Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Midnight on June 22, 2003, 12:19:57 PM
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It seems a classic question in every AH development cycle is what new planes are going to be added, or what new planes people would like to see added. Another common thread is suggestions for gameplay improvement.
My question is, which is more important to you
A. Better gameplay (whatever your idea of that is)
B. More new Planes.
Personally, I don't give too much care to new planes, because with the same gameplay, the new planes become old very fast. Almost every plane built during the war was built for a different purpose or specialized role. AH doesn't have any real gameplay that requires a specialized role from any particular plane, and as we have seen from recent months, AH gameplay is trending downhill towards simple pigpile missions to capture bases.
Anyway, new gameplay is what I am hoping for more than any new planes or vehicles, both in the new TOD and for AH Classic.
Now Q3 is right around the corner, so I imagine that the HTC staff will be revealing something about AHII during the convention mid-July. It's been very quiet from them lately, so I am hoping for something good.
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I prefer new planes. I also prefer planes that are not in other sims, right now we have the same planes that can be found in every sim to date. I would also enjoy a change in play as well, but planes are more important for me.
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I'd much prefer more new planes. Its hard to control gameplay, because people will still do what they want. Look at the current strat for example - trains, truck convoys, etc. Very neat opportunity for interdiction missions, but does anybody really do them? Instead I see B17s and Lancs flying over enemy fields at 1,000 ft dropping their loads just before the entire flight is wiped out by ack. And I understand lately the B17 had been discovered to be an effective anti-shipping dive bomber...
Unless the new planes are significantly better then the Spit IX, the LA7, the P-51, or the N1K, they're not gonna change the MA much. But they would make the CT settings more enjoyable and I'm sure make more events possible.
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Originally posted by oboe
... Its hard to control gameplay, because people will still do what they want. Look at the current strat for example - trains, truck convoys, etc. Very neat opportunity for interdiction missions, but does anybody really do them?....
That's exactly my point, oboe. The reason nobody goes after supply convoys or factories is because they have ZERO effect on how the rest of the war progresses. The whole zone supply system is essentially useless as well. Why bother organizing huge raids to kill a factory or several factories, when all you have to do is capture one field to control the entire zone?
A change in gameplay is what is needed. Something that will shift the focus of the war from constant JaBo raids on enemy fields to more strategic actions to try and knock out the enemy's infrastructure.
The way it is now, the only time players bomb factories is for score padding and only if thier country owns the field closest to the factory, making attacking it a quick and simple venture.
I would like to see something where factories are placed inside enemy territory, and able to be defended by nearby airfields. Then if the factories get destroyed, the enemy will see the supplies made by that factory start to diminish.
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Then along come the suiciders to take out facrories , spoil the furballers fun , furballers try to make a common sense post , along comes Beetle and hsubert , thread becomes more of the same , HT ignores more of the same, ect , ect , ect.
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Originally posted by Midnight
A change in gameplay is what is needed. Something that will shift the focus of the war from constant JaBo raids on enemy fields to more strategic actions to try and knock out the enemy's infrastructure.
Infrastructure ??
Not on the same page here. I'm not trying to win the war that never ends, I want to log on with some friends and have a few laughs and have some good fights.
Balance to make both achievable are where the game needs to place itself. I must say it does a pretty good job of it. If your idea of infrastructure is going to in effect, "pork" a countries resourses as I think your meaning, it has no place in the Main.
That would be reserved for AHII.
In the mean time if your bored, throw the oxygen bottle away come on down in the weeds and play. Different game down here. Alot of fun, never boring. Might hurt the k/d a bit, but with your hair on fire you can pass on the haircuts.
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my answer is''A'' change of gameplay.
