Ehrm...sorry ElAurens but I think that there is not a good mindset going in to BoM, I-16 anyone?:cool:

Actually I think ATAG do a pretty good job of trying to balance realism and entertainment within the current limits of the game. After all, you don't have to fly out on the deck and engage likeminded players.

May I suggest you could threaten map closure by both sides towards the end by spawning ai bomber raids aimed at player targets, forcing each side to defend.

I'm afraid the real flaw in this game from a df server point of view is the asymmetric (but actually somewhat equal) nature of the real bob, which lends itself to campaigns rather than dfing. Mapmaking that satisfies both sides is never going to be easy, or be quite like bob.

It also cruelly exposes the British lack of close air support capability and the German concentration on it.

Incidentally, Manston was almost abandoned as a permanent base, a bit like I've abandoned Hawkinge for similar reasons, so actually ATAG has got it sort of right!

56RAF_phoenix.

Most of the conditions DO exist on ATAG..the problem lies largely with the players themselves.
Get 10 players together on the British side and deciding on what to do always ends up in one single thing... "Let's go to the 3 airbases in France and strafe em!"
Similarly if you ask on Teamspeak if anyone wants to fly bombers, you're lucky to get 1 or 2 guys who join.
And asking for escorts for those 3 bombers might get 1 fighter..who often forgets about you before even joining up ("oooh a shiny contact ,let's go investigate").

I think if people bothered to fly in more historical ways before asking others to do it we'd be a long way towards seeing more engrossing situations develop online.
Heck even the "Storm of War" campaign stuggles to find 8 guys willing to fly bombers out of 100+ signups from what I hear.
Would love it if we could get a weekly event going on ATAG where people join up with the intention to fly bombers and escorts as a team.
Right now most pilots just fly fighters, join furballs and don't see the inside of a bomber even once a week.
If we can't change this there is no way to get more truthful BOB-scenario's (except coops I guess...) and the best place as always is to start with yourself and your squaddies.

note : I'm fine with and can hugely entertain myself on ATAG as is, even if I'd love a weekly or 3x a week time where more organised flying is attempted.
There is no need to force people to fly in such and such way, limiting fighters and forcing people to fly bombers fe. will just result in an empty server.
But if nearly noone wants to fly bombers ,escorts or "real" missions I don't see the point in pointing fingers at others when they don't fly in the way you want em too.

The above post is mostly true. Sure, there are difficulties with many aspects of the sim, but even those that work don't see that much use on the grand scheme of things.

I'm not saying that we should make this a default setting. What i'm trying to propose is something that will let us fly dynamic campaigns, both offline and online. So for example, if blue team keeps successfully bombing the red team's fuel supply on a base and/or the fuel dumps around it, then the base would have to be resupplied. Same if the Blenheims start attacking bomber airfields in France, blue bomber availability would decrease. Or cratering runways would make airfields unusable for a certain amount of time, forcing players to spawn at different ones, and so on.

My aim is not to recreate a day to day recap of the battle, but let the players influence the outcome themselves by giving them a sandbox with parameters that can be tweaked. Then, it will be the server admin's job to set the starting conditions right for each team (amount of aircraft of each type, pilots, fuel, etc, along with their replenishment rates).

I'm talking about a strategic aspect, which is more or less possible with the scripts, so that we have goals to achieve even when there are no missions explicitly built for that. Essentially, this would create a 24/7 campaign with semi-realistic outcomes: if the players have the same starting and victory conditions as the LW and RAF did and they fly the same, then most probably the outcome will be the same, if the players do things differently then maybe the outcome will be influenced.

It's the essence of what the developers intended to do for multiplayer (that's why we have scripts), making it possible to join the persistence of a DF server environment with the realism of coop missions. Only this time, it will actually depend on the players to plan their own missions and fly in a way that helps their team. There will still be room for simpler fighter sweep type missions and there will be lulls in the action where players can simply roam, but essentially my thoughts are creating a sandbox environment and letting the players chose what to do with it. They can still do whatever they want, but winning such a mini-campaign or even having their favorite aircraft to fly from their favorite airbase will depend on how well they also protect their team's assets.

