Change back the dog fight mechanics

Regid wrote:

You can still use planes to direct attack land units and moving planes. Why are you so dependent on the patrol system? I mean, if you can stay up long enough to micro the planes, then you certainly would have time to attack directly.

Regid wrote:

I have played this game for 3+ years,

So, why would you play this game for so long and yet never participate in these all-important discussions?

Clanpred wrote:

Aircraft payloads are a tradeoff with aircraft capacity and distance to target. Perhaps a mechanic could be built in whereas aircraft in direct attack will do less damage the further they are from a certain distance from their base.

On a side note, I would love to see a one-time-use option for aircraft where their firepower could either be enhanced (like a Kamikaze attack) or their distance doubled (like the Doolittle raid) but upon completion of their mission, the aircraft is lost. (Kamikazes would only get a single strike, similar to rockets, and Doolittle raids would get a one-way double-length attack would then have 50% chance of surviving but to land in a friendly airbase within a very close distance to the target (or within the total distance of the double-length flight's maximum potential range).)

Clanpred wrote:

But I'd love long range fuel tanks on my ints and tacs

MontanaBB wrote:

As for the other solutions listed, I have already read the entire thread, several times, over several weeks. I understand the "exploit" problem. I also understand that underlying all of this is the absolutely preposterous idea of time-unlimited offensive patrols, without which this exploit could not occur. That said, let's address the immediate problem in the simplest way possible, that bears some resemblance to the reality of air combat, without fundamentally changing the game, and then ---- and only then ---- steps should be taken to time-limit patrols.

NovaTopaz wrote:

Also, who else would I single out? You were the only one who suggested the entire thing get re-polled(as in literally the only one who explicitly asked for it, in that way, because you didn't like the results of the poll, or otherwise didn't like how few people voted or spoke out).

Trust me, as one who writes very....prolifically, if you want to actually get your material read, you've gotta add a lot more whitespace. And, a TL;DR at the bottom would really go a long ways towards getting more people to read something of your work. I have to admit, even I, being a very anal-retentive person, did not take the time to peruse through that virtual tome of words.

@Diabolical: please don't tell lies!

The poll it's still open, but freeze declares that the poll is over, because the devs says that the arguments form the people that speaks for option E are even better. He made clear that we have no other choice like 'F' or 'G'.

But we have to look what happens now in future with the dog fight. If we get now the change we must see if it's works or not. Maybe we start a new discussion in a few weeks...

@Xarus tell the dev to direct attack a 10- stack patroling planes with 10 stack planes, and tell me what they think about E,

they need to fix this as well! or no1 will use direct attack unless noobs who think they know too much

and btw i find a way to kill the trick as a defensive player... it will work for around 5-6 ticks

MarkAchkar wrote:

and btw i find a way to kill the trick as a defensive player... it will work for around 5-6 ticks

....rock and a hard place, I tell ya!

i will only talk to the Dev team

Hey, put in a good enough word for me, and I'll get on that dev team.

And, no, I won't put in an Easter Egg that makes certain very specific players have occasional random units simply disappear without cause whenever they send me a negative in-game pm.

Wow, I really have no words diabolical lol.

Diabolical wrote:

There is a very fundamental reason for not wanting to eliminate the important and needed ability of patrols to intercept and attack your opponents....and that is because most of us don't want to have to stay up long enough to micro-manage the planes. And, that would defeat the point of this whole entire game, which is that you play slow and casually online. You can check in whenever you feel like it and the game changes only so much between the times you do check in. But if you have to manually tell your aircraft to attack every single blasted little target....well, that would really ruin this game for me and I believe it would ruin it for lots of other players.

Diabolical wrote:

Really? Wow. I was pretty sure Call of War (CoW) didn't get released until April 2015. I'd really like to know what timewarp you are playing CoW from? Now, if you'd said you'd been playing for 2+ years, that'd make more sense since, like me, you'd have been here since the early days of Call of War. It's a funny thing, though....for some reason, your forum ID says you've only been on the forums since last January. And you've only posted a few times since then.

So, why would you play this game for so long and yet never participate in these all-important discussions?

Diabolical wrote:

On a side note, I would love to see a one-time-use option for aircraft where their firepower could either be enhanced (like a Kamikaze attack) or their distance doubled (like the Doolittle raid) but upon completion of their mission, the aircraft is lost. (Kamikazes would only get a single strike, similar to rockets, and Doolittle raids would get a one-way double-length attack would then have 50% chance of surviving but to land in a friendly airbase within a very close distance to the target (or within the total distance of the double-length flight's maximum potential range).)

