I'm with Lazs, Rude, and Yeager here. I went through the phase where I got burned out with fighters. So I tried bombers.
"Hey, this is pretty fun, watching a formation of B17s blow big chunks out of factories." But then you start thinking... well... what did I actually do there? Take off, go AFK to smoke, make a sandwhich, eat said sandwhich, smoke again, take a ****, smoke again, come back, calibrate the bombsite, drop the bombs, turn around, go AFK to smoke again, come back, and land. Whats the point? Blowing up the factory doesn't seem to do a damn thing, as far as I can see. I actually prefered the old setup with just the cities and HQ, where bombers could actually have an effect on gameplay. Plus, I enjoy shooting down bombers, so defending a city or HQ was a fun sortie. Now don't get me wrong, I don't dislike bomber pilots. In fact, I wish there were more that actually flew non-suicidally. I'd love to see squad-sized missions of B-17s pasting some field from 15,000 feet. That said, nobody is going to use bombers for the simple reason that they are inefficient. Instead of taking 20 flights of B-17s, you can take 20 Tiffies and blow up all the fuel, the VH, and the town and take the field (and the 3 or 4 guys that don't auger get a nice vulch if someones stupid enough to try to keep upping). Anyway, I decided bombers just weren't doing it for me.
So I tried GVs.
"Hey, this aint bad either... shooting planes with the main gun is kinda fun!" Yea, I know, I'm a 1337 ]-[@X0r. Well, dammit, it was fun anyway. Of course, then you shoot some M3 with 18 AP rounds and it doesn't die, and then it shoots your Panzer and blows it up. Thank God they fixed that one anyway. Still, little things like getting blown up by strafing Spitfires, losing the tracks on a Tiger and shaking so bad I almost went into sympathetic convulsions, consistantly weird things happening in tank to tank combat, the miracle 37mm manned ack that can drop Tigers and Panzers like nobodies business, and other assorted peevs that I can't think of off the top of my head sort of ruin the GVs for me. If the GVs didn't seem so much like a tacked-on afterthought then there might really be an alternative to fighters for me in this game. As it stands now, a sizable proportion of the time I log in, see either no fights at all (usually earlier in the day, when you get 70 people on and 40 different bases getting milkran), or see 3 attacks of 100 people vs 2 defenders, which is no fun anyway. Or on some rare occasions you'll see what looks like a decent fight, so you check the closest field. Damn.. fuels porked. Well, lets check this one. ****... fuels porked here too. Well... this is an outside shot.... Golly-geeN, they porked it here too?! Guess I'll hit the gym a little early today.
I think the era of Lazs "noble furballer" is coming to a close. For whatever reason, people don't like to actually fight. I'm not pointing any fingers or calling anyone any names, because it seems that the people who do enjoy just fighting for fighting's sake are a very very small minority on this BBS (which is in itself a very small minority of AH players). It would be stupid of HTC to make decisions that imperil the "fun" of the vast majority of the subscribers to cater to a few dozen people. I honestly don't think the game will change much from here on out, it has entered into the final "stage" of its evolution. AH2's arena might be something different, it would be hard for me to make any guesses.
