A new approach to Strats

[Latrobe]

Instead of having the strats tucked away at the back of the maps where it takes forever to get to them, almost pointless to go hit, and just as pointless to defend, why don't we try something different with them and get them more active in the overall fight on the map? Here's my idea...



Instead of having just 1 strat location way in the back of the map that controls the downtime of all objects across the map, we have multiple strat locations scattered around the map much closer to the fighting. These would act as kinds of "cities" in the area. Each strat would be connected to nearby bases (purple lines) and would resupply just these bases. The downtime for these bases would follow the normal downtimes we already have (30mins or whatever it is if strat is at 100%).

If you capture a base that is connected to an enemy strat then that strat would stop resuppling that base (not giving the enemy our goods!  ). Instead, that base will now be supplied from your "main" strat located near the HQ. The resupply time coming from this strat however is longer than if the base was being resupplied from the frontline strat (representing longer supply route). Maybe twice as long? To shorten the resupply time we can have the strats a capturable target. A kind of mini-hq map room area in the center of the city that requires maybe 20-30 troops to capture. This would make these frontline strats very important to defend and attack and would require a somewhat coordinated attack to take instead of just 1 guy rushing in an M3. If you capture the enemy strat then all bases connected to it that you own will now follow the normal downtimes and the enemy bases will follow the longer downtimes from their "main" strat. If all your strats on one flank are captured then all your bases that are connected to those strats that you still own will resupply from your "main" strat but will now follow the normal downtimes. This should help give that team a fighting chance to get their land back.

My thinking for this is to bring a kind of "section fighting" the base fighting in regards to the strat supply system and have the strats play a more direct and vital role in the overall "war". Rather than having ALL of your ordinance downtimes set to 2 hours because your 1 ordinance strat was hit you'd have ordinance at the local fields downtimes lengthened while other bases on the other side of the map are unaffected. The frontline strats should also provide some rather intense air and ground fights as both sides try to capture or defend it.

[bustr]

You mean something like this? It's up to the terrain builder to set the strats.

[Randall172]

I've always wanted a trickly supply system, where instead of a regeneration of assets, you would need to have supplys on hand or supplys brought in, where they could be intercepted(destroyed).

AND OFF TOPIC

grass speed penalty

[Latrobe]

You mean something like this? It's up to the terrain builder to set the strats.

(Image removed from quote.)

All I see is a broken image. 

[The Fugitive]

I've always wanted a trickly supply system, where instead of a regeneration of assets, you would need to have supplys on hand or supplys brought in, where they could be intercepted(destroyed).

AND OFF TOPIC

grass speed penalty

This is how it is set up now. The time between deliveries can be slowed by dropping the strat for that item. Rails, trucks, and barges are all destroyable which also stops resupply.

The only things that are "regenerated" are the Hangers, towns, and CV groups. These are set on a timer.

[bustr]

Try this one, I thought my google gallery allowed linking for view in forums.

This is a field layout map for my new terrain. The tiny [ s] on the islands are a strat location. And then the HQ and city are there for NOE or high alt bomber missions, CV NOE missions. Hitech tested complexity with systems and found no one bothered with it because it was complex and ate up their valuable play time. All of those [sf] in the central three bands are placed 3\4 of a sector from at least two other [sf] fields. The bands are there to aid me in numbering the fields to guide me in the terrain editor. The three [sf] on the very tip of each island will have no gv spawns to them other than the very tip one will have one gv spawn to the central tank battle arena. While the three un-capturable small GV bases will be there for the hard core GV only guys. The 1800-2000ft caldera of that central island will have a 3000ft solid cloud layer to make things exciting for aircraft. And then the rest of the islands will have gv spawns where you would expect including multiple to the strats for the win the war guys.

At 51 fields per country, they will need to capture 11 from both countries to win the war. And the gauntlet of PT spawns the 9 CV will have to run will be interesting. Feilds are too close together for any shore batteries other than the port on the end of each central island. The buzzsaw map does a good job of making everything easy to attack and generates action and activity. I took a cue from it with the strat placements and [sf] placements. I'm expecting some genius to think they can capture the CVs from a country and hide them in their own back water area. Something for those bomber guys to hunt and sink. The too close to land buffer will keep them steaming out in plain sight with no place to hide.

