Originally posted by texace
As wacky as it sounds, it adds raelism as well. Planes didn't magically appear for you to use...they had the be built and shipped. If the planes couldn't be built, the planes couldn't be shipped. So let's say a Spit factory was destroyed, but everyone from the country/field kept using and destroying Spitfires. Eventually the supply of planes would run out and the Spits couldn't be used until the factory cuold be rebuilt. Am I right, Shiva?
Not quite. Destroying a single site, no matter how big, shouldn't cut off supplies of a plane type absolutely. Look at how Germany dispersed its aircraft production during the war so that, despite the Allied bombing effort, aircraft production was higher at the end of the war than it was at the beginning. And there are some fundamental problems with the way that the 'game' of AH works that would prevent strategic effects from being implemented in a reasonable way. For example, if you capture an airfield behind the enemy 'front line', there is no reasonable way to expect that, in reality, you would be able to get enough fuel and ordnance into the base to be able to support full-on air ops there -- but AH runs the supplies in invisibly.
Also, AH doesn't model the shipment of supplies, except for the truck/rail convoys that rebuild fields and strat targets -- and implementing a functional, destroyable supply model would be a
real pain, both for HTC to get it set up and working, and for terrain designers, who would have to build supply routes for every possible combination of fields a country might have. Not a practical solution
So what I suggested uses destroying a factory as a simulation of destroying both
production and
delivery. When production is at full capacity, you're able to conduct air ops as recklessly as you choose -- launch fifty Spit9s at once, get them vulched on the apron, and do it again and again until the vulchers run out of ammo, and there will still be Spit9s available. But when a factory is destroyed, the production/delivery of a plane type has been disrupted; the airfields only get a slow resupply of that plane type, so using them up too fast can run you out of that plane type at a field.
With a limited number of destroyable vehicle factories, terrain designers can control how much disruption that strategic bombing can cause; with some seventy different planes, vehicles, and boats in the set, having, say, five factories as strat targets isn't going to allow a country to close off fighter ops in an enemy country by destroying all the factories. And the random selection of which one gets impaired makes it more of a crapshoot for the attacker if they're trying for a specific result -- having availability of Me262s or Ar234s drop to 1 per minute after the first 5/10/15 (depending on field size) isn't going to limit a country much, but having Osties go on allocation would really put a crimp in the eternal-respawn GV defense.
Now, it's
possible that a country could destroy five factory sites, hit the jackpot, and get, a single aircraft's production/delivery whacked back to one plane every five minutes per field, which would cause
huge amounts of hate and discontent from the country that got shafted if it were a popular plane like the P-51D, but the odds against that are infinitesimal -- with seventy different vehicles, the odds of just
double-tapping one vehicle type with all five factories destroyed is about 1 in 500, and about 1 in 5,000 with only two factories destroyed.
