Originally posted by Midnight
Give everyone 4 lives per hour. If they use them up carelessly, then they have to wait for the next hour before they can get a new vehicle. Allow them to be a gunner or drive all the goons they want, just not insta-spawning every 20 seconds.
I've been putting some thought into a possibility even more diabolical...
It's similar to the idea of having the available number of planes limited, but instead of applying it per team, it's applied per-player.
Each plane would gain two new values, in addition to ENY and cost. "Maximum Available" and "Build time".
Each player would start off with the maximum available of each plane. Everytime they died in one, that player would lose one count for that plane(It's per-player, what other players do has no effect on your personal hangar)
If the player didnt have the maximum number of planes available, they would gradually rebuild, with the build time representing how long it takes to replace a single plane with a countries strat at 100%. As a country's strat got bombed, the rebuild rate would drop(perhaps to as much as 25% of normal) Your hangar would rebuild while you're offline, not just in-game. This would give strat a usefull roll, and make it somewhat more important since it would effect you even when you weren't online.
EVERY plane would gain a cost, not just the perk planes, based on the plane. (My thoughts are 1-10 perks for everything up to but excluding the 40 ENY planes) If you ran out of a specific plane, it would cost you the cost * the percentage of the build time left before another plane would be available. So if you had lost all of your spit9's, and it's cost was set at 10(just for simplicity) build time at 1 hour, and you had 30 minutes before the next one would be available, it would cost you 5 perks(Half the build time left, half the perks). And the timer for the plane currently being "built" would be reset. Also, when you "bought" a plane, the perks would be immediatly removed from your count, and the available counter increased. (In effect instantly finishing the "construction")
This system does have one large advantage in that, it makes planes like the 262 available even to newbies, without letting them takeover the arena.
So, perk planes would have a maximum available of only one(excepting perhaps the f4u1c, and ta152, which might be higher, and the 234 which would be 3 to allow for a formation) and a long build time(weeks to a month)
As for the "free" planes, the build times for most of the currently free planes would be set up so that there were ~5 planes available, and a rebuild time of ~4 hours. The reasoning is fairly simple. It's designed so as to have no penealty for those who don't have the time to play more than an hour or so a day. (Hard to lose 5 of any plane that quickly, short of letting yourself get vulched!) Those who DO play longer will have the perks available to fly the planes they want to, but suicide type attacks would be dramaticly lowered.
I personally believe that a system like this would not only do a better job of getting more of a variety of planes into the air, but offer some very strong reasons to fly the very high eny planes, that aren't normally flown, especially for things like base defense. (Giving the fighter-only planes an attack option would probably do a lot also) It adds a cost to dying constantly, but a cost which pretty much anyone can afford, even though they can afford it, it will get people to put a bit more thought into dying.
So there is a good reason to avoid dying, perks are more usefull, and there is little practical restriction to planes, short of constant, short lived, suicides.(i.e. letting yourself get vulched)
Wow, if you've gotten this far, please comment and tell me how wrong I am. No cheating and posting before reading the whole design!
