S3 Series

The rules allowed gathering of points in areas away from the contested area so thats what people did.

Draw a circle on the map for the frame. Any target struck outside the circle = -5 points. Fall Gelb would have been fought complely differently.

Not 100% sure but I think the Allies did support or defend a contested spot at one point.
For what it's worth, I still think it's a good idea and that w should continue to experiment with it.
We need to convince the nay sayers to work with it.

Salute!

Didn't mean to diminish your inputs, Dazed. Sorry if it comes across that way.
+++++

Ya got it Sleepy.

The ETO field tgts are spread all over, and modifying "capture" criteria is necessary, IMHO.

The actual, RW scenario was about gaining territory and not getting "points". So the field capture criteria was maybe a big player in the series. I had no problems with the Allied "left hook" and trying to go around the south to trap us. The "points" aspect of that was the only thing that bugged me. It seemed to the Axis that we had to attack where those red arrows were, and that was really not the case.

I was very surprised to see the hardness of those barracks. And hitting them seemed a good idea to get the Allies to retreat.

The idea of using a subset of the ETO terrain might be worth considering.

Gums sends...

There was some of that but there were also escorted bomber missions far away from the contested area and FG's in the stratosphere. We don't have enough people in S3 for all of that going on at once.

If it is a close air support scenario, all 92 players should be engaged in direct support of the land battle or penalized in some fashion for not doing so.

hmmn..perhaps a Battle of the Bulge in Ardennes scenario in the Ardennes terrain, or a North Africa Rommel deal in Tobruk or even a Kursk event in Crimea.
If I remember right, and spindz knows how to do this, you can lock out the area not being used. turn em white and they not capturable or anything.
Narrowly defining the tactical objective to win the series may be a big contributor to how it would get played by the respective sides.......could be bloody
and over early for some..
Forget about points etc...support the ground war tactically and let the automated routines run their course in capturing the objective.....left alone, they more or less stalemate each other, but outside human influence effects the success rate of them greatly.
Do we need to rethink how we judge a series for a win or lose situation?

It would be fabulous to forget about "points" and win or lose be determined on achieving the objectives of the scenario. A furious 60 minute battle is more fun than 3 hours of hunting empty airspace.

I would prefer to drive a tank an action packed Kursk pocket than drone around in a airplane for hours at 35,000 feet.

That doesn't mean I want to drive a tank.

For those of us that take S3 seriously, it means hours of planning, effort and practice. When the result is, more often than not, hours of boredom and the frustration of actually following the stated intention having no meaning and groups rewarded for avoiding action, one begins to consider not putting forth the effort.

Salute!

Methinks Dawg and Sleepy are onto a viable scenario.

I was disappointed, as I had flown most of my RW missions providing CAS, LZ prep and such back in my previous life. So lack of anything resembling that for the Blitzkrieg was a bummer. I was looking fwd to strafing tanks right near our own critters, and so forth.

- Do the paras still run across the field and climb the tower for capture?

- If we can provide janitors with boat routes, why not critter movements?

- Not a lot of this "point" stuff. Track kills and such for the lites and buffs get field closures or factory destruction. Boat kills are simple - convoy starts with "x" and when they are all gone, they're all gone!! Ditto for the critters.

Gums opines...

It didn't help the AI were dingdings as usual. We tried helping the routine in the beginning, but the tanks wouldn't hit anything and then, as an example in frame 2 or 3, we captured 38 just to have the routine start attacking their own field. Then there was the matter of vehicle respawn farming. Non anyone's fault, the system allowed it.

Taking the points out of that might help, dunno. It might have been better if the cities and towns were the objective and the front matched the scale better. In a tactical scenario like this the only reason to attack airfields is to deny airpower for the other side in efforts to achieve the objective win. Many many games and MMOs have this "conquest" scenario as bread and butter. Something like " your mission is to get the tanks to the outskirts of Paris this frame" how we achieve that is up to us.

Among things that have previously been very attractive to players about S3s is that it was a competition between Squads that contained PEOPLE. Not competition between people and Artificial Intelligence critters which have some preprogrammed activities. In the last Series, much as noted above, the AIs did NOTHING if they weren't supported by airplanes. However, bring those airplanes and all of a sudden the supporting parts of the preprogrammed activities kick into place. "Defensive routines" begin to spawn, "AAA defender trucks" start to spawn. The presence of critters on the grade makes the airplane part of WarBirds subservient to what these critters, that somebody preprogrammed, happen to be doing. In the scenario that we were presented with, the concept of "Contested" had NO MEANING. The presence of "Contested" merely delayed the closure of the field and made the attackers hang around a field that was already closed until someone could determine that "Contested" actually equaled "Closed" and put a message in the buffer. This wasted the time of the folks who had already worked hard to destroy all of the required targets having to drag the field repeatedly looking for additional targets that were not present. In addition to that, these pilots had to scour the area looking for pesky self-spawning AAA trucks that might be looking to shoot their pilots, only to discover that the field had actually been closed for quite a while.

The "interface" for the buffers in regard to their AIs DID NOT WORK, and was abandoned by many pilots before the end of the Series.
The flashing circles and arrows prevented player-constructed .dtf route files from working. In fact, the "FEBA program" erased them in just a few seconds.
Welcome, destruction, and "congratulations" notices filled the buffer in blue, disrupting intra-squad communications from being able to be seen by many pilots.
Fields "closed" came over as "contested". A term which had no meaning whatsoever and delayed the progress of the game on to the next item on the Frame COs list of tasks.

In short, far more negatives to S3 play than any "positive" influence that could possibly be perceived.

What if they held a war, and nobody came? Much to the credit of the folks who had to do all of the code work, this type of play was presented to the players in more than one of the "Alphabet Arenas". In general, this type of play was not supported by the players when any other option was presented. One may note that "Alphabet Arenas" no longer exist.

My personal preference would be that during S3 play that any type of GV be "static" and a TARGET, and that I happen to have the option to select an aircraft which can kill that TARGET. IF, as indicated, there can be AI GVs running around on the grade that do nothing unless there is some airplane interaction with them, let them run around on the grade doing nothing but making a lot of noise. Just don't fault pilots of AIRPLANES who are looking for other TARGETS. This type of game play seems to make the operation of airplanes dependent on the activities of AI GVs. That's called TRACKBirds.

Salute!

I am compelled to go with Wolf on his philosophy and observations of this last series.

Gums sends...