Let me address this on two levels, tactically and strategically. Tactically, I’d like to see the long distance dot reduced in size, but augmented by dust trails when the vehicle is moving or firing. I would then like to see roads such that the vehicles climb hills better when driving on a road. This would be coupled to a new vehicle autopilot feature that would essentially guide a vehicle down the road without operator input. It would operate such that the player would guide the vehicle onto the road, getting it more or less lined up with the road, then hit a button to engage “auto.” It would then keep the vehicle on the road, so long as the vehicle speed wasn’t too fast for the curves in the road. “Auto” would also maintain speed as best as it could for the gear and slope of the road, perhaps automatically downshifting for the driver when the road becomes too steep. Any stick movement (if in the driver position) or rudder input (when in the gunner positions) would disengage the autopilot.
Strategically, I’d create a mobile base, represented by a large column of vehicles/guns/tanks that could roam over the countryside in the same way fleets move over the oceans in AH. As with fleets, these would be mobile spawn centers for gv’s. The mobile base would represent a field army, and they could have waypoints set for them in the same way as fleets. Your vehicle perk points would be used to determine who was in command of the field army (i.e. able to control its movement). Just as fleets must stay at least five miles from shore, field army (FA) waypoints could not be set to bring the FA any closer than five miles from a base, city, or factory. Likewise, the waypoint checking algorithm would check to see that the terrain is passable before accepting waypoints (no driving the FA up shear mountain cliffs). FA’s would respawn at or near the troop training strat facilities. Under the new strat system soon to be implemented (multiple and capture-able strat zones), each zone would have one FA. Capture the strat zone and the FA becomes yours once it’s destroyed in the field (just as fleets become yours after capturing their associated port and sinking the flagship).
An FA would consist of a column of tanks (the equivalent of the VH; destroy it and no GV spawning), a battery of howitzers (man-able in the manner of ship guns), some mobile AAA vehicles (again, some man-able as well as some automatic), and a supply train of trucks. Some of these supply trucks would be fuel bowsers (kill them and reduce fuel), ammo trucks (kill them and reduce ammo load outs for spawning GV’s), and troop trucks (kill them and…well, you get the idea). As with bases, these units rebuild very slowly; however, player resupply drops can reduce downtimes. What do you think?
