TheElf
Posts: 3870
Joined: 5/14/2003 From: Pax River, MD Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Alfred TheElf, Please, please, oh please do not fall for the old conjuring trick being presented with the aim of pressuring you into changing things when there is no sound fundamental good reason to do so. Too often in the past code has been changed to accommodate poor players who complain when their lack of skill/understanding is exposed. To put up now the detailed reasons for my plea would be too time consuming but here are a few briefly presented reasons. 1. You were generous in dismissing kindly in the other related thread the validity of the so called air combat tests. I shall be much more direct. For the reasons you gave plus a few other reasons you did not state, those tests had zero validity. They have been described by a well known forum contributor as "vanity tests". They prove absolutely nothing. 2. All the proposed coding solutions are difficult to code because they are arbitrary, and there is no development team available to do all the work. Plus they all fail because they fail to address the fundamental problem which is that RTS style players who attempt to play a game which is grounded in real world parameters will always, at some stage, reach the edge of the cliff. 3. The game already has the solution to the perceived problems. Unfortunately it requires players to do all the necessary unsexy things which the RTS crowd don't like to do. Those game areas which could be further improved involve zero coding but an awful lot of OOB reconfiguring a la the DaBabes family of mods. No one, and I mean no one, is volunteering their services to undertake all that hard yakka for the official scenarios. 4. Some posters in this thread and elsewhere have repeatedly poointed out the incorrect strategy and tactics employed. Those who continuously shout down the messengers of what is the correct approach fail to understand the points. Here are a few common errors. (a) Attrition of the Japanese forces is cited as the correct approach. This is wrong because attrition is a very dumb military strategy. Ask Haig, Joffre and Falkenhayn. What advocates of attrition really should be iterating is that degradation of the enemy force structure, plus misdirection of the enemy military assets, plus pinning enemy forces elsewhere is required before a direct approach to the Home Islands can be undertaken with any reasonable comfort level. None of these elements has anything to do with attrition. In fact given the basic game design, compounded by playing the ahistorical scenario 2, attrition particularly of air assets is to the benefit of Japan. (b) Several posters are advocating coding additional air coordination penalties. Mein Gott, they already exist in the game. Instead because a player places over 4000 aircraft in a single airbase and has the need for only 250 aviation support personnel present at that same airbase to maintain this surreal air fleet, you are being asked to undertake complex recoding. All that is required in this instance is two things, firstly properly implement the AE decision to remove the 250 aviation support upper cap for human players, and secondly adopt the DaBabes treatment of the multifacets of engineers. The first might be relatively easily accomplished but the second isn't (see point 3 above). (c) Others are practically demanding that coding be introduced to guarantee carrier fleets will be able to utilise fully 1000 fighters on fleet CAP. Again a misunderstanding of the real world and what the existing game engine is capable of. Just how long would it be before an Allied player sends a 20 CV fleet to act as an air combat trap deploying only fighters, approximately 2000. Would we then have demands to up the limits? Whatever limits are introduced, someone will sooner rather than later come up with a counter. The only correct way to deal with that sort of a problem is with skillful play. (d) Others complain about the ablative armour effect to the bombers provided by the escorts. This too can be defeated. The days of when a battle incurred entirely within a day, usually over just 1-2 hours are long gone. Battles can and do rage for days, weeks. Campaigns for months. Let the strike package approach with its ablative armour. On day 1 the bombers will get through, the ablative armour will be hacked out of the sky. The escorting fighter groups will return to their airbases and perhaps will be able to draw in replacements or be rotated out and replaced by fresh fighter units. So on day 2 of the battle another strike package could possibly be assembled with its supporting ablative armour. Same result. However this time, the fighter losses, even if supply is present and the pools contain airframes, cannot immediately be made good as there is already in the game a 7 day restocking limit on airframes. The skillful recipient of these huges strike packages factors into his planning these game elements and assembles his forces to absorb the impact of day 1, day 2 ... to come out ultimately on top. 5. All this has come to a head as a result of the rader-GreyJoy match. The single biggest reason why that match has a problem, is due to a single fact which no one ever comments upon. That is they have no "objective" victory conditions. An old thread by Bullwinkle argued, and in my view, quite correctly that a game such as AE needs auto victory. Section 17 of the manual deals with the game's victory conditions. Unfortuneately far too many players like to puff up their chests and declaim s.17 doesn't apply to me, I'll know when I have "won". Well guess what the fundamental sillyness of that approach is exceedingly well demonstrated in the rader-GreyJoy match. When GreyJoy landed on Hokkaido the peanut gallery said the war was now won by the Allies. Now after the failure of the subsequent follow up Allied strategy and tactics there is much wailing that the Allies can't win. The victory conditions outlined in s17 of the manual fairly represent the historical outcome of WWII. In mid August 1945 Japan surrendered because it was totally defeated (except in the eyes of certain fanatical suicidal elites) without the need for an Allied landing on the Home Islands. GreyJoy couldn't adopt that approach because he had been outplayed by his opponent and could not achieve a victory as per s.17 of the manual. Instead he chose a Hail Mary to bypass s.17 of the manual. The results of the poor play has come home to roost. Alfred Wow...umm. I agree.
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IN PERPETUUM SINGULARIS SEDES
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