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Post by cabusha on Feb 25, 2020 3:33:29 GMT -6
I loved Rule the Waves 1, and love the new options that Rule the Waves 2 has brought. The new, carrier-based gameplay is pretty cool and has seen rapid improvements. The Land-based Air though, honestly, is just painful. I seldom play a campaign past 1940 as it turns into nothing but "Ships approached by aircraft" messages that will drag a mission into 1400 or 1600 tics of me, un-pausing, over and over again as I'm continuously bombarded by land based aircraft. It's just unfun. There's no player input and the game is entirely RNG as this point.
And it's equally easy to game the AI with it. The Germany 1920 start with "all the treaties" is trivially easy because all you have to do is build Land-based aircraft bases, put heavier than air research to high, and pick a fight. Build a few fast scout cruisers and use them to pull their navy into your flying death swarms. Tada! Who needs a navy?
Seriously, I would love for there to be an option to disable land-based aircraft bases entirely, as they pretty much dominate what should be the coolest new feature, the Aircraft Carrier.
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gt
New Member
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Post by gt on Feb 25, 2020 4:25:56 GMT -6
You may disable pausing on some notifications instead.
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Post by sagaren on Feb 25, 2020 5:09:21 GMT -6
I loved Rule the Waves 1, and love the new options that Rule the Waves 2 has brought. The new, carrier-based gameplay is pretty cool and has seen rapid improvements. The Land-based Air though, honestly, is just painful. I seldom play a campaign past 1940 as it turns into nothing but "Ships approached by aircraft" messages that will drag a mission into 1400 or 1600 tics of me, un-pausing, over and over again as I'm continuously bombarded by land based aircraft. It's just unfun. There's no player input and the game is entirely RNG as this point. And it's equally easy to game the AI with it. The Germany 1920 start with "all the treaties" is trivially easy because all you have to do is build Land-based aircraft bases, put heavier than air research to high, and pick a fight. Build a few fast scout cruisers and use them to pull their navy into your flying death swarms. Tada! Who needs a navy? Seriously, I would love for there to be an option to disable land-based aircraft bases entirely, as they pretty much dominate what should be the coolest new feature, the Aircraft Carrier. I have to disagree. I find once you have semie-efficent CAP a carrier is easily able to beat off many times it's number of land based aircraft assuming you have decent fighters and enough of them. Especially as they never put in coordinated strikes with escorts. We can see this historically in the Pacific conflict. Early war when CAP control was poor carriers tried to avoid fights with land based air. By midwar they were dominating over it.
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Post by akosjaccik on Feb 25, 2020 5:35:26 GMT -6
^ The problem is that this statement's validity can vary WILDLY depending in which theatre and - in this case, more importantly - on what gameplay settings you are playing. On the old medium, and especially small fleet sizes the Med and to a certain degree the NS was an absolute hell, because the land bases do not scale. Take for example Italy, if you take every territory from the state outside of the core territories, ITA still has more than 1000 a/c in circulation regardless of you being able to field 12 or 2 CVs in the area due to the gameplay settings. In every battle. I wish I've screenshotted a battle of mine, where I played Germany I think, and I actually planned for this with armored carriers and maximum CAP with fighters heavily priorized in the loadout. In under 100 nautical miles I've lost count how many times was I under attack, but on average every CV got 2-3 torpedoes, no matter the italian losses. This might be realistic? Certainly. Issue is, in this case all the player is able to do is declining each and every battle late-game. Not a particularly favourable solution. This is even somewhat admitted by lowering the plane count from 120 to 100 in case of the largest bases.
So I don't think that betting on land-based aircraft is a bad thing or a strategy that needs to be cut down or artifically discouraged. It might be battle-winning, but not war-winning, like sub-spamming, and granted, weather and time of the day can play a role. If a simple "OFF" switch can be implemented, sure, no harm is done, I'll not use it though. However, I really, really do wish for either an automatically scaled land base size modifier, or a slider where the player can influence it on the game's starting setup screen.
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Post by wlbjork on Feb 25, 2020 6:16:19 GMT -6
It's a bit tricky, as the game I believe has a modifier of 1 through 7 for the fleet size.
Set the values too low and Airbases are pointless, but too high and they can dominate.