I first came to AH with a feel of a simulation but then seemed more gameyer as I played through out the last months. If I want simulation I goto the CT and feels alot better. I would like to see bugs fixed and possibly mess with the perking system alittle better and stuff like that. I dont like seeing the mass gangs to get a base but sometimes you have to or you will have dozens of seafires and hurricanes up if you dont get cap. I understand AH is what the comunity makes it though. New maps are great as well. Love the new one. I would like to see some kindof of system that would make a player value his life alittle better, so you wouldnt have as many HOs and have divebombing lancs on a cv. The ganging thing wont stop and is a good tactic to take a base but would be cool if some kindof thing only let so many cons in a sector hehe. my 2 cents
FBsmokey
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Perhaps im ignorant about this but,
Why can't we get both?
It doesnt take a programmer to build a new plane, and it doesnt take an artist or flight-model designer to add new gameplay features.
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AH2 is simply the new version, 2.0. 'AH2' includes both the MA (AH2:Classic) and the TOD (AH2:Tour of Duty).
So, yeah.. We're gettin new gameplay.. So i want new planes.. and I -DON'T- want one 'superior' to te current dweeb planes.. I want.. Something more along the lines of the P61, B24, Yak1, earlier P38 versions.. Heck, maybe even a biplane or two, and loads others..
So yeah.
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Originally posted by Innominate
Perhaps im ignorant about this but,
Why can't we get both?
It doesnt take a programmer to build a new plane, and it doesnt take an artist or flight-model designer to add new gameplay features.
Yes, but it takes a programmer to program how that pretty new plane will perform and to operate all it's features.
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I would vote for game play.
Things that in my opinion, need attention:
1) Damage model: Be it aircraft, ships or vehicles, it needs improving.
2) Realistic gunnery models: I saw a guy lose a wing to a B-26 at 1,600 yards, that's about 600 yards beyond the effective range of an M2 BMG firing at a moving target with ring and bead sights. Do the ballistics math and add in normal bullet dispersion associated with hand aimed gun mounts and you will see that this is virtually impossible in the RW.
3) Zoom mode: Disable guns when in zoom mode. No one had telescopic gunsights unless they were trained snipers. If you're that blind, see an opthalmologist (Fluff drivers will whine about this one).
4) Triple A: Harden the field acks.
5) Why is it Buff bombs arm when dropped at 500 feet, and Jabo bombs do not? I watched a formation of B-26s drop bombs and kill a CV while at just 400 feet. I know his altitude because I was on his six shooting.
6) Fix the VOX bug that causes the constant outages.
7) Consider requiring 11 troops being the minimum for a field capture. This will cut down on the single player milkrunning of bomb VH, or kill town, auger and grab troops. If he has to make two trips, the town or VH will be up before he can return. Late-night milkrunning on the big maps is rampant.
There are other issues relating to scoring and flight models that could be mentioned as well, but the above 7 items are a good place to start.
I think game play issues are of greater importance than increasing the number and types of aircraft available.
My regards,
Widewing
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Oh yeah... give us more planes to leave in the hangar while everyone goes for the fastest available planes.
That'll do it.
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Game play. Thread subjects overwealmingly point toward that.
Nice list widewing, two questions.
3)I can shoot a real gun and hit the target without knowing the exact distance due to depth perception. If I did know the exact distance it wouldnt mean squat to me unless I was like hunting out in Montana where you could be firing very long range. Dont you think zoom is a fair trade to compensate for not being able to model true depth in the sky where there is no background reference?
7) What would be the incentive for a pilot to be goon #1?
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What makes you think the two are exclusive? Seems there's guys that make the planes and guys that make everything else.
MiniD
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gameplay is affected by opportunity. the new maps are terrible... they have allmost no opportunity for a large segment of the playerbase to have fun... the furballers are left with nothing but an easily killed cv to fight from/to.
change all the vehicle fields to combined fields and "gameply" will improve. Unlike the so called strat guys.. the action guys simply need opportunity and they will make their own fun.
