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- Jan 24, 2011
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With the Battle of the Atlantic, I would probably go with the random spawning option as I found the mechanism where the nearest Allied destroyer spawned the freighters to be an issue for me as it meant all of my efforts would need to be focused on one point. I realize the BotA might have been a fruitful objective to pursue but with so many production priorities to pursue I felt it was a waste of resources to fight a battle I was always likely to lose. Perhaps this was an error in judgment on my part.
My proposal, though it's not been thought out in any great depth, would be for random spawning of Freighters that need to get to port. I would reduce the number of Destroyer escorts and make it more of a Maritime air battle - hunting down the U-Boats. Right now I feel like any U-Boats I send out to sea are on a suicide mission. If the focus was more on Freighters vs U-Boats vs Allied Maritime Airforce then I may be more incentivized to send the Luftwaffe to try and gain control of the skies.
The BotA mechanism evolved from a desire of the Allied player to not feel compelled to search the seas aimlessly for U-Boats that may or may not ultimately be there, as an objective Prof. Garfield and I have shared is trying to improve the "quality of life" and minimize turn time whenever possible (a necessary goal for any 100+ turn multiplayer event). Condensing to a convoy route made sense given that. We went so far as to make the system completely abstract, so that players wouldn't even need to bother hunting for convoys or U-Boats after a time if they felt like it.
I do agree with you however that this forces the Luftwaffe's hand to a focal point where they can be readily intercepted by the Allies. What I'm almost thinking we do is the following:
1. Reduce all sea units (besides aircraft carriers) to two: U-Boats and Convoys. Both have an attack rating of 0. Convoys have a high defense and U-Boats now get a munition unit, the torpedo. Convoys cannot attack, but are strong enough defensively that it should take a true wolf pack and/or Condor air attacks to take them out.
2. Convoys should now spawn somewhat randomly, but generally on the first third of the convoy zone, meaning that the Allies need to bring them all the way to England.
3. Compensate for this by reducing the number of convoys dramatically. Instead of a maximum of 11 spawning, perhaps have a maximum of 3 or 4 spawn each turn. The # is directly tied to the number of port units alive for the Germans, as it partially is today. The amount of units in the convoy box no longer matters.
4. Rather than each convoy spawning 1 freight train, have each convoy spawn several (perhaps - if possible - dependent on how much health the convoy has).
5. Have the convoys start with a fair amount of speed, and rely on Civ2 mechanism to reduce this when they are weakened.
6. Have the convoys be strategic targets as Garfield suggested, meaning that air units can't cover them.
7. Have U-Boats draw reactive defensive fire from Sunderlands, making these units much more valuable. Perhaps a Sunderland has a pretty darn good chance of sinking a U-Boat, or at least badly damaging it. So, although point 6 would prevent the player from stacking an air unit on the convoy, there'd still be a good reason to have it nearby as it would have a chance to destroy the U-Boat.
I think that this approach would do a few things:
* Reduce the amount of time each turn takes (moving three freighters is better than 11)
* Make attacking convoys more realistic for the Germans and make their U-Boats a bit more survivable since they can no effectively operate in the entire sea zone.
* Give the Sunderland a purpose to be built (I don't know if I built a single one in the entire scenario).
You could just have ground units represent much larger groups of units, so there are only a few of them to move. Then, rather than tactical bombers bombing these units into oblivion, the tactical bomber goal is to whittle the enemy down just enough to guarantee that the attacker will win.
If you want to make the ground war events only, then perhaps you should make tactical targets appear for your bombers to attack in order to make the war progress.
I'm not sure what to do to be honest. It's a big change and not one that I intend to reverse after making it. I'd really like to make one final push and complete this scenario after all of these years. I suppose there are two options (leaving things as is is not an option).
1. I could just have one unit for the Germans and Allies "Army Group" or whatever, and still allow these to move around the map. Perhaps they are so powerful offensively that they take care of the issue of having flak hold up the game by taking 70+ attacks from tactical bombers to get past. If the army group reaches the city or airfield, the flak is guaranteed to be destroyed and the only thing that can effectively stop it is another (full strength) army group. This would allow people to choose their own adventure with the ground war to an extent still which might be more fun than the game "having" to progress along a certain path. As you mentioned, it would give tactical bombers more of a reason to exist (to soften up the army group so that your own one could kill it). Another advantage is that it works as is with what we currently have going on and would be substantially easier to implement.
2. Have the city capture 100% driven by points. This would make the game all the more so about the air war but would also be much more complicated to implement and test and would basically take away the whole mystery of when and where the Allies (or Germans) land.
Right now I'm leaning towards #1 I suppose mainly because of the ease of implementation but would appreciate both of your comments.
I would recommend a cheaper Night Flak unit to help the Luftwaffe protect its airfields. There is no industry on the night map to efficiently produce Flak in large enough numbers. I would also question the ability of Bomber Command to effectively attack Luftwaffe Airbases at night (where most of my losses were incurred). Bombing cities is one thing, but hitting a blacked out airbase at night seems unrealistic to me. Instead of allowing more cheap flak at night you could find a mechanism to prevent bombing of airbases. Of course, hit & run raids on day map airbases makes a lot of sense historically.
@Prof. Garfield, I think I've seen you mention elsewhere that it is possible to "nullify" combat results/respawn defeated units instantly depending on what type of unit kills them, correct? If so, perhaps it makes sense to limit the types of attacks that can kill units at airfields. I would like night intruders to play more of a role (historically they would loiter near enemy airfields and shoot down planes that were landing). As it stands, my night fighters haven't done much. If they were the only aircraft that could kill Luftwaffe fighters at night (because they would respawn if killed by bombs), this might make things more realistic but also give the night fighters (another unit of limited use) a true role. How would that sound, @McMonkey? I think that would be much more realistic than having lancasters take your fighters out. This same concept, if it works, could be used elsewhere -- especially with more unit slots. I could simply have a few more types of ammo and only allow certain units to kill other units (perhaps the P-47D carries a bomb that is great against trains but can't kill other things, for example?).
As for the flak, they should be able to move freely between day and night maps just like trains and if I missed that, I need to change that.
Why not have bombers only carry one set of bombs? We can use a unit's home city to determine if the bomber is loaded or not. Empty bombers have a home city of NONE and can't generate munitions. Loaded bombers have an airbase as the home city, and the city is changed to NONE when the bomber generates munitions. This would also mean that you can't support all operations out of a single airbase.
A stated before, I definitely want to implement this.
I would look at randomizing the spawning locations of Supply Trains from France to make them less predictable.
I didn't have a whole lot of luck killing these once you stacked flak trains on them, but if some changes above are implemented that might change, so perhaps they do need to be randomized somewhat.
I found the invisibility of RAF night bombers to be pretty frustrating. I knew they were there as my radar picked them up but pinpointing their locating was a bit of a grope in the dark.
I mean that is kind of the point but in fairness I haven't been on the receiving end so I can't opine on how the frustration vs. fun aspect is going. It might not be the worst thing in the world to give the bombers sub qualities (rather than invisible) and allow the top-end intruders to be the ones that are full-on invisible.
One more thing I'm considering is only allowing heavy bombers to call up ammo on the high alt map so there is a definite need for tactical bombers on the low alt map.