I am busy with various other things and can't devote the necessary time (plus it's summer), but i've had this idea for a while and i want to develop it into something that can be used at some point. Mind you, i'm not part of 1C and i don't speak in any official capacity. It's just a potential project of mine that i've had in mind for while ;)

Understand what you are saying Blackdog, but I thought that BoB airfields were well established military air bases with dispersed and protected underground storage tanks which could not be easily spotted from the air. In other words, not a neat pile of drums on the airfield for the LW to take pot shots at. I guess the underlying point I wish to make is that I would prefer to fly the BoB, as near as the sim allows, rather than a made up battle. My thinking is that battle maps focused more on the attrition rate of aircrew and aircraft could be a way to achieve that. I had hoped that the specific nature of the BoB would offer maps a little different from the same old IL2 1946 maps, especially as sequels on the Eastern front, etc, are likely to offer up more of the standard ground war support scenarios.

Just my thoughts Blackdog. I am grateful to all server hosts and map/mission makers that are trying to make sense of CloD.

Happy landings,

I can't say I'm interested in dynamic scenarios for multiplayer, especially on a public server. Those things are best served for online wars between squads in something like SOWC. A very small portion of the community reads the forums so they have no idea to use the radio menu to call for a supply convoy to restock an airfield with their desired plane. Instead the chat window begins to fill-up with "why are there no E-4's?" & "when is this mission over?".

Many people simply want some online scenarios that make some historical sense fought during normal hours of operation. For BoB that means targets like convoys, ports, radar stations, airfields, & aircraft factories with some decent sized bomber formations.

That is the point where you answer politely and help those folks out.

What is lacking in these scenarious are rewards. Ppl look for success when flying online, not for historical missions out of pure principle.

You need incentives to have people fly those missions, some kind ongoing reward system.

For example, moving frontlines, or mission rotations based on outcome. Let's say we have a Dunquirke scenario starting with some Bf109E1s and Hurricanes. Red Wins this scenario , the Dunkirque Area is held and on top of that red recieves the Rotol Hurricane.
Or the Blue side wins and gets the 110C7 or the E3, depending on what is more useful for the next mission and moves on the channel battles. Now here it depends if red is capable to recieve reinforcements via ships or blue is able to sink them fast enough. In this way you can develop quite a bit of dynmaic gameplay.

Stuff like this will even get the fighter jocks thinking in what way to deploy their fighters...or to switch to bombers so they can have more fun later on in other scenarios.

Naturally, this does not follow historical developments, but then again we are also not in a life and death struggle whose outcome will effect the fate of whole people, a rather strong incentive. If you want people to contribute in those servers in a meaningful way, simply reproductions of environments and expecting ppl to fly accordingly won't work.

I agree with Bewolf. We can't force people to fly a certain way, only provide incentives. Incentives means dynamic outcomes, which means we can have either one but not both:

1) We force people to fly a certain way and recreate the battle itself

2) We "nudge" players to fly in a realistic manner by giving them incentives, but naturally the battle will take a different course each time, according to what the players do.

From that point on, it's a choice of what the server admins want for their environments.

I agree in principle with what you say, but when practicality is concerned we the users can't achieve something like this in one go.

Theoretically speaking, even if the RAF fuel reserves are hard to get to on the base and they have the historical amount of fuel with an non-historically low amount of players (so more than enough fuel for everybody), the blue team could hit the fuel supply lines (AI ship and truck convoys) and the main storage areas (refineries, etc in industrial areas) and still strangle the red team out of the game, or vice versa. At some point the amount of fuel on any field will be low and it will need resupplying, attacking those resupply convoys will prevent topping up the tanks and effectively close down the field.
That's especially true if most of the team is busy flying furballs between Calais and Dover and the other team is bombing targets of value.

But of course opinions differ. You prefer to fly the BoB itself and there's nothing wrong with that.

I would prefer a more dynamic nature to such a campaign so that players can influence the outcome, that's why i would code it that way if i ever got to it.