The strat guys depend on depriving furballers of a place to fitght because they know that any close fields or cv will cause a huge group to gather and have (gasp) fun while not listening to the several generals of the day or participating in "missuns" to fly around killing defensles toolsheds and maybe getting to fight over a few scraps now and then.
lazs
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Gameplay
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Gameplay as well.
I was going to say the current one is getting stale, but then I realised I have never before played a game for 3+ years in a row. (Boxed games usualy last less than a week, except for a few classics.)
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Originally posted by Widewing
I would vote for game play.
Things that in my opinion, need attention:
5) Why is it Buff bombs arm when dropped at 500 feet, and Jabo bombs do not? I watched a formation of B-26s drop bombs and kill a CV while at just 400 feet. I know his altitude because I was on his six shooting.
ks.
My regards,
Widewing
Hmm Jabo bombs will arm when dropped from 500ft. If the jabo flies the same attack profile as the B26. The B-26's bombs will not arm when dropped from 500ft if it uses the same attack profile as a divebomber.
SKurj
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Originally posted by Widewing
7) Consider requiring 11 troops being the minimum for a field capture. This will cut down on the single player milkrunning of bomb VH, or kill town, auger and grab troops. If he has to make two trips, the town or VH will be up before he can return. Late-night milkrunning on the big maps is rampant.
Widewing
AW switched over to that capture method in AW3 to prevent the same sort of milk running capture that was going on. And added little thing was not only did you have to use 2 drunk loads to capture a field, you had to get the drunks to the field within 5 minutes of the field going down or you don't capture it. Would like to see this in AH, that too would help curtail the late night milkruns.
Ack-Ack
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Originally posted by Midnight
Personally, I don't give too much care to new planes, because with the same gameplay, the new planes become old very fast. Almost every plane built during the war was built for a different purpose or specialized role. AH doesn't have any real gameplay that requires a specialized role from any particular plane, and as we have seen from recent months, AH gameplay is trending downhill towards simple pigpile missions to capture bases.
Two things:
One, like you, the plane that I would like to fly the most is already in the game. Therefore, I don't care if they add any others. However, there are several planes that many people would like to see added that could definitely add to the game (i.e. Ki-84). So I guess I can live with new planes being added to make others happy (not that I care, but I am sure HTC does so they keep their customers happy).
Two, AH has always been simple pigpile missions to capture bases. The difference between now and two years ago is the number of people involved in these pigpile missions. Now, I will see 30 or 40 planes involved. Back then, it would be 10-15 involved. Just a matter of degrees and perception. Of course, you could be talking about the few months after the mission planner was introduced and people wanted to play with thenew toy by actually using it. Then again, even those missions were pigpiles. They just didn't seem like it since they were supposedly organized coordinations instead of chaotic vulchfests and suicides.
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New plane?? How many do you need? I already have a hard enough time deciding what to fly. A typical preflight choice goes something like this:
Hmm, jabo or no jabo, I'll go.... Jabo, lets see, US planes, F4U, Boom and Zoom baby, no F6F and I'll mix it up afterwards, no, the big kahuna P47, that will do some dammage, wait, the P-38 can do it all, no, the P-51 will keep me alive, dang it would be fun to use the cannons of the Mossie or even the Bf110, dang, I want to fly them ALL!!!!! Stop tormenting me!!!! :mad:
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Originally posted by SKurj
Hmm Jabo bombs will arm when dropped from 500ft. If the jabo flies the same attack profile as the B26. The B-26's bombs will not arm when dropped from 500ft if it uses the same attack profile as a divebomber.
SKurj
Ok, but that makes even less sense. Dive bombers are usually moving at a higher rate of speed than level bombers. Bombs arm when the arming vanes (they look like small sheet metal propellors) rotate a sufficient number of turns arming the explosive train. The higher the velocity, the sooner the bomb is armed.
Secondly, retarded bombs (either using clam shell or balloots) were developed to prevent aircraft from being perforated by their own bomb sharpnel. Dropping a string of 1000 lb bombs from 400 feet virtually gaurantees that the dropping aircraft will be seriously ventilated.
