How to fix the zero fight country???

[popeye]

Maybe put fewer "Barracks" on airfields and Vbases would encourage the attacking team to kill them to prevent M3 resupplies.

[RufusLeaking]

The advantage of attack is to choose the target.

Defense has to have options other than sitting in the tower, waiting.

It is balanced as it is. 

Use a little imagination and coordination. Make a feint. Time the attacks. Do a classic NOE.

[The Fugitive]

M3's are like chicken fries, you can't eat just one! 

Yup, and for a guy looking for a fight there is nothing better than chasing M3s in my plane of choice 

I think the town resupply is a bit off. It should be an option, but not the easiest option. There has to be a balance. If your going to make it easy for a single player to to be able to drop enough supplies to tip the scale from white flag to NOT white flag, then why should it take 4 guys (2 per base) to drop 4 barracks at two bases that spawn into the one your attacking? What about the bases that have 3 bases spawning in? 4 to 6 guys to counteract the efforts of a single player. Its the same as the dropping of HQ all over again.

And this is during "prime time" when there are fights available, more and more people having to do things other than fighting. Add in the low numbers of early day/euro time and that makes it even worst. Half your force is busy fighting buildings (barracks) just so a single guy cant stop you from maybe getting a base. When during a low numbers time your first choice shouldn't be run supplies to change the flag, it should be to get in a plane or GV and fight/defend.

Making the barracks easier to drop at other bases is an easy fix (i think there is an arena adjustment for "hardness" of the barracks), Changing the way supply works for a town may be a bit tougher. Instead of the supplies pushing the percentage of town down back over what ever the magic number for a white flag is, make it so that a percentage of the downed building that ARE down need to be resupplied before the flag is changed.

If the town needs to be 80% down for a WF, and we get it to 85%. Supply runners need say 2 runs (resupply 4% each run) to get it to to 77% down and so change the flag. This how I think it works now. Instead, make it a flat rate. Resupplyers need to resupply 25% of the town (7 runs) to change the flag back .

With low numbers this isn't a good option any more, too many people, too much time for attackers to get troops in. However with good numbers it becomes an option again. 2 or 3 guys can run supplies and maybe get the town back up enough to force a longer attack. Both sides fighting for the base will have more numbers so M3 chasing is a sport for some as the defenders will have those that will try to make the runs.

Again, the best solution would be a massive increase in numbers, but until then another tweak may be in order.

[waystin2]

Yup, and for a guy looking for a fight there is nothing better than chasing M3s in my plane of choice 

I think the town resupply is a bit off. It should be an option, but not the easiest option. There has to be a balance. If your going to make it easy for a single player to to be able to drop enough supplies to tip the scale from white flag to NOT white flag, then why should it take 4 guys (2 per base) to drop 4 barracks at two bases that spawn into the one your attacking? What about the bases that have 3 bases spawning in? 4 to 6 guys to counteract the efforts of a single player. Its the same as the dropping of HQ all over again.

And this is during "prime time" when there are fights available, more and more people having to do things other than fighting. Add in the low numbers of early day/euro time and that makes it even worst. Half your force is busy fighting buildings (barracks) just so a single guy cant stop you from maybe getting a base. When during a low numbers time your first choice shouldn't be run supplies to change the flag, it should be to get in a plane or GV and fight/defend.

Making the barracks easier to drop at other bases is an easy fix (i think there is an arena adjustment for "hardness" of the barracks), Changing the way supply works for a town may be a bit tougher. Instead of the supplies pushing the percentage of town down back over what ever the magic number for a white flag is, make it so that a percentage of the downed building that ARE down need to be resupplied before the flag is changed.

If the town needs to be 80% down for a WF, and we get it to 85%. Supply runners need say 2 runs (resupply 4% each run) to get it to to 77% down and so change the flag. This how I think it works now. Instead, make it a flat rate. Resupplyers need to resupply 25% of the town (7 runs) to change the flag back .

With low numbers this isn't a good option any more, too many people, too much time for attackers to get troops in. However with good numbers it becomes an option again. 2 or 3 guys can run supplies and maybe get the town back up enough to force a longer attack. Both sides fighting for the base will have more numbers so M3 chasing is a sport for some as the defenders will have those that will try to make the runs.

Again, the best solution would be a massive increase in numbers, but until then another tweak may be in order.

Here I thought you were ignoring me.  Pompous much? 

[Zimme83]

People whining about its too easy to kill strats so now its a lot harder to take the strats down. (cause noone defending them) it means that towns etc is down for much shorter time and its easy to resup them. So now people are whining about that...
Why no go all the way and make the game like War Thunder with air spawns and a 5 minute furball since there should be no form of strategy or team work involved in the game...

[Lusche]

If the town needs to be 80% down for a WF, and we get it to 85%. Supply runners need say 2 runs (resupply 4% each run) to get it to to 77% down and so change the flag. This how I think it works now. Instead, make it a flat rate. Resuppliers need to resupply 25% of the town (7 runs) to change the flag back .

Resupply of objects substracts time (10 minutes in case of bases and towns), not a (fixed) percentage. A single drop of supplies could bring back anything between all objects or none at all - it depends strictly on their remaining downtime at that point.
Just wanted to make that clear for any newer friends that read this thread and don't know much about the resupply system, who  might have been confused by this passage above



(Such a misconception might also be the cause for the frequent shouts of "15 objects resupplied" or so in multi player town resupp runs, which never made much sense).

