Strat play was horked up with 1.08. 1.09 is going a long way towards fixing it. There's been some good discussions with HiTech on this subject in the Gameplay forum. An important point to realize is that downtime is now 3 HOURS for all strat targets except the HQ, which is 2 hours. The new system works like this:
City sends trains to factories/refineries/training camps every 10 minutes. Safe arrival of a train or resupply by a player reduces down time by 30 minutes. Now, here's the linchpin: Cities CANNOT be player resupplied. Kill the city, and no trains spawn from it to resupply the factories. Kill barracks at fields an no resupply flights can take off from there, either.
So, completely kill a refinery, for instance, and no convoys to fields will have fuel resupply on them. Result, longer downtime for field fuel. Even if a train arrives at the refinery immediately after you destroy it, it will still take an hour for the six trains necessary to completely restore it. Otherwise, it will take one guy 6 C-47 flights, or six guys doing one C-47 flight, to completely rebuild a strat target.
HiTech said that when the new mega-terrain is released with an upcoming 1.09 patch (not necessarily the next patch, but sometime soon), they may do away with player resupply of strat targets altogether. That's because there will be three or four strat zones for each country, or what I call provinces, each with their own city and set of strat target. Killing a provincial strat target will only affect fields in that province, localizing the effects of strat somewhat. Also, who ever controls a majority of bases in a province will "own" that province's city and strat targets!
So strat play is already more relevant with 1.09. It will only get better with the upcoming mega-terrain and strat patch, as far as strat gameplay is concerned. I for one am thrilled with the changes. It's given me a reason to go back into the MA (though my heart and soul still belong to the CT:D).
Sabre
CT Team