My regards,
Widewing
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More lenient experimentation.
Then maybe will achieve gameplay without the expense of giving up on new planes. Fiddling around with the settings every week would be a drag, but surely there could be more attempts in, say, different perk agendas for gameplay maybe every two tours?... and stuff, wouldn't you say?
Developing something new to please everyone is practically impossible. Only option there is, is to tweak things to suit the majority of people around. Such tweaks, I haven't seen since the perking of the F4U-1C for 8 points.
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Originally posted by Murdr
Game play. Thread subjects overwealmingly point toward that.
Nice list widewing, two questions.
3)I can shoot a real gun and hit the target without knowing the exact distance due to depth perception. If I did know the exact distance it wouldnt mean squat to me unless I was like hunting out in Montana where you could be firing very long range. Dont you think zoom is a fair trade to compensate for not being able to model true depth in the sky where there is no background reference?
7) What would be the incentive for a pilot to be goon #1?
I don't see depth perception as an issue. We have the icons for range.
I've never met a shooter who could estimate range based upon depth perception alone (especially at very long range). Human stereoscopic vision is mimimized at long distance, simply because aspect is minimal. Likewise, most shooters using iron sights (and virtually all using telescopic sights) will close the non-sighting eye (no depth perception, per se). That's my opinion, but I work with Military small arms on a nearly continuous basis and shoot for recreation as well. This is one reason I object to the insane accuracy of buff guns. Having fired countless thousands of rounds through M2HB Browning .50 MGs, I know first hand how difficult it is to hit a relatively small target at long range, much less a moving target from a moving gun platform.
As to the incentive to be the first goon; if the goon driver is out to pad his score, he may not want to be first. However, if it's a team effort, then the goal is to capture the base. Personally, I could care less if I'm first. Then again, I rarely fly C-47s as I'm not interested in that aspect of scoring.
It might be worth a try, just to see what turns out.
My regards,
Widewing
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3) fair enough, just wanted further elaboration.
7) I would think putting that .0 part of the field capture stat would help the team effort issue.
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better gameplay most definatly...we allready have the largest selection of planes in any game...ever...and i still havent flown them all...
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Originally posted by Sandman_SBM
Oh yeah... give us more planes to leave in the hangar while everyone goes for the fastest available planes.
That'll do it.
I'll fly em. I fly the more obscure planes we got now.. Mission arena starts from the beginning of the war, our current planeset is severly lacking in comparison to what we'd need
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Widewing,
The zoom mode does not give us some super unrealist detail level. It tries to approach realistic size and detail levels at the expense of periperal vision. The size things appear on your monitor when you are zoomed in to maximum is about the same size as they would be in reality. The zoomed out view is there to try to cram all of the periperal view you would have into 15% of your view field (your monitor), but to do this size and detail have to be lost.
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Originally posted by Rutilant
Heck, maybe even a biplane or two, and loads others..
...Points and laughs...
....biplane....yeah, good matchup there. getting BnZ'd by an A6M2...great fun!
RAF gets the firefly, IJN still missing the Ki-84 :rolleyes:
Gainsie
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Originally posted by Mathman
Of course, you could be talking about the few months after the mission planner was introduced and people wanted to play with thenew toy by actually using it. Then again, even those missions were pigpiles. They just didn't seem like it since they were supposedly organized coordinations instead of chaotic vulchfests and suicides.
Well, what would be nice is if the mission planner were actually worth something. Aside from being able to lay out some GENERIC waypoints that you can't even adjust, it is useless aside from being able to assign pilots their aircraft.
In countless other threads there have been requests for something to improve the mission planner. Be it additional room to put in text objectives, a method of adjusting waypoints and adding descriptions to them, being able to colorcode things as desired, or various other improvements. HTC has done nothing with it, and because of that, the mission planner has become a stupid waste of program.