NovaTopaz wrote:

Randomization wouldn't work. It doesn't fix the underlying issue, namely attacking aircraft getting gunned down by defending aircraft. It would just makes it harder to execute. Assuming the randomization only put the intervals to reasonable times, you could feasibly micro manage your aircraft to avoid it still. By reasonable, I mean only a few minutes between the patrol ticks(IE 3 minutes at minimum. Obviously, 1 second intervals would be ludicrous when you are talking having to wait 59 minutes and 56 seconds for the next batch to go...). In fact, it would encourage you micromanage your aircraft even harder, and then even fewer players would be able to use the patrol function. Well intended, but without other things mixed in, it would probably worsen the problem, not make it better.

NovaTopaz wrote:

Though, what Montana said is also very good. A defending patrol should not be able to defend an infinite number of times in a set period(at least against patrolling aircraft). Basically, all aircraft fire once, period, per 15 minutes, not what is currently happening, which is a single patrol attacks all 5, and then it gets counter attacked by all 5, and then it repeats for the other 4 attacking patrol squadrons, within the 15 minute time limit. And actually, nobody addressed this directly, but that effect compounds rather quickly and means that whole fleets of aircraft can be decimated in a matter of hours, instead of days, were it to be occurring nominally. But I guess everyone already realizes this. Montana's would work, but it also brings up the point of how this would effect other things. Patrols are essential to protecting units on the ground, and making it only one per 15 minutes would leave units on the ground vulnerable to air attack, though that may not necessarily be bad.

Diabolical wrote:

Spoiler

NovaTopaz wrote:

... It's probably a good thing I understand what a joke is when I see one now... May not get the humor too much, but I do see it. Soooo yeah. Let's continue then, shall we?

First, 2 cents on the stuff currently being thrown about from the last page or 2:

Randomization wouldn't work. It doesn't fix the underlying issue, namely attacking aircraft getting gunned down by defending aircraft. It would just makes it harder to execute. Assuming the randomization only put the intervals to reasonable times, you could feasibly micro manage your aircraft to avoid it still. By reasonable, I mean only a few minutes between the patrol ticks(IE 3 minutes at minimum. Obviously, 1 second intervals would be ludicrous when you are talking having to wait 59 minutes and 56 seconds for the next batch to go...). In fact, it would encourage you micromanage your aircraft even harder, and then even fewer players would be able to use the patrol function. Well intended, but without other things mixed in, it would probably worsen the problem, not make it better.

As for the defender getting only 25% to correspond with the 25% of the attacker's attack... Sounds good. May not fix the core issue by itself, but it would help with the overall problem. However, as a counter to this, maybe we could have a different function if the patrol has not been engaged in combat? Like, if the aircraft has not been engaged for 2 or 3 ticks(30 to 45 minutes), the patrol aircraft have their overall flow sinergized such that the majority of the aircraft can take off and destroy the target that passes through the patrol area(so instead of doing the 100% it does now, it would do like 150% or something. Or it could just be 100%.). This is to deal with flying by aircraft not getting hit, mostly(also means you can have a second screening line of fighters in the rear to deal with stuff heading inwards to your provinces). Or if a air target goes for a direct attack on a land target, it should give 100% defense(because those aircraft are not on patrol). It would complicated it, but would make it less likely the patrol would get a massive nerf to it's overall capability. I'm in favor of aircraft no longer declaring war on a neutral country, but that's just me(and like I said, still do not understand why it was decided to be a problem, as the issue was never clarified. Well, the reason they gave for why it was made to declare war was not clarified, to be more specific.).

Though, what Montana said is also very good. A defending patrol should not be able to defend an infinite number of times in a set period(at least against patrolling aircraft). Basically, all aircraft fire once, period, per 15 minutes, not what is currently happening, which is a single patrol attacks all 5, and then it gets counter attacked by all 5, and then it repeats for the other 4 attacking patrol squadrons, within the 15 minute time limit. And actually, nobody addressed this directly, but that effect compounds rather quickly and means that whole fleets of aircraft can be decimated in a matter of hours, instead of days, were it to be occurring nominally. But I guess everyone already realizes this. Montana's would work, but it also brings up the point of how this would effect other things. Patrols are essential to protecting units on the ground, and making it only one per 15 minutes would leave units on the ground vulnerable to air attack, though that may not necessarily be bad.

