Originally posted by Shane
apples and oranges. *You* got yourself killed so *you* lost your armor.
would you have liked the idea of some raiding party attacking a forge in the rear lines making *your* armor disappear or your weapons less effective when you're miles away from that "factory" engaged in a heated battle with some Orcs?
I'm sorry, but it's
your analogy that doesn't work. A proper one would be going out, fighting a bunch of battles, and coming back to find that the weapons stores are running low on arrows, and won't sell you as many as you want to fill your quiver, because a raid on the fletchers' village killed most of the fletchers, and there aren't enough arrows to go around for all the people that want them. Or going out to fight, getting killed, resurrect naked in your home, and then be unable to buy the suit of armor you want to replace the one you lost, because the armorers' village was raided.
When someone destroys the La-7 factory, the La-7 your flying doesn't magically vanish beneath you -- you can still fly, and fight, and land and rearm then take off again, but if you get shot down, you lose your plane, and may not get a new one.
The one hole with this is that there is no mechanism for fixing a plane that you bring back damaged. Perhaps a mechanism via the rearm pad where for each 30 seconds you stay on the pad, one red-tagged damage item is repaired, and if you have no red-tagged damage, 30 seconds repairs all the fractional damage on your plane. Or just allow you to take off in the same plane type you brought back if you land or ditch your plane at a field, regardless of the availability of that plane type. That would give people an incentive to try to drag damaged planes back home, knowing that if they can get it home, they can keep flying it, but if they crash or bail, they might not be able to get one.
Maybe a modified form of aircraft availability would be more viable. Set each airfield up with a 'stock level' based on the field size -- 5 for small fields, 10 for medium fields, 15 for large fields -- and then drive aircraft availability off of usage. In the rear areas of each country are a number of aircraft factories. Under normal conditions, planes are supplied to fields as fast as they are requested, but when a factory is destroyed, a random plane from the planeset is selected, and that plane is put on allocation -- one plane per minute is delivered to each field, up to the 'stock limit' of the field. If the same plane is randomly picked more than once, the allocation interval increases -- one every two minutes, every three minutes, etc.
Tying the 'stock limit' to the number of functioning hangars at a field would provide a mechanism to produce incremental damage to the availability of aircraft, but I think that it would overly bias the ability for a country to defend or attack if their rear area gets overrun -- when an enemy country can milkrun to keep factories bombed flat, letting them further beat down plane availability allows them to steamroller fields much faster. Some people might regard this as a good thing, but I suspect that it would result in many more people logging in disgust once their rear areas got overrun and damage to their fields kept them from mounting defenses.
