I for one am a big fan of strat in games, but I think this new system in AH has some issues to work out.
It seems to me that no one bothers to attack strat targets, because it is just way too easy for a small group of JaBos to kill the town and capture a zone control field and take over all the strat targets with one simple capture.
Strategy elements just don't seem to have any real effect on gameplay at all. It seems like the only thing in the strat system that anyone ever notices is the radar system. There seems to be something missing from the whole strat equation that I thought HTC was moving towards in 1.08, which was the supply depot system.
IMO, for strat to have any sort of meaning at all, there needs to be some sort of resource limits that effect the availability of items once the manufactured quantities have been used up.
Example:
A factory makes 10 planes of every type, every 5 minutes up to a limit of 100 planes of each type in storage. When all of the planes of a type are destroyed, then they will be unavailable until the factory makes 10 more 5 minutes later.
If the factory is damaged, production levels drop, but all types of planes are still manufactured. If the factory is destroyed, production stops completely.
The current system of the city level affecting the factory rebuild time could still be used as it is now. The closer the city is to 100%, the faster the factories are rebuilt
To expand the system further, Depots could be used to store additional planes which would then be distributed to the surrounding airfields by the trains and truck convoys (or by C47 supply flights from depot/factory directly to an airfield by a human player)
If the depot is destroyed, all stored planes at the depot would also be destroyed.
The factory could deliver more planes to each depot after each production run, and each depot would deliver to airfields as the resources there are used. No deliveries would take place unless there was a need.
Airfields could also have a storage capacity (50 of each plane type) which would need to be replenished as a battle went on. If the supplying depot was destroyed, then the field would begin running out of resources as they were used. If all of one plane type that were in storage were depleted, they would not be available again until the field was resupplied.
The same type of system could be used for all resources, including troops, fuel, ammo, ordnance, radar systems, etc.
Again, IMO, this type of strat system could really make strat mean something, instead of the current system, where it is either ignored, or factories are bombed just for points, rather than to hurt the enemy.