A cap of expansions to game size would be simplest, but would that be too low for small games?
Should the number of 'planes per base/expansion be proportional to the game size? Again though, I can see this being an issue at small sizes as the base would be barely worth investing in.
Another problem is of course early aircraft are less capable and shorter ranged so the numbers are needed, yet later on the capabilities are much improved making aircraft extremely dangerous and enabling the aircraft spam that seems to be the issue.
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Post by JagdFlanker on Feb 25, 2020 6:26:06 GMT -6
i made a suggestion in the past where at game start there should be an option to choose airbase size per tech level - i'd personally prefer 8/10/12 aircraft per level of airbase rather than 20 because of similar late game experiences in the past
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Post by akosjaccik on Feb 25, 2020 7:31:30 GMT -6
All of them are valid concerns, and all of them can be fine-tuned by testing. For example, to just state the most obvious, linking base sizes to fleet sizes should not necessarily be represented by a linear function. And even with that said, I'd still say that it's better to err on the "not worth investing into" side than to keep the current iteration, for one clear reason: The AI controls this. If the land bases are made borderline worthless, while that would be an unfortunately wasted gameplay-element, but the player is still playing the game, carriers are still under his own control, and this particular parameter, the land-based air would be toned (too much) down in an AI vs. AI environment.
Despite the initial decision, the option to make them manually controlled is still also there, so the land-bases on a one-on-one level in your example might contain "too low", just say, 8 (actually on alert and ready to aid the naval assets) aircraft on max level, but you have at least 4 of them in the region, that's still a respectable strike package which you might perhaps even control manually, and is always there and you pay for these planes accordingly. More importantly, the AI pays accordingly as well - dorn crunched the numbers in a "suggestion" topic iirc. Basically, the less the AI spends on a/c, the more it spends on ships you can actually fight against. (...or subs, but that's another matter).
Right now you can choose at the start of the game to have 6 capital ships against 1200 a/c or 60 capital ships. It's not that tricky.
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Post by wlbjork on Feb 25, 2020 8:15:08 GMT -6
Of course, one could add that this is another incentive to take colonies in peace deals. It's not the extra income as much as denying air bases.
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Post by director on Feb 25, 2020 9:16:51 GMT -6
The best argument against allowing nations to build massive naval-strike airfleets is that they did not do so, and did not do so because they more urgently needed their aircraft for land operations.
Had Germany or Italy gone full-in on naval airpower there is no doubt they could have closed the Mediterranean to the Royal Navy - at, perhaps, the cost of land campaigns in the Balkans and Russia.
Of the three nations that did develop robust naval-strike airfleets, two were islands (Britain and Japan) and the third (US) might as well have been. Had a continental power tried to build a large naval-strike airfleet, those aircraft would have been co-opted by the senior service (army) and effectively removed from naval control.
So I am in favor of very sharp restrictions and/or caps on building a large naval airfleet for Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Austria or any other continental power. I am in favor of alternate history and I enjoy exploring possibilities, but I can't see that this is even remotely likely.
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Post by akinesia on Feb 25, 2020 9:45:40 GMT -6
I tend to agree land based air becomes to much in late game it really killed my enjoyment of playing AH after about 1930.
It was not as much of an issue playing as the US since I avoid taking colonies in Northern Europe or the Med.
So you can play certain nations with certain play styles and it isn't a problem but that really decreases the replayability of the game.
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kaiww
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Post by kaiww on Feb 25, 2020 11:09:22 GMT -6
I have encountered the same problems in late games with land based airplanes but instead of limiting or eliminating land based airplanes i would prefer another option.
While aircraft's were much cheaper then Ships the resources to build them in the numbers desired were not always at hand or cheap to come by during the war.
So perhaps if new planes would come slower into service and active airbases cost more upkeep during peace time, to reflect that in peace time the resources needed for airplane construction would go into other projects, would slow down land based aircraft numbers.
I would also argue that if we had an option to allocate naval butches to airplane purchases, like research, we could decide or self how fast new Planes would be build.
Last but not least, there were so much more air battles during WWII then Sea Battles, there should be something like the abstracted submarines warfare for airplanes, monthly loses in air raids and dogfights in the war zone to reflect airplanes losses outside of ship operations to keep the number of airplanes in flux, this way you have to constantly replaces a number of airplanes even if you did not fight a active battle. This would force you to make the decision, more ships or more planes.
