Chickenboy
Posts: 24520
Joined: 6/29/2002 From: San Antonio, TX Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Panther Bait CB, unfortunately AE does not really take a lot of that sort of prepwork seriously. How about most player's constant shifting of combat ships (not divisions, individual ships) and air squadrons on an ad hoc basis to make bombardment runs, bomb targets in massed hordes, etc. Can you imagine all the work required to map out radio networks, call signs, coordination areas, form up that all shift on a sometimes daily basis? And yet all these things happen with little to no degradation in performance (at least with ships, at least airplane raids can suffer from lack of coordination). Plus CR's navy has been in the Philippines for a week or more, game time? How fast did those ships really accumulate there? Considering that the US had been in the Philippines for quite a while pre-War, it's at least plausible that they had enough information on the Legaspi area to pre-plan an anchorage. Oh I get it about the inability of the AE engine to represent reality. There are myriad examples. My commments were in the context of the taking the plausible and making it into an absurdity because the engine 'lets you'. What you're describing (changing call signs, radio networks, etc.) could plausibly be done in the background so that the effects were noticed overnight. I can suspend my disbelief and assume that these things were implemented spontaneously, but had been worked on for months in 'the background'. No problem there. It's even reasonable that a semi-organized anchorage could be established for a modest number of ships very quickly. Is 453 ships a modest number? No. Does the engine allow absurdities by not addressing this? Yes. Another pet peeve of mine is night bombing-particularly in the early war. Early Allied efforts using B17s from PM against Rabaul were largely ineffective. Night sorties suffered from heavy OPS losses, poor accuracy, difficulty with navigation (winding up on the business end of the Owen Stanley peaks), sporadic enemy CAP, etc. They did it not so much because it was effective, but because they 'had to do something' and anything would do. The game engine permits the absurdity of rookie-crewed, massed early war aircraft flying with no OPS losses over hundreds and hundreds of miles of trackless terrain to deliver fantastically accurate bombs on target. All the while shooting down hapless enemy fighters with laser-like precision. At night. With no OPS losses. It's just 'broken' on so many levels. An easy fix to the night bombing would be to increase the OPS losses (flying into the side of a mountain in the dark) to 10%. Not *by* 10% but *to* 10%. This level of hard-coded night bomber OPS losses would give even the most bloody-minded Allied commander pause. Similarly, a significant increase in the OPS damage for armadas occupying a small hex should also be borne. Enough to make it sting when pulling this nonsense. The game does not exact this tax-the engine 'can't handle it'. I'm just outlining what I think it *should* do for fairness' sake. If it can't (e.g., night bombing), then that's fertile ground for HRs.
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