Tumor, you know not of what you speak, and the Japanese were not the only one's that mounted suicide attacks. Granted the Japanese did train pilots for just that purpose while no other nationality did, the US Navy mounted a massive inadvertant suicide attack during the battle of Midway. Torpedo squadron 8 had only one survivor......Ens George Gay of Texas, unless you count in the other half of that squadron that trainied together in Fla and went to the Midway Island defence force, in which only two of that half survived thier attack during Midway. Bombing Squadron 8 (both from the USS Yorktown) was competely wiped out, with nothing to show for it, not one hit. The attacked without fighter cover and the ones that did survive the Japanese CAP were shot down by ack gunners aboard the carriers and support vessels.
I have tried many times in the game to get hits on a CV, mostly with a SBD because its fun. If I am lucky I don't get clobbered by ack before I drop my bombs, but that is usually because I am the only one up there, or at best there is a couple of squaddies with me. Guess what, if we get shot down, we grab fresh planes and try again. If this is suicide bombing then so be it. I cannot see where trying to survive by not hitting a CV is better than letting the planes roll off the flight deck and keep pounding the base you are trying to defend. In a perfect world, the Knights, Rooks and Bish would be able to send in a force of about 12-15 SBD's for a dive bomb attack and the same number of TBM's for a torpedo attack, as well as 20 or so fighters to escort them. As any of us who have played the game any amount of time knows this rarely happens. What do you expect is going to happen, usually 3 or 4 guys will keep hitting a CV till it is dead, and the threat is taken away. Consider this, might not the 3 or 4 suicide monekys that instantly spawn back in to hit the CV be the same as several planes in a squadron comming in using a piecemeal attack? Granted not a very sound tactic, but it beats getting vulched and having all of your base resources porked so you cannot fight back. Is it annoying to have some guys dive bomb with a Lancaster formation and kill the CV in one fell swoop....you betcha, but on the other hand it is annoyuing to have your fuel porked in a 3 base radious, and getting vulched everytime you try and take off from the field you are trying to defend.
The point is, there will always be people that will exploit the game, be it Aces High, Counter Strike, Diablo II or whatever. There is really no amount of software or game features to stop it. The people that want to play that way will find a way to exploit the game......they always do. Before I got into online gaming, I played tabletop miniture games, and it was the same old song and dance. In fact I had a special shirt I wore to con's that said "If I let you win can I go home early."
I am sure that you can fly a plane better than I can, and no doubt you have played AH longer than I have, so dont take this as a flame. I would rather see Hitech spend time on new updates than trying to stop a few "gamey" players from doing what they are going to do anyway. I see the logic on both sides of the argument, but I have also seen several other people out there concerned about the ligit players trying to sink a CV not getting anywhere for their efforts. If a CV has fully manned guns and cap, very few planes will get through, and the ones who do are likely to get hit while on a bombing run, either diving or level becase they are most vunerable then, as for if they take any action to avoid fire, they will miss their target. So for their bombs to do no damage after all that, would be a bad idea, at least I think so anyway.
One possible sloution for the dive bombing LANCS and 17's would be to not allow bombs to drop out of the bomb bay after the nose has dropped past a certain angle, I know nothing of programming, so I have no clue as to how hard that would be to impliment, but it is an idea, might be a bad one I don't know.
Conn
