Deterring suicide attacks...

[AKDejaVu]

Fly CAP more VOR and see how easy that is to do.

The facilities stay down too long to protect against a constant stream of enemy planes.

And inominate... the current system is constantly exploited.  It is exploited by a majority of the people attacking bases.  It is exploited by numerous people that know that the worse that can happen is they instantly re-up with 2k more ordinance.

Now... you cite a "well.. if someone had two accounts" rarity to argue against something that is occuring matter of factly these days.

AKDejaVu

[Innominate]

Suicide jabos should be detered.  Divebombing lancasters should be stopped.

Your idea is a downright bad way to go about it, especially with at least two better ideas available. (no damage if you die within x seconds of dropping bomb, and perked bombs)

No point in using an exploitable system, when there are less exploitable options readily available.

[hazed-]

a suicide bomber isnt going to care that he dies and isnt going to care that the target is going to 'up' 5 minutes earlier because he died.He is still going to have the pleasure of destroying the target.


how is this deterring anyone but the guy who is intent on doing a serious and realistic attack and gets caught after the drop?


as inominate says there are better ideas and i agree.Also i agree with stopping lancs or b17s suicide dive bombing altogether.They didnt try to do this in WW2 therefore we should not be allowed to exploit this 'gamey' aspect.

perk the bombs
disable high angle drops with internal bombs (unless its proved the internal racks were designed for the job)

[AKDejaVu]

Originally posted by hazed-
a suicide bomber isnt going to care that he dies and isnt going to care that the target is going to 'up' 5 minutes earlier because he died.He is still going to have the pleasure of destroying the target.

He'll sure as hell care if the base is not captured.  The whole point of "mass suicide" runs is that it doesn't matter if they live or die, the base stays down and gets captured... followed by 40 "woohoo!"s.  Make it matter.  Simply making the bombs do no damage does nothing to deter dweebish behavior.. it just makes it less rewarding.

And it SHOULD impact everyone in the mission, just as losing a wingman or a squadmate impacted everyone in a wing.  People should be thinking about planning for everyone involved as opposed to just throwing mass numbers at things.

how is this deterring anyone but the guy who is intent on doing a serious and realistic attack and gets caught after the drop?

Then its a guy that wasn't quite thinking about a serious attack.  In AH you don't die after a bomb drop unless you've stopped, turned and made at least one more pass.  You know that and I know that.  You want them to make serious bomb runs... make them have serious consequences.  Consequences that effect everyone.

AKDejaVu

[AKDejaVu]

BTW... there is nothing to stop someone from using a second account to continually shoot paratroopers to prevent a base capture.  What stops people from doing this is the fact that it impacts everyone around and everyone responds to it.  You make it impact everyone and everyone starts to care wether or not its occuring.  You don't... and people don't really care cause the game allows it.

AKDejaVu

[Innominate]

Originally posted by AKDejaVu
BTW... there is nothing to stop someone from using a second account to continually shoot paratroopers to prevent a base capture.

Yes there is, you can't kill your own teams troops.

[Shiva]

Originally posted by Soda
Concept, delete hangers at airfields and make aircraft revetments instead.  Make 1 revetment for each plane in the game, or maybe double up.  Spread them around so a single suicide attack will get 1, but someone who can make 2-3 passes without dying can likely kill 2-3 and still escape.  Also clump them a bit so bombers have something to carpet bomb rather than pinpoint bomb, and might kill several in one pass.  Each revetment controls the spawning of 1-2 planes, and destroying it will stop the spawning of that plane type for the 15 minutes it takes to rebuild.  Make the position of the planes types to each revetment totally random so there is no pattern and people don't immediately target specific revetments to kill certain planes.  Even make the revetments change over time so one field isn't constantly the same.  This would allow a single attacker to make a difference, knocking out a couple of planes, but probably not end the fight completely with 3 suicide attacks into 3 hangers, knocking out all fighters.  It would also give a benefit to survival, at least until you had made your 2-3 passes in something like a P-47 and dropped all your bombs.