During a long war you should even be forced to consider to disband heavily under-strength air units so other get more reinforcements. At least this was a realty some countries during WWII.
This is how i would like to see this change.
(Sorry for my English it is not my first language. )
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Post by seawolf on Feb 25, 2020 13:37:53 GMT -6
We had looked at this earlier. You can limit the size of airbases to 20 or 40 if every time you get a notification of "Larger airbases are now available" you save and exit and change this line "AirbaseSize=120" to "AirbaseSize=20"
This is line 31 in the RTWGame#.bcs file
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Post by cabusha on Feb 25, 2020 16:35:07 GMT -6
We had looked at this earlier. You can limit the size of airbases to 20 or 40 if every time you get a notification of "Larger airbases are now available" you save and exit and change this line "AirbaseSize=120" to "AirbaseSize=20" This is line 31 in the RTWGame#.bcs file Yeah, I've already tried doing that, and found the game will do this check every turn now. That's not even close to an acceptable fix, having to hand edit every single turn now seriously sucks. To discuss further, by the time these massive land based airbases show up, the games strategic elements fail to adapt. For example, in Hearts of Iron playing as Italy, if France and GB have air control over the Mediterranean, I can keep the fleet at home until the situation balances out in my favor. In RTW, there is no balancing. There's no War for the English Channel to thin planes down. Instead the AI continues to mass air cover with its losses only taking place when you Sally forth. And failing to Sally forth penalizes you, the player. I'm not failing to Sally against their fleet, I'm refusing to Sally against overwhelming air power. The game doesn't care though, and you'll be penalized for not taking the engagement. Basically, the land based air power breaks what little strategic elements there are, and actually punishes the player (vps) for not engaging it.
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Post by cabusha on Feb 25, 2020 16:42:03 GMT -6
To add, I can sink an aircraft carrier. I can't sink their land airbases. I've tried flying bombing strikes with my carriers to where their air bases are, but nothing of note happened.
So you end up with infinite health, strike carriers that can cover the north Sea or Mediterranean, rendering fleet actions suicidal, with no player agency to counter it.
It's the submarine warfare simulation taken to the extreme, but the AI gets to actively hound you with flight after flight of aircraft, and you having no recourse but to hope your AA and Air screens can hold out. For the 1400 ticks it takes for the planes to stop.
It's not good gameplay, and really makes the game unfun.
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Post by rimbecano on Feb 25, 2020 18:02:37 GMT -6
I'm not sure land airbases need to be disableable, but a few things that I think the late game really needs:
1) Every late game engagement needs to begin with the player's fleet leaving harbor, and needs to last at *least* 2000 turns. The player needs to be able to plan his entry and exit strategy (ships wait outside of air range until nightfall, surface ships hit bombardment targets after dark and retreat by dawn, carriers launch attacks on airbases with the alpha strike scheduled to hit at first light). I'm quite confident I could manage even the Baltic or Adriatic with such a setup, but spawning in range of enemy air at high noon ***sucks*** (why would my admiral be stupid enough to put himself in this situation, and how was I not sunk before I spawned?). I wanted to see this in the RTW1 days just because I really liked the operational scale missions in SAI campaign mode, but after 1930 or so in RTW2 I consider it a critical QOL feature that would really help with a major pain point.
2) Land based air should be generally much worse at strikes on shipping than naval air (as they often were IRL), unless the player pays through the nose on training.
3) All categories of LBA but floatplanes, flying boats, and maybe TBs (which still can carry bombs for ground strike) should be routinely raided by both the player and AI armies for inland missions, effectively removing them from action for affected missions. The number of planes poached by the army on either side (and an estimate for the enemy) should be part of the information on the accept/decline screen for a battle.
4) The number of planes per airbase per tech level should probably be what it is, but should need to be reached by several airbase expansions at each tech level instead of one, at current costs per expansion. So building out a 20 plane airbase at TL 1 should take two expansions of ten planes or four of five planes, rather than one of twenty planes (counting the initial build as an expansion from zero planes), with the cost to build each expansion being equal to the current cost of a twenty plane expansion.
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