op-fire rules and visibility

[WanderingHead]

**
I recently learned in Harrybanana's post that island based air will not op-fire at movement from the sea zone to an adjacent land zone. This doesn't make sense to me. Should it be so?

It seems quite wrong that a German plane can fly from Southern Italy to Tripoli and _not_ get shot at by a WA plane in Malta, while a German plane would fly from So. Italy through the Central Med to the Aegean and get shot.

Or, a plane flying from So Italy to Eastern Med would get shot, unless it flies over Tobruk instead of going directly, in which case it is not shot. It's the same movement points either way.

It just seems like it should be made consistent, whether exiting the sea zone to another sea zone or a land zone.

I can see the special case that could cause a problem, which would be any units moving through the sea zone to attack the island on which the air is based, but it should be an easy enough case to flag and treat separately.

**
Another op-fire point ... it seems too easy to run a blockade to get supplies to fleets. Namely, you can place a transport and supplies onto a seazone with enemy fleets without incurring op-fire. Your fleets on the other side, assuming they are adjacent, can then use those supplies by sucking them from the adjacent seazone.

E.g. I had fleets stuck in the eastern med, blockaded in the central med, snuck the supplies into the central med and was good to go.

Not sure that this can be improved, seems too ingrained in the rules. Not even sure if others would agree that this should be improved...

**
Another op-fire point ... would it be possible to see the op-fire combat report in playback?

It's frustrating to not see what happens, and sometimes I find myself wondering "how did they get there? wasn't there op-fire? why didn't it hit?"

**
Another playback point ... would it be possible to see the combat results of the first CAG air strike, instead of only seeing the results of the CAG counter-strike?

Actually, this request applies to both playback and normal play. It seems that there is no way at all to see the results. I guess you'd have to check the damaged units screen before and after the combat to know what happened (i.e. damaged or destroyed).

[JanSorensen]

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead
Another playback point ... would it be possible to see the combat results of the first CAG air strike, instead of only seeing the results of the CAG counter-strike?

Actually, this request applies to both playback and normal play. It seems that there is no way at all to see the results. I guess you'd have to check the damaged units screen before and after the combat to know what happened (i.e. damaged or destroyed).

I fixed that one so it should be in the next patch.

I will take a look at adding op-fire to play-back but I do not know if its something I can do so I will not promise anything.

As for the first two questions I will leave those to Joel to answer as they are design issues. My personal opinion on the second though is that I prefer it the way it is now - the IGOYOUGO system makes putting ships out of supply too unrealistically easy otherwise.

[Joel Billings]

We didn't want to make it too easy to cut off fleets from supply.

As for the op fire rule, it came about during development. I think we didn't want aircraft to be able to shut down invasions against nearby land areas as that seemed to be too much power for the air units. I realize it sounds like an odd exception, but at the time during development there was a good reason which may have had to do with how the AI could or couldn't handle things. We also didn't want Malta to shut down operations in the Med so we were happy with the ability of Italy to move troops and supplies to North Africa. At the time we were happy with the impact the air rule had on the game and didn't want it to do more (even though it causes the inconsistencies you mention). It was definately a conscious design decision.

[WanderingHead]

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings
We didn't want to make it too easy to cut off fleets from supply.

OK.

It seemed to me like making such a change to supply/op-fire might actually improve things in that it would be harder and more risky to support distant fleets, since the lack of incentive for nearby port facilities seems like one of the weaknesses of the naval system, particularly in the Pacific.

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings
As for the op fire rule, it came about during development. I think we didn't want aircraft to be able to shut down invasions against nearby land areas as that seemed to be too much power for the air units. I realize it sounds like an odd exception, but at the time during development there was a good reason which may have had to do with how the AI could or couldn't handle things. We also didn't want Malta to shut down operations in the Med so we were happy with the ability of Italy to move troops and supplies to North Africa. At the time we were happy with the impact the air rule had on the game and didn't want it to do more (even though it causes the inconsistencies you mention). It was definately a conscious design decision.

Hmm, makes some sense.

I think the op-fire rules are pretty good, but I see lots of places like this were little bits of tinkering might improve things. Not that I expect it in this game, but just a thought for the future.

E.g. I think that degrading op-fire capability after repeated op-firing would make sense (like the arty against amphib assault), and maybe having one air unit opfire instead of all of them, or allowing mass movement so that op-fire can be distributed amongst several moving units (instead of against each one) could degrade the capability a little so some new op-fire opportunities (like against seazone to land movement) could be added. After all, using your example, I think that the importance of Malta is somewhat underplayed in this game.

[WanderingHead]

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings
We didn't want to make it too easy to cut off fleets from supply.

OK.

It seemed to me like making such a change to supply/op-fire might actually improve things in that it would be harder and more risky to support distant fleets, since the lack of incentive for nearby port facilities seems like one of the weaknesses of the naval system, particularly in the Pacific.

Having thought about it more, I think you guys were 100% right on this. What I brought up would make it too easy to cut off fleets.