As you can see, anyone can build a terrain, and I'm too far into this one to change it because someone in this forum other than Hitech doesn't like it. Oh! The ring of mountains is a super caldera with the highest peaks at 23,000ft for those afk guys. Because I didn't use a 3rd party app to create a RAW height map to import and create the terrain in a few minutes. The mountain range and all those fjords took about 7 days of 8 hours work time to complete.

Your strat idea has been floated in the Wish List in various incarnations since I've been around about 15 years now. I think the whole idea of letting your bases next to your strat be captured is to force you to fight for the base and the strat. Buzzsaw shows players are willing if the distances are reasonable to fly or drive to the fight. Distances between bases becomes a big problem when you have fewer players. In the old days of mega hoards, long flights were needed to slow down the hoards. 

[Latrobe]

Looks like a cool map  . I do like how most bases are within 1 sector of one another. Are the strat locations on the islands individual strats? (1  is ordinance, another  is barracks, etc) or is each  a whole strat complex on their own? I'm suspecting it's the former and follows the current supply system where hitting the ordinance strat increases downtime for all bases across the map.

My thought wasn't to spread out the individual strats but to create entire strat complexes that would resupply just the bases near them. Using your map as an example for this kind of system there would be 1 strat complex on each of the smaller islands where the frontlines are. These strats would resupply the bases on the island they are on (ammo, troops, fuel, and everything else). On the main larger island there'd be maybe two more strat systems. One near the tip, and one fruther back. These too would supply bases in their general area. The idea behind this is to give the defending country a better fighting chance to retake land.

Let's say on the small island there is the barrack strat. If the enemy captures most (or all) of your island then the barrack strat is left helplessly surrounded by enemy bases. Now the enemy bombs it into the stone age and your troop downtimes are at their maximum (2-3 hours or whatever it is). Now the enemy goes around to all your bases and kills the troops. Every base you own now has troops disabled for 2-3 hours. You either wait that long until you can go recapture your bases again or spend time resuppling bases instead of actually doing what you want, to fight.

With separate strat complexes supplying different areas of the map the enemy can completely capture one of your islands but can not just bomb your now defenseless strat so you can't effectively fight back from your main island. This is because those bases are being supplied from a completely different strat complex, and this one isn't completely surrounded by enemy bases.


It's just an idea I had to try and improve the combat in the MA. I still remember the days when bish would bring an entire country to a standstill by just hitting 1 strat and then porking all the bases to the point where players had no choice but to wait out the long resupply time or spend their time driving/flying supply boxes around.

[bustr]

The biggest hurdle on this terrain will be the first foot hold capture. The mid band fields of each country have cross water gv spawns that connect their three islands to give you a strategic capture path. None between the different countries. You have to old school the first capture while everyone can see it will be one of the shoreline fields connected in the spawn web. Capturing one of the island tip three sf fields just makes a big furball, and the medium fields will spawn bombers to keep it shut down. If you want the ports, you have to fight for them, then fight to hold them. There will be PT spawns all over the place to make CV groups work for their grief and no place to hide from bombers.

Late night small numbers will have things to do, the tiny tank arena, furballing in the center, or "trying" to sneek around and take fields on a map you cannot get lost on like so many from our mega hoard days. The buzzsaw terrain design of instant combat and easy access to things to blow up is our foreseeable future until our numbers pick up again.

I realized when I started this map I agonized over building it to protect my country's strat and bases from easy capture along with it's resources like our anti mega hoard terrains. Then I played for an evening on buzzsaw and had a revelation after a fun evening. I'm building the terrain for everyone to find a fight and have fun. So the strats are honey pots to start fights, the central sf feilds are all close together, no place to hide CV's, the HQ and city are just sitting there at 5000ft if you want to challenge the aa feilds and kill the 163 hangers. And the fun from the AH2 CraterMA tank arena is back in the tiny central tank arena with three tiny GV un-capturable bases.

And for the lone wolf strategic bomber guys, there is one lone large airfeild with no GV spawns to it for them to up and drive around all night single finger saluting, or two 5k super large airfields under the caldera rim to fly around the rim out of radar and try to poop on the other HQs. 5k is the highest elevation on the terrain, it's 5k at the base of the 23,000ft mountain range running down to SL in the center pond. No one will have any real advantage on the terrain like those 9k bases on buzzsaw.

[lunatic1]

Try this one, I thought my google gallery allowed linking for view in forums.

