ORIGINAL: FatR
The dive gives benefits approximately equivalent to extra 15 knots of speed. At most. Likely less. Deliberately giving up the dive in exchange for the optimal altitude band seems to be actively and significantly beneficial for certain planes, like Ki-43-Ic. At least in my Scen 70 game, Japanese planes always sweep at 15k (due to our HR), and Ki-43s actually work better than they ever did in stratosweeps - even against my own airforce in JuanG's BB Enhanced scenario, where all of Japanese planes get about the same 15-knot buff. In fact, during that game Ki-43-Ic were relegated to cannonfodder once Allies got enough Hurricanes, while at 15k they got about 1:1 kills against the same Hurricanes.ORIGINAL: Yakface
You are representing the symptom as the problem. The problem IMO is that having 'the dive' the only thing that matters in air battles.
Zeros work about as well sweeping at 15k as they did on stratosweeps. Again, in both cases (Japanese sweeping me in BB Enhanced, me sweeping allies in Reluctant Admira) Zeros had about the same small speed buff (although in the latter case it was unintended and somehow managed to creep into stats of Zeros/Oscars/Franks at some point in development - an unpleasant consequence of the several people working on one mod, and not being sufficiently in touch with each other, I guess), and in both cases Zeros dominated early Allied planes to about the same extent.
Actually it means the removal of player input from air tactics. Which might be a good thing or not, depending on whether you like AE's level of micromanagement or not. But it also means a tremendous metagame change in unclear direction and necessity to relearn how the air model works from scratch. And possible breakage of several air model aspects other than A2A calcuations (bombing altitudes, raid coordination). Which is a very bad thing.ORIGINAL: Yakface
Dealing with just the symptom would mean you are effectively changing one god-stat for another. Previously it was max ceiling - in future it would be whatever height you decide is right for the plane.
EDIT: I do sincerely hope that was a joke.
perhaps I shouldn´t complain because I´m the Allied player and I´m fielding P-47 and P-38 for the rest of the war while the enemy flies lower than me, therefore me getting the dive (only due to altitude) and constantly achieving 10+:1 with the dive against Zekes, Tojos, etc. The same squadrons get 1:1 or perhaps 2:1 without the dive.
Now all of you that were saying altitude doesn´t matter probably missed the point when there was this official comment: "doing stratosphere sweeps exploits the game". If everything is fine, how can it exploit the game? Answer? It´s the players, not the game.
Ok, back to start. Not only me (I don´t care at all anymore) tried all the "advices" of the far smarter people than we are here on the forum with what outcome? It was even WORSE with these great advices. So what did my opponent do then? Of course going back to the fighters ceilings instead of all these fantasy advices. Now it even got worse for him I guess as now my fighters weren´t even only doing ceiling sweeps, but we´ve also got ceiling P-47 Cap now. He sends in nearly 40 Jacks at their ceiling somewhere around 39000ft, countered by my P-47 at 42000ft now. Result? It made me laugh, a 35:1 for my combined P-47 / F4U Cap, with the P-47 downing 80% of the enemy during the "non important?" dive.
Show me your results with all your so well working advices (that seem to be ignored by us?) against P-47 at 42.000ft. Show me please, it´s not like we "whiners" as you like to say have ignored all these advices right from the start. Same as not having had all our fighters at their ceiling right from the start. Discussion got senseless at exactly the day when there was the comment of ceiling sweeps being an exploit anyway. This should say enough. If it´s an exploit then noone can tell me it´s working.