[pembquist]

(Such a misconception might also be the cause for the frequent shouts of "15 objects resupplied" or so in multi player town resupp runs, which never made much sense).

o

While your probably correct about people misunderstanding I always thought it was a way you could gauge how many buidings were down; look at the dt for the downtimes to get a sense if they are uniform or 3 minutes to 100 minutes use the the number of objects resupplied to get the number of buildings down as opposed to estimating from the length of the dt list.

As to the game dynamics, for base captures to be fun for both defenders and takers at the same time you either need bigger numbers or a different game. I'm pretty sure it would be amazing if there was a way to make the rules both dynamic and non-capricious while being universally understood and intuitive but I think that would require a huge amount of work and development. Tweaking might help here and there but it is fundamentally a very difficult problem.

[Zoney]

I got my brand new system up and running around Noon yesterday and had a blast.  Plenty of fights everywhere, lots of friends playing too!

[Shuffler]

I usually do not worry about towns much as I am a fighter. I do sometimes get involved in defending a base or taking one.... Usually as a fighter.

[bustr]

Most of our terrain designs are from another era which had hundreds of players on 24x7. They do not work well once converted to AH3 and it's trees for the GVers to either attack quickly and take over a field, or the defenders to defend quickly. Speed is one major key when you have low numbers to attack and defense. And how you use the terrain.

The buzzsaw map showed us how to bring small numbers together, at least during prime time, to fight. One great complaint from the GV community about AH3 is the trees. Unlike AH2, unless the terrain is like the buzzsaw terrain, open for miles to see, you don't get anywhere fast in a GV. On the buzzsaw terrain aircraft can find the GVs to stop their base assaults. Or the GVs can get to the base rapidly enough to over whelm a few defenders and take it. Terrain makes this speed possible for attack and defense.

What the AH2 converted terrains don't have is generic roads for cross country speed if GVers want to risk it. Or for defenders to run out to the spawns or town quickly. This means air defenders looking for GVs waste lots of time and feed themselves to wirbels getting too close to find GVs hiding in trees. Things get stuck in a stalemate because of the trees.

I'm trying a new airfield,town,spawn design that will probably be good for prime time. Probably bad for off prime allowing quick base sneaks by two or three players. But, it will make seeing GVs easier while giving them an option for speed getting at the town and airfield. AH3 needs generic roads to help speed up GV access to destinations. Airfields and towns expecting to come under assault in the real world would not allow forests next to the asset. So my design puts a 1\2 mile grass ring around the assets and lacking for a generic road function, I'm using the smallest brush size to put in grass roads.

The screen shot is a medium field with two spawn points into it. If you look closely I'm using villages as the spawn destination with grass roads as quick access lanes to the town and airfield. The villages with all the houses will make spawn camping interesting at least. I believe in AH3 we are facing a population driven design problem while nothing but a 4x4 sector two sided arena will fix the low numbers problems the OP is experiencing. And then no one will want to login for a guaranteed trip to the tower every time they up. The OP is a rather highly accomplished vet.



 

[Lazerr]

I got my brand new system up and running around Noon yesterday and had a blast.  Plenty of fights everywhere, lots of friends playing too!

Whats your point if i may ask?  Would changing the downtime of a town change your experience?

It does for off peak times when people are trying to kick up a fight with low numbers.

[bustr]

OP should have gotten to the specific point he is complaining about and titled this post differently at the same time. This is still his wish for Hitech to globally change things to force off peak low numbers to fit his wishes for combat. Peak time the arena has fights and people having fun. The AH2 era terrain designs are not about fast action so much as about slowing down 50-100 aircraft NOE hoards. Even they could use some adjustments for the smaller peak time numbers.

The low numbers the OP contends with would be better served by a three country terrain with up to 5 airfields and 2 GV feilds on each side, on say a 5 square sector terrain. He would still have the same problems getting people to fight him, but he wouldn't have to travel as far to get disappointed. At least two weenies couldn't flip the map in about an hour just to screw with him.

Way back when didn't a function save and close one terrain then brought out another terrain because of low numbers late night? If it is not being used now, chances are it caused cancellation of subscriptions back then. Or was it during the split MA arenas and one would just close for the night when numbers dropped. Low numbers on a giant terrain is guaranteed to generate posts like this.

I wonder if those same low numbers of players would bother to log back into a late night low numbers MA when the warning message popped up to countdown the arena shutdown? A terrain that tiny would have to be really entertaining to overcome not wanting to fight with no real place to hide. That is the real root of this problem.   

[Lazerr]

Just curious to ask everyone.. how would a reduced resupply time on a town effect your gameplay?

[Zimme83]

All problems in the game can be boiled downed to one root problem: Number of players. It is simply not fun to play a multiplayer game with no players. Euro prime time game have already imploded months ago and U.S prime time isn't far away either. Compared to 3 years ago the number of kills over a tour has dropped by ~67%. Without a large input of new players soon there will be no game. I don't even bother to log on on weekdays because i know that there is no gameplay going on anyway.

This is an awesome game, problem is that no one knows about it. I still haven't met anyone that have Heard of this game....

[serun]

(Such a misconception might also be the cause for the frequent shouts of "15 objects resupplied" or so in multi player town resupp runs, which never made much sense).

I usually do this when several are re-supplying a town. I thought it made sense because those M-3's behind would then know whether their load was going to be needed at town to get it back up or they could divert to the base with their load as the base is often damaged as well in these situations especially radar.

Just my thoughts on it.