Keep the hangars as aircraft spawn points, but the revetments are a nice idea, with the additional caveat that the revetments work -- a revetment would have one open side, and you'd have to either put a bomb in the revetment or in front of the open side for the blast effect to count; bombs landing on the protected sides don't affect the revetment (that's why they made them, after all). Give each field some number of revetments based on the field size, and when a revetment is destroyed, a field with N revetments loses 1/N of the planeset, planes chosen randomly from the still-available planes. That way, you'd know that destroying revetments would erode the field, but you wouldn't know how effective you'd been (destroy a revetment and kill the Boston, Val, and 190F8 for that field -- big loss, yeah....   ).

You might want to set up a cutoff point at the 100-lb bomb level for blast effects, where smaller explosions don't contribute toward destroying the revetment, but fire into the revetment can suppress the revetment (while it's taking fire, it acts as if it were destroyed, but as soon as the fire stops, it comes back). That way, you can mount a GV offensive that, by dedicating one GV per revetment, can keep a field suppressed for as long as their ammo holds out (the red and purple shirts get shot up if they try to service the planes), but the moment they can't keep the revetments under fire, planes can launch again. That might impose too much load on the server, but it would allow an Ostwind to have an effect on airfields without the unrealistic 'chew hangars to rubble' effect we have now.

One last point, give back the ability to crater airfields and damage runways... that alone might make bombers much more useful.  I remember the days of broken gear on heavily cratered runways, I don't think it was a bad thing.

As long as you 'pave' the entire airfield area, at least for fighter takeoffs (maybe a 'grass field' flag on aircraft that indicated whether they needed a metalled runway to take off), so that you don't have to worry about snapping your gear taking off. This would also require a redesign of fields to arrange the field objects so that they didn't constitute an obstacle course pilots would have to run when taking off on the grass.

[Soda]

The whole suicide dweeb issue is pretty complex though, especially in relation to the rules in place for disabling an airfield.  Both sides of the equation were not really correct.  Detecting suicide dweebs is almost impossible, and how would you differentiate from someone who took a unlucky ack hit, or was sprayed by 20 Osties on the ground and hit at D3.0 after dropping.  It happens, so a 30 second penalty was unfair.

Secondly, the whole "All-Or-Nothing" hanger knockdown game gave no incentive to do "some" damage.  I mean, it was all or nothing, so once you started you were basically forced to continue the attack until the hanger was dead.  Then, you actually had to attack all 3 FH's (small field) or everything you did meant nothing.  That wasn't totally fair either, since it would be nice for 1 guy to be able to make a difference and do something with a single sortie.  Same with a CV, you needed to get 8K to stop if from swarming fighters at you.... 7.5K on target meant nothing... silly.

So, that was the concept behind the revetments.  Give something that a single person can accomplish, but don't make it unbalancing.  Give an incentive to say alive since the longer you stayed alive the more targets you could hit and the fewer trips back you would have to make.  Also, make it worthwhile to defend each and every revetment, not simply defend the last FH to keep it standing.  It's not like the airfield is all that important to a field capture anyway.  Sure, it's the prime location for defenders to spawn, but any 2 guys can still sneak into a town and take the place if nobody comes to defend.  With the revetments you could whittle down a field a bit and maybe make things easier.

It also had the nice side effects (at least I thought so), that you could give carpet bombing some usefulness again, plus the revetments would make it much tougher for an Ostie to simply blow up 3 hangers from outside of ack range like they tend to do now.  They would actually have to get close to the revetment and shoot through the opening on one side... that's the way it should be anyway... Osties should over-run airfields, not knock them out like artillery from long range (as is the case now).  I think there are already plane objects that can be placed on the ground and destroyed, so those would be perfect to place inside a revetment.

I think fuel/troops/ordinance should also get some similar treatment, spreading it out into more objects and making each one less important.  This would up the number of targets to strafe on airfields too, which would be nice.  You can always take off-land off the runway anyway, you just need to make sure you exit on the runway.  Sure, it's a little bouncy, but it's not like it's damaging.

-Soda
The Assassins.

[fffreeze220]

What u guys think about the limit ammount of planes a base provides like AW.
In AH we can fly as much plane s at the same time as we want.
Why not limiting the ammount of planes a base can offer.
Maybe make it 10 planes per hanger or 15.
Kill 1 hanger 10 - 15 planes less and so on untill all hangers are destroyed.

What ya think ?

