Change of approach - BIG wish!

[Chalenge]

Please change the process by which fields are captured. It has gotten to be so familiar its a routine for many people unable to do more then fly a heavy airplane and drop ord right under them and kill two buildings and themselves. Get enough of those types together and somehow they can make it work without fighting at all.

[trotter]

What would you suggest? (not being critical, just interested in hearing an alternate idea if you have one)

[FiLtH]

 I suggest that more strats are added. A strat center controls two bases it is near. The center has to be down 100% to close the base. The base itself will still have the hangars etc, but will have no real meaning to spawn. The town is still captured by the town map room.

  The strat center would be aways from each base/town to put the fight away from the bases. There would be alot to destroy at the centers so it would require alot of bombers. Hopefully requiring large bomber missions. Increase the arm time for the bombs as well so it would require a higher drop altitude.

   Hey..we're wishing right?

[trotter]

  The strat center would be aways from each base/town to put the fight away from the bases. There would be alot to destroy at the centers so it would require alot of bombers. Hopefully requiring large bomber missions. Increase the arm time for the bombs as well so it would require a higher drop altitude.

Lots of bombers = little fun

IMO

The boring three ship triangle, the laser guns, the drone warping in turns, the unhistorical throttle redlining. I just avoid attacking bombers, either they are an easy kill or if the bomber knows what he's doing, chances are I get my oil shot before I can kill all three and have to rtb. Either way, that's no fun.

[Chalenge]

I would make heavy bombers unavailable except at zone bases (large airfields) and nothing larger then 500lb bombs available from small fields. Maps that we have would likely have to be changed but organizing things so  bombers and fighters have to coordinate and rendezvous even for an NOE attack would make things a little more interesting. Another idea concerning marshalling would allow only a given number of bombs to be outfitted from a given field at one time (forcing a delay of maybe ten minutes before allowing more).

Also making small fields with small towns and progressively larger towns for larger airfields while leaving vehicle fields the way they are would slow things down a bit.

I would also like to force CVs to follow a little logic. If ord is up the cv cannot be allowed into the dar circle of an airfield but SBs would not be limiting that way.

Allow field gunners a choice of 37mm or quad 20mms before they launch and add manned guns to the towns.

[trotter]

I do think, though, that strats should be made more important. I'd like to see the super accurate bombsight disabled, so bombers are actually used on area targets and not for GBU style bunker busting. I would like to see large strat targets AND smaller strat targets so that jabo's actually have a valuable role other than gv griefing. And the strats should all be more closely tied to base operations, instead of an abstract time value on resupply that can be negated by field supplies.

[Ciaphas]

What about this idea?

Combining the area fields and facilities to form field command centers and then linking the fate of each base together. Have one airfield responsible for the whole sector or two sector area. Force the Aggressor to capture/level the field bases under control of the command field and then flatten 50 percent of the facilities that provide support to the local command AOR.

Essentially it will work like this:

Make the base grab harder to achieve. I recommend the following setup. I think that this will receive a lot of bad critique but for those that are hardcore in to immersion it should prove to add a bit of a challenge to the mix. This will force the countries to work as a team to achieve the desired output, it will also provide some great fights and it will highlight those squads that work well and plan long and hard for their squads missions. It should also allow for true inter squad support. There are squads that are Air to Air and those that are CAS and those that strictly bomb and i think that it would go a long way in to forming very formidable fighting forces and hopefully making the fights monumental.

Field Command

• Large field <--- Command Base
• Medium/small field
• Vehicle base
• Radar Facility
• Ammo Facility
• Troop facility
• Gas Facility

How it should play out

• The non command fields must be taken and held during the duration of the battle
• The vehicle base must be taken and held for the duration of the battle
• 50 percent of the facilities must be completely destroyed and remain destroyed for the duration of the battle
• After the above requirements have been met the aggressors can now push towards the command field (Large Airfield)

How the capture will work

• only when the command field has been captured will the other airfield and vehicle base be registered as captured.
• If any of the required conditions/bases pop the aggressors must recapture the bases before they can fully  capture the command base.

The required condition/bases do not count against the countries win total until the command base is captured. Only the command base counts against the countries land percentage for the over all map victory.

[Cajunn]

Add puffy ack like the cities, and Double the size of the town and I think it will make for a tough take.....

[Ghosth]

Interesting idea

Current arena setup does not allow for limiting ords by type, weight, or anything else. Either you have all of them, or you have none. (Hopes this gets changed soon)

Except for some very late war sorties most fighters simply could not load up a pair of 1k bombs, rocks and takeoff.
They just were not that easy to get.  Early war 250 lbs and mid - late war I agree, fighters should be limited to 500's.

But the AH coad would have to be extensively changed IMO to make this possible.

The same problem happens with plane choices, and to change that again takes a total rework of the coad.
Maps would have to be rebuilt and redesigned to work with the new system.

Part of the problem is that certain groups of people in AH have pretty much chased all the bomber pilots out of the game. Compounded by the fact that AH really doesn't reward you for taking the time to do a bombing sortie correctly.
A few perk points that can only be spent on a jet bomber, and thats about it. No "name in lights" for bombing, only for shooting down attackers. Thats the first thing thats going to have to change.

[FiLtH]

  I think we have trained ourselves to kill everything we see. Rather than attacking a bomber force,getting past the escort and influicting whatever damage we can on the bombers. Landing 2 kills going up against an escorted close formation of heavies would have been quite a feat.

[Ciaphas]

That's why you force them to work together.

[Boxboy]

Just make fighter hangers unkillable, problem solved as far as the fight is concerned.  With unkillable fighter hangers you have to bring enough numbers to take the the town, plus bombers have the strat of knocking the town flat, taking out the base radar, fuel, etc.  If the bomber boys want addition strat let make some plane factories around the map to be hit, take out the factory and that plane type is gone for say 1 hour.

[ImADot]

While an interesting idea, I don't see any of this ever happening.  You are basing all these wishes (nothing wrong with them, you get to wish for anything you want) on the large numbers in the LW arenas.  The MW and EW arenas will not have the numbers of players to support these types of strategic operations, and you'd probably have to permanantly merge the two LW arenas into one.  I do agree that there should be some kind of change made to inject some freshness into the MA play, but have no idea what that should be.

I seriously doubt HTC will want to spend the resources for something that will most likely force a significant portion of their user base to pack up and leave.

[bongaroo]

Turn on wind and have it change during the day.  Nothing crazy but I'm sure it would help.

[Ciaphas]

that would help a bunch, so would adding other environmental factors such as fog, rain, snow and quite possibly hail.

Heavy snow and hail would force the fights higher making the base raping impact tougher while at the same time forcing full GV assaults. This would also help encourage large bombing missions..