The fuel on a field should be reducible to 25%. That’s the way it was in AH1 and I didn’t see any lack of furball opportunities there. Nor did I see a “lone Tiffy” porking large numbers of fields. I don’t see it now either. If a Tiffy driver porks a field, he’s lucky to get very far at all on just one field before the ack gets him, an upping defender gets him or he just runs out of ammo. Multiple fields fully porked by one Tiffy pilot on one upping? I don’t thinks so. And if he’s doing it on multiple uppings? Well that just means by the time he gets to field three, field one is already popping up. Not much impact there. Just a futile activity he’s got to get bored with very quickly.
Allowing the fuel to be reduced to 25% allowed for an additional tactical/strategic element in the game. It made the game more interesting by giving it another dimension. It didn’t eliminate or punish furballing. What it did do was make it a higher priority to defend your field. It also made you have to defend your field if you couldn’t drive all the way to the other guys field. It placed greater importance on bombers who could up with reduced fuel and still do effective damage.
When I see a P51 successfully taking out ordnance bunkers with its .50 caliber guns, I have to admit the bunkers, fuel and ordnance, should probably be a little harder. Not so much that you had to use 4K of ordnance to get them down, but it seems perfectly reasonable to require some ordnance to be used. Personally I do it by dropping 500 lb. bombs on the things and I think that it is more than reasonable to assume that’s going to do the job.
The .50 caliber gun is a powerful weapon. The 20 mm cannon even more so. However, allowing either of these to take down bunkers seems questionable despite doubting fighter aircraft are really that much of a problem when it comes to porking. I do see fighters porking fields, but they only seem to get the job half done. Time and again I see a field with one of the two barracks down or two of the four ordnance bunkers down. Could it or can it be done? I suppose so, but I don’t see it being done or happening in an effective fashion. I pork with bombers and I do take down entire fields, troops and ordnance though it takes a couple of passes to do it. If I’m not shot down, I pork a number of fields, but that’s in a bomber up high, out of field ack and out of reach of somebody who upped a defending fighter 60 seconds ago. It also took an investment of 20 minutes just to get to altitude and up to airspeed, let alone getting to the first target. Fighters get there much faster.
Finally, this game is about contesting with other humans in a war game. Not just furballing, not just bombers, not just gv’s, but all of them. More than that, it used to be more about strategic maneuvering. It used to be more about the pros and cons of defense and offense and when to use them. It still is. It’s just that making fields have 75% minimum fuel and hardening HQ’s beyond all reason have made it less so
