Arlo Check This Out.

[bustr]

Arlo,

I was watching more films from one of our capitol ship focused competitors. Their arenas are either 10x10 miles or kilometers, but small areas. They allow ships it looks like within 100yds of shore to maneuver between islands and other structures. Their action is at warp 9 compared to our task group combat. So I started mapping shore lines with the 3mile minimum distance for task group segments along with trying to use the 18 miles of our haze for short term concealment.

Came up with this, small red circles are 3 miles the big one is haze distance and those three 1mile islands are tall enough gunners will loose sight for a few minutes. Task group commanders can risk the passage between the islands to cut across the circle. Had to keep shrinking those islands until I could get slop room between the segment barriers for commanders who are a bit tipsy that evening.  I still cannot make up my mind if I should include a battle ship task group at each port. As it is this will keep task groups at each other all the time along with bombers, PT's, and shore batteries. But, they will have a short hop back into the fight after they re-spawn. Players in our game seem to look at task groups like they are giant tanks with auto ack that also launch planes off the top of the turret. I've been shrinking the task group combat area down to this "no place to hide a task group" size to see if it generates a lot of activity.

There will be a medium airfield on each of those points with shore batteries to make trying a port capture by ship very risky but, it would be in 16in "Shift_Q" range while the battleship would be out of visual range from the port. By air is a calculated risk of this game to loose any capture-able asset, and I still haven't created my GV spawn map for the terrain. I think the daytime bish who capture half of everyone's territory before the evening, not having a furball island out there to take away the three fun bases, would focus on trying to own all three ports and their task groups just to stick it to the knights and rooks like usual. Makes me wonder if a smaller barrel to shoot fish in will be needed for the knights and rooks to capture back their assets.....

[Arlo]

Yowsa! 

[bustr]

The three tiny islands kept bugging me and I finally figured out why. They introduce too much complexity to encourage all players to thread that needle. This game has a problem that once something complex is introduced, it gets avoided because of the complexity. It's a game and not real life so the majority of people just want to get with the piu, piu, piu and not have to really play chess to fight or get form one place to another. I reduced it to a single island to give task groups a small amount of space to hide in the 18 mile haze range and maneuver. Otherwise task groups would just cut straight across and eliminate any chance of using the haze how ever short term.

[Arlo]

Even better.

[bustr]

With this configuration I think the battleship task group is doable. Poor sods will whack each other from 22 miles and force gaggles of bombers to patrol the pond......weeeeee....

But, ship to ship gunnery slug fests will be more common instead of the usual slipping away to fight another day. Wonder if this will bring back bomber intercepting as a game standard like the old days? Lets see, I put the strats in a big complex for the bombers and then I put the ships in a 2 sector area pond.....this might get good.....

[Arlo]

With this configuration I think the battleship task group is doable. Poor sods will whack each other from 22 miles and force gaggles of bombers to patrol the pond......weeeeee....

But, ship to ship gunnery slug fests will be more common instead of the usual slipping away to fight another day. Wonder if this will bring back bomber intercepting as a game standard like the old days? Lets see, I put the strats in a big complex for the bombers and then I put the ships in a 2 sector area pond.....this might get good.....

I'm sayin' ....