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Nikademus -> (7/18/2003 3:16:39 AM)
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Mr.Frag
[B]I really think this issue would go away if two things in UV were fixed:
1) Fatigue rates for CAP were downgraded to make CAP sustainable instead of the current good for a few turns max.
2) Disablement for AA units was quartered so units didn't become completely worthless when subjected to daily LBA.
As it sits now, UV is just silly in these regards. We already know this has been partially fixed in WitP as it is quite obviously a problem, be we don't have WitP yet, so we continue to suffer from this abuse in UV.
Not much point picking on Chiteng as to a certain extent he is quite right, he just singles out the B-17 specifically when it is more of a general problem with players abilities to impose extremes in UV that were not historically possible like basing 200+ LBAs at a single base to ensure rediculous levels of suppression, etc). This is not England where aircraft took off from 30 separate airfields to form up for a raid on Germany. This is the Pacific where it took an hour to get 12 aircraft up from a single base. UV's abstraction of time into two phases steals the reality of this from us and makes such silly things possible.
Mogami's AARs while being a good indicator of what things are like show one thing clearly (please note Mogami doesn't send his LBA in at 100/1000 feet), use of planes historically result in historical results. If Mogami cared to switch to the silly tactics that others use such as mass carpet bombing at low altitudes, he would see Chiteng's issues, but he plays the game without exploiting it's obvious weakness. [/B][/QUOTE]
Good post Herr Frag, particularily insightful regarding the difference between player styles Like the Mog-ster, i too tend to prefer non exploitive tactics, so no mass 1000/100k raids for me either
Too your list I'll add one that has not been mentioned recently at least
3) Aircraft repair/servicability rates.
A large factor that mostly goes under the radar in regards to the LBA issue in light of talk about B-17's , national bias, blah blah blah, is that one of the BIGGEST differences between UV and the real McCoy, are the aircraft repair rates and the ratio of servicable to unservicable aircraft.
SoPac theater was as mentioned in the past, MURDER on machines as well as men and most air units during the early/mid period days covered by the game would be lucky to have half their "paper" strength on hand at any one time for any one operation.
Add to that, planes that are damaged and do not end up "op losses" repair at very high rates, such that a couple days off and you have mostly, if not all your planes ready vs damaged. This allows allows a highly increased tempo of air ops and contributes to LBA's dominance. Lastly a nitpick i've had from day one is that damaging aircraft on the ground is all too rare. Its the opposite problem of the ground crew/footsoldier/flak issue which is reversed. Matrix put in a more realistic repair rate for 17's but players screamed. It messed with their neat tidy plans and thirst for 'action' so it was heavily muted to be all but useless again. The reality is, is that if you push your planes hard like your men (morale) you will quickly end up on the bad side of your chief mechanic when he tells you you've got 4 planes servicable out of 30 due to a variety of issues from bullet holes to the need to rebuild an engine. And a day or two is not going to fix it. Thats another reason why air units "rotated" frequently. To sustain an air op, you need to pace both your men and your machines.
LBA did dominate the SoPac theater.....it just didn't dominate it as fast or as serverely as UV allows via it's mechanics + Player exploits. CV's could dominate a land base being mobile platforms but they needed strength in preportion to the target and even then there was still a risk.
It remained a long fought war of attrition. Let me put it another way. In UV, players fight a campaign with PAPER strength LBA figures and the results obviously tend to look more impressive than real life. If players were forced to fly with ACTUAL Strength LBA it would not be as dominating or as quick paced as we see now
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