Now, I understand HTC is making AHII with the TOD portion of the game, but I seriously hope that they are doing something with a mission planner that is meaningful for AH Classic. I can't wait to fly TOD, but how much fun will it be after you've flown all the pre-scripted missions 10 times already?
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Widewing...
Errmmm if you read again it makes perfect sense... your explanation of the vanes backs it up too...
In both cases, bomber or jabo, the vanes are required to do their thing. No matter the velocity the vanes will arm the bomb after it has travelled X amount of distance. Sure the faster bomb will reach that distance quicker than the slower bomb....
Right now the bomb has to travel 1000ft, in any direction...
Those vane things... would they arm the bomb in time if a divebomber dropped the bomb from 500ft? Divebombers typically released ord MUCH higher than that...
Retarded bombs weren't they intended for low LEVEL drops, not 70deg dives?
SKurj
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Originally posted by Saintaw
Gameplay as well.
I was going to say the current one is getting stale, but then I realised I have never before played a game for 3+ years in a row. (Boxed games usualy last less than a week, except for a few classics.)
same here saw. before this game the ONLY other game i played for a long time was indy 500 !! lol on the Amiga.
all games since then had been 1 week or maybe a month or two of off and on play.
Only AH has been a game i could almost play every day for a bit and i still get the urge to fly it even 3 years on!.That has to be a successfull game design. It does however need something added i think, and laz i dont agree the new maps are no good. Bigisles so far has been a favourite due to the fact theres more thought involved with attacks and far less la7s around.Im actually enjoying AH at the moment and a week or two ago i was close to quiting. Im glad to see the back of the endless furballs and gangbanging and steamrollers for a week or two while we have bigisles.Laz you have plenty of maps in the list that have furball areas. This bigisles is different and imo better than pizza/trinity/isles and mindanao. Baltic i still like and uterus when the right numbers are in them but they overfill with people fast.Bigisles is the first large map that ive liked and i cant see where it will prove badly made apart from possibly a lack of gv spawns.(trinity was ok at first but proved to have too high hills etc for longterm fun)
keep bigisles!!! :)
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Originally posted by SKurj
Widewing...
Errmmm if you read again it makes perfect sense... your explanation of the vanes backs it up too...
In both cases, bomber or jabo, the vanes are required to do their thing. No matter the velocity the vanes will arm the bomb after it has travelled X amount of distance. Sure the faster bomb will reach that distance quicker than the slower bomb....
Right now the bomb has to travel 1000ft, in any direction...
Those vane things... would they arm the bomb in time if a divebomber dropped the bomb from 500ft? Divebombers typically released ord MUCH higher than that...
Retarded bombs weren't they intended for low LEVEL drops, not 70deg dives?
SKurj
skurj most LW bombs had fuses which could be set manually by the pilot from the cockpit.They could choose impact fuse or delayed action fuse.
Also not all allied bombs used the 'vanes' to spin a certain number of times before bomb arm. These types were commonly used by the big level bombers where the fuse only needed to be inactive whilst it fell out of the aircraft.After a certain distance they were armed.For ground attack they used impact fused and delayed action fuses too (but these were pre set by ground staff unlike LW ones).
AH has every bomb set with the vane activated fuse model which is just plain silly really. Why would any jabo pilot use this type of fuse!? we should have delayed action fuses I think and impact fuses for some types just like rockets. Perhaps HTC could make us choose what type we take and make the special types cost to use whereas the regular vane fused ones free.dunno just thinking aloud :)
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Impact fuse... return of the carbomber... tho I don't really have a prob with that with the maproom off the field
SKurj
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Well you can only fly 1 plane at a time and there is enough of them now so I'd go with gameplay. Stale gameplay with new planes wont make it any better.
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i'm hoping Tour of Duty will fix the gameplay problem for both the furballers & those who do it right:D