Come to think of it (and thanks for the discussion, this is how ideas come along ;) ), it just dawned on me that the amount of available aircraft, supplies and pilots should also reflect the average number of players on a server, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of such a campaign.

Even if we had a server with 100 players on every night, they are still few compared to the size of a real air force. So, having the historical number of aircraft and pilots on each side might mean that there's 150 available aircraft and 70 virtual lives available to each player. If on the other hand we adjusted the amount of available planes on the server to match that ratio with the given server population, it would be much more realistic (ie, it's a scaling issue).

Resupply would be handled automatically via scripts and triggers that spawn the AI convoys. The players would simply receive a status update via the "radio" so that they know what to protect (just like the on-screen messages on ATAG that inform us of AI bomber spawns asking for escort), while the other team would have to discover the convoys on their own. But yes, like you say, what i'm after is a sort of online war module so that each server can run a mini-campaign every second week or so if they choose to.

I must say that I like the historical context and that is why I fly this sim and mostly historical servers if possible. If I was not concerned with the historic context I would probably fly a combat sim/server that had the same aircraft on each side. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

You can't "coerce" players to do anything, they will do what they want anyway. Players play the game as a pasttime, to derive enjoyment. Which is why no kind of "coercion system" will do anything but drive players away.

Wishful thinking. Sorry to be so blunt but IMHO only 1 to 5% of the player base would be willing to fly bombers. That has to do with several aspects - limited free time (not everyone can dedicate an hour or more for a bombing sortie), lack of interest (most people are fighter-centered players), lack of "gratification" (some people need tangible rewards to motivate themselves) etc. Even with heavy AI use you will never get more than a fraction of the people into bombers - certainly not enough to actually reach the historical force ratios of bombers vs fighters.

IMHO you're aiming too low, although the number issue I desribed above makes that more plausible. IMO bombers should not appear below squadron strength, meaning 12 aircraft at least. Better (for the Luftwaffe) would be Gruppe strength (max 36 aircraft). This would depict history, this would make interception more difficult and it would allow for a much more plausible bombload per target.

Talking about 109 and 110 fighter-bombers in the BoB one should not forget that it was a single Gruppe at first which flew such sorties - a tiny minority. Only late (September and October 1940) this was enhanced to one Staffel per Gruppe of 109s operating as Jabos but given the targets they were given (London as a whole) that use doesn't make much sense to me gameplay-wise.

The abundance of fighter-bombers around is yet another sign for the fighter-centric view of most players and the utter lack of realistic force ratios and bomber target categories.

The problem of the BoB as historical background for such a "dynamic campaign" is that it was essentially an ad-hoc attempt at fighting a war of attrition, a war of economics. This can't be depicted in the game because the important industrial areas of central England and the major port cities are outside the map. That means strangling the RAF's fuel supply isn't going to be possible - the main reserves and the "source" of the fuel/oil (the ports where the tankers docked) are untouchable. The same is true for basically any war-relevant industry - aircraft, armaments, ammunition, oil refineries etc.

So what's left? Well, the airfields and the lines of supply and communication which are on the map (ports for coastal convois, London, all railway lines and stations, important roads and bridges etc). With these limited possibilities a dynamic depiction of the BoB is not possible and trying to develop an abstract version is IMO a waste of time and effort since it will always leave a sour taste behind.
All that could be done with this set of variables is a much more limited "campaign", perhaps one in which the Luftwaffe has to force the RAF to give up operating from forward airfields such as Manston or Hawkinge and damaging at least one or two Sector airfields (i.e. Biggin Hill or Kenley) to such a degree, that they cannot fulfill their role (in aircraft maintenance, as fighter controller etc) anymore. But for this to happen the airfields themselves would have to have pretty intricate damage states - a downed hangar lowers the maintenance capacity of the airfield, a damaged runway will be unusable until the craters are being filled up, a blown up ammo dump lowers the amount of ammunition available (same for fuel if that's realistic), ... All that is difficult to do right.

It's true that a tactical war such as on the Eastern Front is easier since it provides a much more flexible environment with a load of tactical targets the BoB doesn't provide. Just saying ...