While I was at the Con, quite a few people (Grimm, Slapshot, and Ghostdancer that I recall--there were more but I was drunk) said they believed that capturing fields was too easy. This bothered me because I try to make arena maps, and help others with their maps, and of course I want to make a quality product. I'm concerned enough to ask you all for your opinions on the matter. Not just whether you think it's too easy at present, but what can be done about it, and what the long-term effects of any corrective measures would be.
Before you all sound off, let me start the ball rolling with my own opinions.....
As AH has evolved, HTC has made field captures harder and harder. That's why fields have gotten more acks over time and we now have towns at airfields, etc. And at first capturing fields with towns was more difficult than before. So why is it now "too easy" when HTC hasn't changed the system recently?
I believe I can answer that question. The changes HTC has made have all been along the lines of requiring more people to take the field than before. There are more acks and more hangars, and the town requires you to control a larger volume of airspace, etc. So IMHO, since the last round of changes, the AH population has simply learned what needs to be done, and to band together into attack groups large enough to have a reasonably good chance of quick success in airfield captures. And now we've been operating that way long enough that it's become routine, so airfield captures appear easy again.
In considering the above, there are some important issues to take into account. IMHO, the most important is the organization of the attackers. If you have a squad of guys divided up amongst the various tasks that need to be performed, and they have the discipline to do their jobs and not sneak off to steal vulches, you'll usually find field captures relatively easy. OTOH, a much larger number of disorganized freelancers might not ever capture the field vs. the same opposition.
I think this will always be the case, no matter what changes are made to the system. No matter what's done to make field captures harder, the organized pilots will figure out the optimum attack method and go do it routinely, so that it eventually seems easy to them. They're organized now and no changes to the system will make them lose their organization.
Thus, IMHO, tweaking the difficulty of field captures will only affect the disorganized rabble. In 2 ways. First, and most likely, increases in capture difficulty will cause corresponding increases in the size of dweeb herds mobbing fields. Every level of difficulty can be overcome by throwing enough bodies at it. Second, some of the rabble may join squads or form their own, and thus achieve the organization necessary to make captures fairly routine.
So at the bottom line, increasing field capture difficulty creates a Darwinian force that compels pilots to form larger and more organized groups. This means that a greater percentage of the arena population will be engaged in field captures than before, leaving fewer for other things like furballing, battles in the GV areas, and lone wolf fodder. Now combine that with the big maps and their huge frontages. That gives you an even higher likelihood of large forces doing unopposed landgrabs, because the pilots must be more concentrated than now, but have the same huge area to cover.
Having said all that, let's assume that somehow increasing capture difficulty is still desirable. Without a major overhaul of the system by HTC, there's only so much that map-makers can do. We can't change the basic system with towns and all that. All we can do is add more work to do, and/or make it more dangerous. Basically, we can redesign airfield layouts, add some buildings and acks, and sometimes make individual objects harder to kill. But we can't make really substantial changes or the strat system won't work right.
Here's an incomplete list of some possible changes, to show those of you who don't make maps what I'm talking about:
- Have 2 or more VHs at each field, and give the GVs a spawn right near the town(s)
- Have more acks and/or more mannable acks
- Have more town buildings, or multiple towns in different areas (still only 1 maproom however)
- Require more drunks to capture a field (although I don't really like this one)
- Put fields about 10-15 miles apart instead of 20-30, so reinforcements can arrive sooner (although this gives you about Pizza's number of fields on Baltic's area)
Of these sorts of changes, my preferences start at the top and go down. I think having several VHs would be a very good thing in general. A few more acks would be OK as well. But beyond that, I think we start running into trouble. NOTE: on a related issue, it would be easy to add more fuel, ammo, and barracks to fields to make them harder to pork.
Anyway, that's how I see it. I'd like to hear what you all think.
