Curious...Why is this game so hard to get right?

[Blackdog_kt]

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.

Originally Posted by Talisman

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 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).

Originally Posted by notafinger!

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.

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.