ORIGINAL: TheElf
There is no air this game. Lowering the Altitudes to those that are more representative of those flown IRL would do nothing, as the relative performance advantages would be the same when interpolated at lower Alt. Players will always find a way to game the system....
This issue is likely best resolved by House Rule as much as it pains me to say it. AE leadership has stated, and continues to state that AE support will remain at the Bug squashing level. This is not a bug. It is a player loophole in the code. There are lots of loopholes.
HOUSE Rule. Sweeps May be flown NO higher than the top altitude in their Optimum Altitude Band. CAP may be flown at any altitude.
This may sound unfair, but CAP is limited to only a portion being airborne @ the assigned altitude, the rest have to scramble and as such would be at disadvantage.
One of the best HR suggestions ive seen in a long time!
This is somthing worth trying out.
ORIGINAL: castor troy
Please noone feel offended by me posting on this matter now, but it has been said for months by the officials (and forum members supporting the officials) that it´s all fine and working well. Now either the language barrier hits me again or your post implies the different, as we are now talking about a loophole in the game that is exploited by the players. Same goes for some posts on this matter on the Uber Tojo thread.
And this is what I was talking about weeks ago, when I said people are doing what they are told, look at the stats - trial and error. And it soon turned out that this leads in a lot of PBEMs to the "who gets higher wins" encounters. I said this was wrong, as it´s not reflecting history at all as the air engagements are happening just below 40.000ft all the time in many PBEMs while this is probably something like twice as high as the average altitude battles were fought in real life. Yet from posts of both sides on this matter there was a lot of "bad mood" around, name calling etc.
Either I haven´t understood what I was told all the time or this is a change in the official´s oppinion. [&:] I guess nearly none (or noone at all) of the PBEM players has done testing on this before starting a game to find this "loophole", yet many PBEM players have figured out that their fighters work best the higher they go (at least higher than the enemy). I´m experiencing the same in my PBEM and with a lot of other people doing the same I thought this was evidence enough for me that fighters do work better when flying their sweep at a higher alt than the Cap.
Now that we are speaking about a loophole, I still can´t figure out a good hr. Your suggestion isn´t bad, the problem though will be that with a lot of Allied base forces you will soon get enough radar coverage to see the 100% in the air on Cap again. I had this happening in the Sydney hex with 100% of my fighters in the air, even though the Cap setting was 70. And I was counting on all my fighters in the air btw, there were at least a dozen radar sets giving me enough time to scramble everything. So the hr about the Cap at every alt and the sweep at a max alt will soon be encountering the problem of all fighters in the air having the altitude advantage over the sweep and therefore diving on the sweep. The note on the scrambling sounds good though.
I know that there have been no changes to this matter (at least none that I know of or that have been posted in the patch notes) but since the latest patch my PBEM saw two stratosphere sweeps of Lightnings at 39.000ft. The P-38 encountered Oscars (38.000ft) and Zeroes (6.000ft) on Cap. And to my surprise, the Lightnings did NOT dive on the Cap, but it was the other way around. Strange things happen in the game and it´s a funny coincidence that exactly after the patch this happened twice in a row while it never happened in 6 months game time before this latest patch. Nothing was changed, yet it has changed in my PBEM, at least for those two sweeps and this has never happened before. Like I said, strange things seem to happen. My opponent and I will definetely keep an eye on this.
Edit: to point it out again, this post is not intended to be a flame post, so if there´s too much sarcasm in it again, then noone take it as a personal attack.
Very sensible post CT! [X(] [:'(]
You made some good points. I´ll try to explain the difficulties we are facing here when adressing things like A2A
Testing this game surely included things like the stratosphere sweep.
The Elf was pointing out that loopholes as this one are VERY hard to treat or remove without killing the game engine as a whole.
I like his comment that theres no air in this game.
Every value is abstracted. You don´t get a complex flight model out of some alt bands numbers and dice rolls, but this exactly is the only way that the game is able to simulate
A2A and we are stuck with that (for anything radically better we need a new game engine).
That said solutions to these loopholes have the bad habit of opening new loopholes which we are currently not aware of. Every change to a model this old and this complex
has to be done very carefully, and sometimes left as it is, because the solution would make other parts of the model inefficient or exploitable.
If you don´t work with software issues day by day its hard to imagine how difficult it is to find a solution for a problem without touching other parts of the program
that aren´t even connected to the issue on a first glance.
Maybe there are some possibilities but these are very hard to find and have to be implemented with care.