[Revvin]

I'd like to see attrition added, I posted the following idea in my squad forums sometime ago but the quakershigh out there would not be keen on it,

My thought's centre on limiting the number of aircraft at an airfield by tying in the number of planes available to the number of hangar's up. Say for instance at a medium field you could have say 4 fighter hangars each capable of holding 40 planes. Numbers could be increased or decreased as required but for gameplay purposes in the MA this hangar capacity may have to be quite high. So now we have a situation where we have 160 planes available at that field. Under normal circumstances the train and vehicle convoy's would resupply this field at a certain rate so potentially the field may never run out of available fighters but should this supply system be interupted then the only way to get supplies in would be to fly them in by C47 which would introduce another cargo type for this plane.

If a field has all it's hangar's destroyed it can still accept resupplies but as it has nowhere to put them it either has a greatly reduced plane capacity..say for instance be able to hold 20 planes or have aslightly increased capacity..say 40 but these planes would then appear parked on the grass around the airfield where they would make juicy target's for attacking planes as they would be damaged beyond use with a few well placed cannon rounds.

This system would apply to bomber and vehicle hangar's and perhaps supplies of a certain class ofvehicle (fighter/bomber/vehicle) would have to be ordered by a field controller who could take adminstrative control of an airfield the same way a player would control a CV group and then he could choose a certain type of supply or accept a random type or the type's turn up automatically in rotation for instance fighters first then bombers then vehicle's or a C47 could choose a particular cargo type to fly the supplies in manually to augment the AI supply lines.

As well as deterring suicide bombers (never seen a mission posted where the leader has asked for people to kamikaze) we also need to deter the suicide defenders who throw themselves at an enemy knowing that the enemy has to fly a distance to return where as the suicide defender just clicks away and is back in action in minimal time with minimum penalty.

[Soda]

Attrition would be very difficult to implement, at least in my opinion.  I thought about it, but how would you handle factors such as:

- number of players in the MA vs number of aircraft that a particular field can launch?  You would have to make some rule to say that if there were X people in the MA then X/10 can be launched from a field?  I don't think that would work.  What if the enemy had 2 fields close by to your 1, would you run out of planes defending from the first attack, and then have nothing to up for the second?

- what would happen if someone launches a mission from a field?  Would that use up all the aircraft so others couldn't launch?  Would a bomber formation use up 3 planes... how about GV's?

- what if someone decides to suicide and use up the available aircraft at a field, or someone who simply sucks and can't manage to launch properly.  I've seen a number of people trying to fly with a mouse lately and crash 5-10 times in a row.  Would that guy make it impossible for someone to launch?

- what would the limit be for the number of aircraft that could up?  Would there be a timelimit before a plane that was launched didn't count against the airfield anymore?  Lots of guys take off in something like a P-51, fly a long fighter sweep, and never land back at the home field.  Would that plane be unavailable for as long as they were in the air, or some other length of time?

I see what you are getting at, and I thought about ways to maybe make something similar although my thoughts centered around limiting the number of times a specific player can spawn at a particular airfield within a period of time.  I couldn't come up with a good way to work it though, too many holes, not to mention the sort of dweeb tactics that could arise from someone switching countries, and then to a field and intentionally using up all the aircraft in order to prevent defenders from launching.  Don't laugh, it'd happen, there are all kinds out there.

-Soda
The Assassins.

[EDO43]

US Navy carriers during WWII did not have armored decks?  Only British carriers had armored decks as far as I knew.  I am of the opinion, perhaps incorrectly, that the CV's modeled in AH are of the US Navy type.  If that is the case, armor piercing bombs would not be needed to sink a US carrier.  Now if it is a British carrier, then yes....you'd need an armor piercing bomb to penetrate the armored deck.  Of course, I, like the first bomb that hit the USS Arizona, may have glanced off the point and buried myself into a small detailed area, only I did not explode.

FWIW......

[hazed-]

TERRIBLE IDEAS!!!!!!!

ok so i didnt bother reading them , just thought id do in dejas thread what he does in evryone elses and be mr negative devils advocate.

ever noticed how even when a thread is getting all possitive answers deja ALWAYS dives in and tries to kill it off ?

hehe deja just ribbing ya

[sling322]

Originally posted by Innominate
Yes there is, you can't kill your own teams troops.

Wanna bet?