J_A_B,
I agree with everything you say. What I should have said is the AH is a flight sim
with a WW2 veneer. I don't want to relive WW2 either - those 7 hour missions we discussed earlier - and not wanting to relive WW2 in that way is why I don't much care for scenarios.
I take your point about the weakness of AH strat targets. "Strategy" is a fairly generic term, and what I meant by strategy in some recent raids was to keep the enemy occupied in one location while we grab one of his bases that we know he can't defend. The only game-strat element here is that things like vehicle hangars will stay down for 15 minutes, the acks for a little longer. I use the stopwatch function on my wristwatch to mark the time when the first target goes down, and can then advise my little helpers how much time they have left to get goon or M3 to capture.
HTC cares about its customers--that's why you don't see me cancelling my account in a huff when something I don't like comes up; I know HTC will fix it
Yep, I've always agreed with that too.
OK, so the old maps are back. One thing I learned about the player base with the pizza map is that furballs are very important to some. I remember when I used to furball (about four years ago) but I found I wanted to move on to better things. I want to be able to do base capture - without running up against a bunch of 109G10s waiting for me at 25K as I lumber along below with my 2x1000# bombs etc. I don't want to have to use the Mission Editor in order to organise a gangbang to win the base purely through numerical supremacy.
We have to find a middle way, and one in which the fighter jocks can do their thing, while those who want to capture fields by strategic mobilisation of their forces can do that if they wish. If I may draw upon my WB experience for a moment, about 2½ years ago I had an excellent tour of duty. I think I flew the F6F exclusively, as soon as the RPS enabled it. I flew it on jabo missions only, and did not seek furballs, and would get involved in a furball only to save my own base from being captured. In WB, you could fly low level without being seen, and if you could then bomb the radar at the target field, you could get to work on the rest of the field unseen. You would have to organise a ju52 troop plane to be in position for the field capture - I flew a bunch of those missions myself. During that tour, I got 428 kills and 175 deaths (mainly from acks, being blown up by own bomb, or being jumped by an enemy lying in wait overhead). The point being that
all these kills were incidental to the overall mission. I did not do a -lazs- and go out looking for kills for their own sake to pad my score.
I hope that the reintroduction of the old maps does not mean we will go back to the old AH formula of furballs everywhere, gangbangs, meaningless strat, and the jabo guys facing an impossible task owing to the bardar and flashing map. Those features are OK if the bases are well spaced, but when you're attacking a base that turns out to be only a few minutes flight from the next one, any jabo mission ends up being a suicide flight because of the LA7 swarm that ups from that nearest base and comes to kill you.
The pizza map was good for me because it allowed me to do some field captures without a Fariz-style mission in which 40 tiffies, 15 LANCs, 25 B17s, P38s and Spits are called for.
I
spoke out about the Mission Editor and bardar a few weeks ago. I was disappointed (but not surprised) not to get a response from HTC about it. They have listened to the guys who don't like pizza. Now, I hope they'll listen to the guys who don't like furballs and gangbangs.