As for a suggestion from me... Well, I don't have much, to be honest, besides adding a couple new units to represent in-between units(I mean, to me, it makes no sense that a fighter(interceptor, but same thing) can do basically nothing to a armored car brigade... It has bombs... And rockets... And it's a group of fighters as well.) that can operate as 2 types at once(either int tacts or nav tacts. Thinking about it now, there could also be naval scouts. Very good view range(the armored car of planes), fairly long range(just above interceptor, below tacts), can fit on cruisers, can spot submarines, and have the best anti-sub of any of the planes, only marginally better than the naval bomber(so 7 or 8 compared to 4 for level 6), but also have by far the lowest health(cheap-ish, though. Wouldn't require a lot of fuel.) and lowest speed of any of the aircraft, making their use limited to sub hunting and naval recon only(and even a pack of submarines can shoot down one or 2 naval scouts, which is about all you can fit on a cruiser at any level). Basically like anti-tank guns in that regard, except it flys and it hits subs hard instead of tanks. This would basically be for people who don't want to have to maintain a carrier task force and instead run a couple cruisers and many hunter killer packs of destroyers. Just throwing ideas out there.), or to add some functions for aircraft, barring that. Aircraft should be varied instead of having to use all the same functions, for me personally. Probably would be better to have a context sensitive menu(fire control, in other words), where some options are available out of the gate and all the other options are barred behind high command. But yeah, everything shouldn't use the patrol function, as I personally think that is highly misleading when referring to strats and tacts. Those ones shouldn't have to patrol, ever. It should also be stated somewhere that all aircraft and artillery attacks have a small amount of AoE to them, as they do have some AoE to them(saw that with some guys throwing tacts at one of my stacks with a re-inforcement coming in, and the re-inforcement got damaged before it could reach the sector...).

Regid, just wanted to make sure(and like I said, was a bit late to it, but I thought I'd add it anyway). Besides that, I also used it to redirect any further discussion on the thread, should they read this far or still be here for discussion(3 parts versus the 1 and three quarters I dedicated to the "issue"). Focus the discussion so there will be no more of the other part, rather than talking exclusively about the 'other part'. May not work, but at least it exists. Also, I was reading page 9, and there was still discussion on that dead horse... Maybe not the specific part of the dead horse I was addressing, but Storm was still arguing against the change in the last posts in that page(which would have been earlier this afternoon, when I wasn't paying any attention to the discussion because I was elsewhere.). Better what I did then have to deal with it later.

Trust me, as one who writes very....prolifically, if you want to actually get your material read, you've gotta add a lot more whitespace. And, a TL;DR at the bottom would really go a long ways towards getting more people to read something of your work. I have to admit, even I, being a very anal-retentive person, did not take the time to peruse through that virtual tome of words.

Guys this is going to be my last warning before I close this thread. As you can see we have a community full with different players that have different approaches and strategies. You will no way find something that makes sense to everyone or fit into everyones strategy.

Feel free to convince eachother, but do it with facts and sharing your game experience

Don't worry Sas, that's just what we were doing, although I might keep the sarcasm down a notch

Regid wrote:

Spoiler

Perhaps my wordings were not correct. I started playing Supremacy in around 2013 or 2014 I think, can't remember correctly. I switched to COW early 2015, I didn't even remember the date the game was released or paid much attention to it. But you seems to have done quite some research just for me, so I'm flattered.Yup my forum ID is made recently, since I only came in and read, I've never participated in any discussion prior to this one. Beats me if you ask why didn't I do it cause I don't know, may be because I felt I didn't have anything to add *shrugs*, really, I just feel like staying quiet all these time, that's all.

This is if I remembered correctly, my 3rd account and my final one. I deleted my previous 2. WiseOdin knew about them.

It is funny though, that you would go such length for such a trivial matter.

Pretty sure I've been playing CoW since January of 2015... On and off, of course... As is typical of me. If I remember correctly, the addition of the aircraft carrier came in april of 2015, or something along those lines. Might be 2016. IDK.

NovaTopaz wrote:

Randomization wouldn't work. It doesn't fix the underlying issue, namely attacking aircraft getting gunned down by defending aircraft. It would just makes it harder to execute. Assuming the randomization only put the intervals to reasonable times, you could feasibly micro manage your aircraft to avoid it still. By reasonable, I mean only a few minutes between the patrol ticks(IE 3 minutes at minimum. Obviously, 1 second intervals would be ludicrous when you are talking having to wait 59 minutes and 56 seconds for the next batch to go...). In fact, it would encourage you micromanage your aircraft even harder, and then even fewer players would be able to use the patrol function. Well intended, but without other things mixed in, it would probably worsen the problem, not make it better.

Spoiler

ah, you understood half of Clan's and my solution. For instance, one stack of planes will only attack one random stack of planes and receive fire from that one random stack of planes only. Also, the timer will be randomized, let's use your parameters; 3 minutes minimum and let's say 20 minutes maximum.

Let's say for every second between 3 and 20 minutes, the chance of the timer goes off is the same which is approximately 0.1%(I kinda rounded it up). Please note that this for the sake of simplicity only, and it's difficult to do this randomization because the parameters can change every time a tick goes off.