This is a field layout map for my new terrain. The tiny [ s] on the islands are a strat location. And then the HQ and city are there for NOE or high alt bomber missions, CV NOE missions. Hitech tested complexity with systems and found no one bothered with it because it was complex and ate up their valuable play time. All of those [sf] in the central three bands are placed 3\4 of a sector from at least two other [sf] fields. The bands are there to aid me in numbering the fields to guide me in the terrain editor. The three [sf] on the very tip of each island will have no gv spawns to them other than the very tip one will have one gv spawn to the central tank battle arena. While the three un-capturable small GV bases will be there for the hard core GV only guys. The 1800-2000ft caldera of that central island will have a 3000ft solid cloud layer to make things exciting for aircraft. And then the rest of the islands will have gv spawns where you would expect including multiple to the strats for the win the war guys.

At 51 fields per country, they will need to capture 11 from both countries to win the war. And the gauntlet of PT spawns the 9 CV will have to run will be interesting. Feilds are too close together for any shore batteries other than the port on the end of each central island. The buzzsaw map does a good job of making everything easy to attack and generates action and activity. I took a cue from it with the strat placements and [sf] placements. I'm expecting some genius to think they can capture the CVs from a country and hide them in their own back water area. Something for those bomber guys to hunt and sink. The too close to land buffer will keep them steaming out in plain sight with no place to hide.

As you can see, anyone can build a terrain, and I'm too far into this one to change it because someone in this forum other than Hitech doesn't like it. Oh! The ring of mountains is a super caldera with the highest peaks at 23,000ft for those afk guys. Because I didn't use a 3rd party app to create a RAW height map to import and create the terrain in a few minutes. The mountain range and all those fjords took about 7 days of 8 hours work time to complete.

Your strat idea has been floated in the Wish List in various incarnations since I've been around about 15 years now. I think the whole idea of letting your bases next to your strat be captured is to force you to fight for the base and the strat. Buzzsaw shows players are willing if the distances are reasonable to fly or drive to the fight. Distances between bases becomes a big problem when you have fewer players. In the old days of mega hoards, long flights were needed to slow down the hoards. 


(Image removed from quote.)

looks like a shark with food in it's mouth

[bustr]

I thought about that while I cut all those fjords, but what else was the water going to do other than cut the rock that way. At least the small caldera tank arena in the center has a more classic look of a caldera even though a number of places on earth are the remains of super caldera. The center at 25ft above SL, is about 250ft below that cliff ring surrounding the four villages. Those hills, one set for each country are at 600ft and the base at the rim is at 900ft. Once I get the fields laid down for the countries, I need to test a spawn from each country into the center of three of those villages to make sure you don't get stuck in a house or a tree. the three tiny GV bases will be un-capturable so players have some place to land their kills. You can see why there will be a permanent 3000ft cloud layer over this island to mess with level bombing greifers. It will force them down to wirbel range to use the bombsight. And that outer crater wall remnant in the water, has a few 3000ft peaks.

[lunatic1]

what does SF stand for?

[bustr]

Kind of a pattern here.

SF - small field
MF - medium field
LF - large field
SLF - super large field

The picture is just a copy of the clipboard map bmp converted to a jpg so I can "doodle" ideas on it, or map field layouts, numbers and spawns. As I was sculpting and painting the land I went through about 80 of those to keep track of the changes and elevations. I decided to see how much work sculpting the topography by hand would be versus using a third party program to create a grey scale RAW height file to import for a rapid terrain topo build. You ever built a terrain yourself?

[lunatic1]

Kind of a pattern here.

SF - small field
MF - medium field
LF - large field
SLF - super large field

The picture is just a copy of the clipboard map bmp converted to a jpg so I can "doodle" ideas on it, or map field layouts, numbers and spawns. As I was sculpting and painting the land I went through about 80 of those to keep track of the changes and elevations. I decided to see how much work sculpting the topography by hand would be versus using a third party program to create a grey scale RAW height file to import for a rapid terrain topo build. You ever built a terrain yourself?

ty  should have known

[toddbobe]

We had sector strats about 10 years ago. sometimes you can see a spawn point to nowhere, that is a where they once were.
Todd

[Chalenge]

I think that any system you come with is still going to be waiting on an update to the convoy/train system. I would like to see an overhaul of the strat system too, but I doubt very much that the design of a map is going to help much.

We're missing something, because AH is the best game as far as mechanics and elements. So, why does it always come down to the strats?