cato13
Posts: 453
Joined: 6/29/2005 From: scotland Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Hubert Cater Thanks for the feedback everyone and off hand it is a bit hard to say one way or the other if things are potentially askew as there are a lot of different examples listed above, and without the numbers, i.e. levels, experience, supply, HQ attachments, there are potentially just too many factors that could have played a part in some of the results. For example, in the unescorted German Strategic Bomber example above facing off against a 10 str Lv 5 US fighter, I can get results anywhere from 1:7, 4:5 to 7:1 depending on what Level the German Strategic Bomber is, how much experience it has, who it is attached to, the supply level and so on and this would also change depending on the US fighter experience and who it is attached to as well. I also ran a test where I had a fully entrenched Corps in Bristol, with AA Level-1 and attacked it with 7 Tactical bombers, all with 1 experience point, attached to an HQ with 2 experience points and all at supply 9, and a range of Ground Attack levels from 1 to 3 for the Tactical Bombers and at best I could knock the Corps down to strength 5, but more often than not it stayed in the range of 7 or 8 strength. However, generally speaking, and let's say we are looking at Tactical Bombers, they are currently set where you can expect them to take 2-3 strength points between closely matched units, i.e. a Level-1 Tactical Bomber at 9 supply with no experience will inflict 1:3 on a supply 8 fully strength Corps that is out in the open. Since increased Ground Attack levels will be cancelled out by increased AA applied to defenders, this ratio will tend to stay the same until supply levels, attachments, and experience become alternative factors. In this light, I'd argue that having an air unit being able to take 2-3 points of damage is not necessarily a bad thing as it does help to keep the flow of the game moving, especially for the Axis in the early years regarding Poland, France, Balkans and then Barbarossa, but beyond that I can see two main points of contention, possibly three: 1) Should air units inflict any strength point damage at all? 2) Should air units be allowed to mass together? 3) Should air units be allowed to destroy a unit? For 1) I would still argue yes as otherwise the early parts of the game, especially the flow and timelines, would potentially suffer. Very early on, many air unit attacks are spread out so inflicting 2-3 points of damage is helpful and typically a ground unit is required to finish the unit off. Unless you start with ground units and then finish off with air after the fact, but essentially it is rarer that a grouping of air units is wiping out units all on their own. Later on this can happen as more air units are built and tactics possibly change with this in mind. For 2) we have attempted to limit this with recent changes to how air units are linked to HQs, but if a player would still like to mass their air units, and they put in the effort to do so with the right number of HQs, then this is possible. Question really is here if this should be forcibly limited further from our end, or is it reasonable enough for a player to be rewarded if this is their strategy? Often there are pros and cons to this strategy and other areas may suffer and increased costs may be involved and at times the gains are short lived especially if another part of the war has suffered as a result. For example, the Axis may go all in for North Africa and it may feel overpowered there, but in the long run Barbarossa suffers and big picture wise the war may ultimately be lost despite the initial feelings of things being terribly unbalanced. For 3) the bigger concern for me would be if air units are destroying ground units outright, i.e. from full strength, or was it a unit already severely weakened and on its last legs, or from a concentration of multiple attacks, and even possibly air attacks. If it is the former I think this would be a problem, but I suspect it is only the latter, which could be amended if it is indeed a deal breaker, but we'd have to be careful to not disrupt the flow of the game that is also quite important as well. Very interesting read hubert. I would say yes to point 1 and 2. i have zero issues with air units inflicting pain on ground units although the more i think about it the more im coming round to the idea of air units not affecting strength at all but certainly reducing morale and readiness. it just seems silly seeing large ground formations being wiped out single handedly by air units regarding point 2, i havent played pbem so im not sure how big an issue this is but my gut feelin is that if someone wants to spend lots of precious IC massing air units then it means they aint spending those points on something else which can have a downside as well. my main beef is point 3. my current game has pretty much been ruined as most of my axis african force has been removed from the map by air units alone. admittedly the units arent in great shape but they were all 10 strength units. and this is against the AI. i can only imagine how frustrating this would be in pbem. my solution would be to simply reduce the damage that air units inflict but you are better placed than me to decide what effect that would have on the game overall!
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