--if you bomb the strats down to any time 50% 80% 40% etc.  it's up to your country men to pork the bases to kill that particular element--for example-ammo strat down for 120 mins. if your countrymen pork the ords at all frontline bases or even 2nd line bases-reupping the strats does not shorten the downtime of those ords on those bases. and to resupp the base ords is still 10 mins per drop.

what do you say to that?

[fd ski]

I think this is a perfect area for micropayments in Aces High, for 5$ i can purchase Bombing Group of B17s - 15 bombers ( or whatever right size was ) to bomb target selected by me, and heck, i can fly as part of it.

It will give bomber killers targets, things to resupply and maybe some extra cash for HTC

Than again, we would need to go back to OTTO discussions, but it works quite well offline from what i've seen....

[Zimme83]

In AH 2 a set of B-17 could nock down AAA strats to ~30%, that is way too much. Even though the new strats have turned the KI-67 into a hangar queen it is an improvement that the new factories are harder to take out.

[DREDIOCK]

One player shouldn't be able to control so much of the game. By having one player blasting strats he can cripple a whole team. Adjustments were made and now it takes more than a single player. Bring a number of boxes, bomb more targets causing the "enemy" to run more supply runs.

It still works, you just cant do it by your self any more.

Another example of why the Zone based system is better. Yes it needed some tweeks because you would have milk runners just milking local strats. BUT those milk runners would only be local
It has two benifits. It only effects the local strats and one person could make a difference at least locally but coudnt effect an entire side.

The national strats should be larger and take nothing less then a good sized mission with heavy bombers to take down completely.

[popeye]

HiTech, it WORKS as is now.... why fix something that isn't broken?   Just take the temperature of the number of posts in this thread alone.

The BALANCE is just about spot on, like someone pointed out the amount of time spent from a single individual spread across the impact on multiple players.  Leaving as is, puts more bombers in the air not less.

I actually attributed it to a spot of genius on your part    I seriously implore you to consider that any adjustment to lowering the resupply time might result in zero interest in resupply at all and in effect undo any "proportional" balance measures.

The real genius of the current resupply time for strats, places the downtimes (which is really the conversation) around the time envelop in which a coordinated attack would be needed to benefit one country over another.   Screw with this and the country side balance will seriously skew.  Been there and done that..... Log in and see a pointless country situation and simply log off.

 

[Shuffler]

The biggest difference in opinion comes from two types.  Those that play the game and to who fly a plane.  For me, I've done most all opportunities over the years.  In that time the game has been adjusted to suit whines or improve graphics. Many adjustments have been to the extreme.  4 minutes to 30 minutes is extreme. That's 7.2 times the previous amount. Read the op.  He Flys bombers, you don't.  He spent 2 hours in the air to make anot her separate mission possible.  Meaning, because of the way the strategy system is set up, his softie must happen before ANY other offensive operation can effectively begin.  Now he does not want it, nobody does.  It precipitates through the team to result in No offensive action being taken.   Have you played lately?  Do you see how incessantly boring the game is?  Did you notice player numbers down 75-80%?  And finally are YOU GOING TO FLY 2 HOURS IN A BOMBER TO EFFECTIVELY DO NOTHING?  nope.   Again, like most have said. Try the middle road, ten minutes, that 2.5 times the amount we lived with for the last year.  P.s.  having straps spread about the map is not as logical as centralised straps.  Again, not sure why ht  had to do the drastic step of removing central straps? The problem was with moving the location, not being centralized.  If they left central strats in the rear we would be happier campers.  Nope, extreme decisions rule the day, been that way 4 eva.

You just shot the ops argument down. What team? The op was told to get more bombers together, a team , to get his/her job done. It is no longer a single person job. It takes a team effort.

[BuckShot]

It takes a village to destroy a village.

[Ramesis]

you know this just occurred to me--don't know if somebody said this,but here goes--if you bomb the strats down to any time 50% 80% 40% etc.  it's up to your country men to pork the bases to kill that particular element--for example-ammo strat down for 120 mins. if your countrymen pork the ords at all frontline bases or even 2nd line bases-reupping the strats does not shorten the downtime of those ords on those bases. and to resupp the base ords is still 10 mins per drop.

what do you say to that?

lunatic... hence my post 

[FishBait]

Two types of players: Those who like to 'win the game', and those that like to fight.

Those who like to win the game, and play as required to do so (hoard attacks, dropping strats, etc) will, in time, eventually tire of it. You can be plate-spinning autistic and you're still going to eventually tire of the repetition. It's a mindless, skill-less endeavor.

Those who like to fight are a different story. They never tire of it, because until they're #1, there's always a challenge ahead of them. And once they reach number one - which is rare and always open to interpretation - they've got one heck of a job ahead of them to hold it.

It would seem to me that AH has made a big mistake catering to the first group, which continues to further alienate the second group. And in my opinion - the second group is where the money is, where the longevity is, and where the loyalty is (or perhaps was).

All of the guys who have been your bread and butter over the years - guys I remember thoroughly enjoying fighting with and against - are telling you to leave things the way they are. But no - let's cater to the first group instead?? Doesn't make any sense to me.

[The Fugitive]

I dont think it caters to the first so much as the second group doesn't need anything but people who fight. All the options added, old and new are to give a wider base to pull in a more diverse crowd.... hoping to keep this crowd for income.

The win the game group isn't bad, after all they do provide targets for those of us that only care about fighting  I think the trick is going to be to get the win the war group into learning different ways to win the war. This way they don't get bored, and if the missions are more exciting they may actually enjoy fighting for that win more than they are now.