Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: OIO on November 22, 2002, 07:57:48 AM
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Was thinking that perhaps the MA, that boasts such a large population now (wow, I still remember when I logged in and thought : Holy COW theres 150 people in MA! WOOT!), maybe it was time to make a lil' adjustment to the "point" of the MA.
As it is now, the MA's objective is to have a chess piece capture enough fields to win. However, having a 3 side war with lots and lots of people on at the same time creates huge endless, mindless furballs in the smaller maps and rampant milkrunning of undefended fields in the big maps.
So I was thinking!
What if the MA's objective was not to capture fields, but rather "territory"?
To accomplish this, the maps would have to have removed a lot of the airfields they have, and replace them with "foward bases" and "vehicle bases" and "towns/cities", "bridges" , "high terrain" objects that players would have to capture to gain territory. Now, the sweet thing is, you cannot just capture ANY of those objects, you have to capture the NEAREST object (with 5-10 miles of object) or else dropping goons on it will not capture it.
Airbases would still be capturable, BUT to be able to capture an airfield you would have to have captured at least ONE of the said objects above thats closest (within 5-10 miles) to the airfield (aka, if they bypass the objects and goon the field, it will never be captured, but if they capture the bridge or town near the field, it turns on the "capturable" switch, allowing the airfield to be capturable.
Pushing the frontline would mean players would have to send out sorties against these objects (which of course will be heavily defended by ack, and in towns/cities and military installations like foward bases and vehicle bases, up to a DOZEN VH's), capture them and protect them from counterattacks. Instead of having a couple dozen people just launching a banzai attack on a field to utterly pork it and capture it, they would now have to capture front line territory and push it closer and closer to the enemy airfields.
This would provide a more fluid fighting in the MA (ground AND air and sea), make the action more varied and it would help people find fights easier.. the front line will always be where the action takes place, not some lone field 2 sectors inside your land that all the sudden got swarmed with cons and by the time you get there its over.
To achieve this effect I would suggest removing most of the current airfields in the map, and put 2 airfields per 9 sectors, up the FLAK defense of these fields considerably (maybe to the point where only low flying fighters (then vulnerable to the current tracer AA guns) or a group of buffs would have a chance of surviving) so that people in the same "front line" launch from the same bases, add the capturable objects i mentioned above and finally, increase the size of the current strat targets (factories, depots, HQ) to be 6X as big and with more objects to blow up, and lower their "hitpoints" so a big buff raid would do good damage.
If I could have a copy of the terrain editor files of the baltic map or the pizza map i could try and do a sketch of it if this sounds good for you.
Thoughts?
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Originally posted by OIO
To accomplish this, the maps would have to have removed a lot of the airfields they have, and replace them with "foward bases" and "vehicle bases" and "towns/cities", "bridges" , "high terrain" objects that players would have to capture to gain territory. Now, the sweet thing is, you cannot just capture ANY of those objects, you have to capture the NEAREST object (with 5-10 miles of object) or else dropping goons on it will not capture it.
You don't want to make locations completely uncapturable just because they're behind enemy lines; that would decrease the fluidity of the war.
To make your idea work, you're going to need a couple of additional ground units: PaK (Panzer abwehr Kanone) anti-vehicle artillery sites (varying from a gun in a sandbagged revetment up to a gun in a bunker -- basically varying the caliber and resistance to damage) and some kind of heavy HE artillery vehicle, like the M7 'Priest'.
Each capturable location has a defensive setup -- some number of infantry ('P' figures), FlaK, and PaK units. In order to capture a location, all of these units must be destroyed, and a unit of troops delivered. When a location is captured, the FlaK and PaK emplacements regenerate to the minimum quality -- .50 MG AAA and, say, a 37mm PaK in an open sandbagged revetment. Now you need a 'front line', which is defined by a line halfway between each friendly and enemy location. The algorithm for generating such a line, given a set of points to determine the division, exists, but I don't want to go digginf for it to explain it. Basically, in its operation, it separates the points into points that contribute to determining the line and points that don't (and are 'inside' one side or the other). If the captured location is one of the 'border' points, then the front line is recomputed and the location becomes part of your territory; if the captured location is 'behind enemy lines', then the front remains as it is.
A captured location in your territory regenerates up to its undamaged state via the normal resupply/rebuild mechanism; a captured location in enemy territory does not regenerate at all unless supplies and troops are shipped in by players. Captured airfields behind enemy lines allow only the use of the refuel/rearm pads; if you exit your plane at such a field, you get a successful landing, but can't take off again (no mechanics to repair your plane, etc.).
Being able to capture locations behind enemy lines allows you to do things like destroy nearby vehicle hangars and put down an paratroop drop to capture and hold a bridge, forcing the enemy to take out the bridge defenders before they could move vehicles in to oppose your capturing locations to roll the front back. Because a captured location behind enemy lines is out of supply, it's vulnerable to being nibbled to death; you'd either have to run more troops and supplies in or have it worn down.
The front line could be indicated on the kneeboard map, probably via an additional button to work like the other toggleable display options.
It's an interesting proposal, but I think that the host overhead to keep track of things is going to be a significant piece of work to implement.