Scale, time, and activity should be something you can create a formula to design terrains for the MA. With my three terrains back to back over two years, I saw that formula for this open world environment. Aces High has been unique in it's scale versus the competition. Unless all you want to do is sign in, then mindlessly furball like an arcade game, the MA as it has played for 20 years has to be large. The scale is needed so furballing, tanking, bombing, CVing and territory capture can happen at the same time. Either all together at one spot or, five seperate activity groups doing their thing oblivious of each other. That is the nature of sand box worlds with few structured activities other than imagination.
The smaller you make the arena, the more arcadeish the game becomes due to compressing the country populations so it's easy to constantly get at people. Kind of like the furball island on NDisles when all the knights decided to play there swamping the smaller numbers of bish and rooks who showed up. Numbers in a small area creates a MOB mentality that has a life of it's own. More often we see this with base captures, when it happens with furballs, it mostly brings out the worst gameplay furball tactics from the winning hoard. And an amazing amount of timid play from that largest group in the furball instead of mass whopping down on the lesser numbers they are hoarded against. I've watched this phenomenon for nearly 20 years. The largest group in the furball with overwhelming odds will not mass attack like an organized fighter sweep by a large squad. Instead they will mill together circling from the ground up to 20k and avoid combat looking for a pick for hours upon boring hours.
So smaller terrains would solve our game play problem? Yet we have 20 years of evidence the smaller the area you jam numbers into, the more they will play badly together becasue of hoard mentality. Remember WT only jams 10 on each side into it's postage stamp arenas for a set period of time. Not much different than our old squad dueling league back in AH2. Hitech would be setting us loose for 24x7 with almost no rules to use our imaginations without even sides like squad dueling did. And it would be three countries, not two teams of 10 or 12 until the last man standing, about 10-15 minutes of piu, piu, piu versus keeping an arena open 24x7.
Here are screens shots, one is my terrain Oceania which is a 10x10 terrain and has activity during prime time when ever it's up. And below it is that terrain reduced to a 5x5. Flying P51 you can easily in a short time harass every enemy field in each country with no place to get away from being griefed on landing or take off on a 5x5. Players with 262 points could easily hang out in your back field waiting for bombers that will be low and slow. Or those P51 hanging out in yours waiting to pick 262 on take off. 5x5 would be Hitech's version of those tiny WT arenas that you have no place to run but, for 24x7. And how would you capture feilds unless everyone simply ignores each other while taking bases. And to meet 20% of each country would be about 3 feilds a piece from the other countries. So the same cast of characters who flip maps in the wee hours would probably spend the night flipping a queue of 5x5 maps all night long. Then the biggy no one wants to hear in this game every time I've brought it up. You need space in this kind of combat game so players can have a buffer from being slaughtered. On that 5x5 version several squads would turn the night into their pet feeding ground and abuse everyone. There would be no buffer space which would drive customers out of the game becasue a small number of players would dictate how they play the game. This would be the furballer's version of those single finger salutes at the end of AH2 by strat runners which kept radar shutdown almost all night. A 7x7 might work, it would be harder on bomber players than fighter players while having scale. Yeah back to that formula for the AH Melee arena.
