- Joined
- Jan 24, 2011
- Messages
- 4,801
Changelog: Minor fix to formations and changed experten kill event so that the treasury is never brought below 0 (killed someone, then captured Paris, and found that I 'plundered' around negative 300 gold.)
I had to use cheat menu again to give the Germans 500 gold. I'm thinking that we need to tweak the munitions mechanism of both parties so that they can't use munitions if they have less than 500 gold. Ideally we'd also add something in where no side can rush build anything with less than 500 either, though I don't know if that is possible or not. In any event, if we have a "floor" of 500 we could simply ensure that both sides always have at least that.
I'm also thinking we might want to tweak the Battle of the Atlantic mechanism a bit to try and cut down on Allied fuel. You had mentioned that they need a maximum amount, but maybe we just need a scaling penalty for losing a freighter. Here's what I was thinking:
At the start of the German turn we count how many freighters the Allies have, and how much gold/fuel the Allies have. Let's call it 10 and 10,000 in this example for ease of math.
Since the Allies possess 10 freighters, sinking each one in a turn would remove 10% of their fuel, or 1,000 fuel.
If the Allies started with 10 freighters and 5,000 gold, each one sunk would take 500 fuel.
If the Allies started with 5 freighters and 1,000 gold, each one lost would cost the Allies 20% or 200 fuel and so on.
This would give the Germans more incentive to focus on the Battle of the Atlantic throughout the game, and would also reduce the amount of fuel available to the Allies, and since it scales, it might be effective throughout the game. Further, it would reward sustained effort by the Germans, as the more they can sink/the less the Allies have available, the greater damage done.
I don't think this would be create an imbalance given that the freighters are fairly robust and can be quite difficult to kill on one turn.
I didn't mean to suggest getting rid of them, just that they might not see much use, and maybe should be tweaked a little.
If we wanted to strive for each unit to be unique, we might have a chance that rounds will 'miss' the targets due to their speed? Maybe 20%, 40%, 60% for the A-20, B-26, and A-26 respectively?
I never really attacked the radar, since I thought the advantage would be relatively small. I usually have to penetrate so far into Germany to do something, that surprise never seemed all that plausible anyway. I might have liked to target radar stations near Hamburg/Denmark, but that is out of range of the tactical bombers anyway.
Surprise is unlikely but vectoring is the real use of radar as every space I don't waste searching is potentially another one I can attack, and i can set up attacks much better. I don't think it made much difference overall, but it was probably a missed opportunity that helped me. I invested in radar early in the game and was glad to do so.
The cost of fighters is fine from my perspective. I don't think it is too high, but it is a bit hard to tell if it is too low. If the Allies attack without escorts, it is either because they are impatient or because the escorts just don't have the range to be useful.
At the moment, my 'strategy' is basically saturating your air defences. The Mustangs, as far as I can tell, just make it harder to kill stuff, so reducing the number of bombers required for 'saturation,' and requiring you to have flak in the airbases that you use. At their current price, this seems a reasonable use. Maybe I could mass enough to kill the flak in an airfield, but thus far it hasn't seemed worth the trouble.
I'm going to have to wait to see what I think when the excel data is available, but my family fell quite ill over the holidays too and I made no progress on anything of value. I do think the planned 109 addition might compel more prop fighter to prop fighter combat in the future versions where we might see Mustangs tangle more. In any event, they are fine interceptors and are having the effect of making me carefully weigh my attacks.
However, I just got an idea that should be very easy to implement, and would solve these problems: Allow 15th Airforce production at airbases in England, and use an on-production event to simply teleport them to Italy when they are produced. Then, their price can be tweaked if they're too powerful, and we don't have to worry about lightning re-deployment of bombers to and from England.
I like this idea and agree that we should implement it. We may need to bump up the price as you suggested, if every airfield in England could theoretically produce them.