I really don't know how you can feasibly micro manage your planes with a 0.1% chance of the tick going off every second during the entire 3 to 20 minutes time span. It's humanly impossible, there is no indication when the tick will go off. Plus, you can micro manage it all your want, because when only one stack of planes attack only one random stack of planes, there is no advantage in doing it. I honestly don't see your connections to this randomization will worsen the problem.

I didn't see any part on that, but OK. But that's what I meant when I said it needed something else to back it up... Randomization by itself does not fix the problem.

NovaTopaz wrote:

Though, what Montana said is also very good. A defending patrol should not be able to defend an infinite number of times in a set period(at least against patrolling aircraft). Basically, all aircraft fire once, period, per 15 minutes, not what is currently happening, which is a single patrol attacks all 5, and then it gets counter attacked by all 5, and then it repeats for the other 4 attacking patrol squadrons, within the 15 minute time limit. And actually, nobody addressed this directly, but that effect compounds rather quickly and means that whole fleets of aircraft can be decimated in a matter of hours, instead of days, were it to be occurring nominally. But I guess everyone already realizes this. Montana's would work, but it also brings up the point of how this would effect other things. Patrols are essential to protecting units on the ground, and making it only one per 15 minutes would leave units on the ground vulnerable to air attack, though that may not necessarily be bad.

Spoiler

Ok, first sentence in bold: That is what the current tick system does. *scratch head*. Again this only skirt around the problem. If your planes only attack once per 15 minutes, it is still the same tick system we have now ??? If you mean by planes receive fire only once per 15 minutes, again it is still gonna be 1 stack of planes attacking once/15 minutes and receive fire back once/15 minutes ??? Or do you mean by every stack overlapping each other will act like a big group and attack once/15 minute altogether, if so then why do we even need individual timer for each stack ???Motana solution really confused me so much that I thought he didn't understand the tick system. Cause he basically just described it.

Ok, second sentence in bold, ahem, namely Roko, Freezy, Xarus, Clanpred, StormBringer50, Diabolical, MarkArklan, me...etc. Pretty everyone, well now you included. Might wanna go back and check on it.

Ok, third...paragraph, I have 0 idea what you're talking about. And no like I said his solution is the current problem that we have now at least to my understanding(it's confusing). Like how this would effect other things, what would effect what?

Argh, it's confusing.

Also did not really read or understand what I said. I said ALL aircraft fire once, period, per 15 minutes. This includes DEFENSIVE FIRE. Currently, defensive fire is completely unlimited, as compared to what he is suggesting, which is reducing everything so as to make it impossible for the exploit to occur, as it relies on the fact that defensive fire on patrol is, well, infinite. It may not completely fix it, or it may come back in another form, but otherwise, it would solve the problem. It may be more confusing to you because you don't have an internalized view of how all the pieces fit together.

I said that they may have said it indirectly, but I was referring to the fact that it may be worse than it sounds, because using that multiple times has a snowball effect that will drop aircraft in hours instead of days, were they to be separated a bit.

And I hope the clarification for 1. helps with this, cause otherwise there isn't much I can help with it. It's the logical ramifications drawn from 1, namely that if aircraft can not defensive fire more than once per 15 minutes, a lot of other things about aircraft patrol would change as a result, namely multiple aircraft striking one target at intervals less than 15 minutes is more effective than sending fighters to fight it out and then send in the tacts to hit a particular target.

stop whinging and learn how to play.

crying to have the game changed to suit your self is pretty poor form.

you sound like the type of people that take their bat and ball and run home once they get out.

leave the planes as they are and let the whiners learn how to play.

Even though I mentioned removing patrol ability as a possible solution to the 1 stack vs many issue, I didn't really see that as a viable option. Removing patrol is s drastic change, but i guess we can see how it goes. If you do that though, then you better fix the combining of stacks when they are doing bombing runs. Even though people that say they can't play as often as others are the few that complained about this issue, the patrol is actually something that helps people that are not on a lot. Forcing bombing will be more of a benefit to very active players. It is obvious that very few of the commenters understand the actual issue, and given the choice of option, which do not address the issue, it is very doubtful that the freezy or sasri do either.

I don't buy that it is too complicated to make a better change. That is total bs. One suggestion was to limit the patrol attack on other planes to two stacks. This would allow some advantage to the persistent warrior but not allow a zillion to 1 scenario. That could simply be implemented when iterating through stacks to see what is in range like:

if ( isAir(stack) && numAirStacks >= 2 ) continue;

the beast wrote:

stop whinging and learn how to play.

crying to have the game changed to suit your self is pretty poor form.

you sound like the type of people that take their bat and ball and run home once they get out.

leave the planes as they are and let the whiners learn how to play.

You really need to work on your layout Nova, It looks confusing with all the bold and quote in quote.

NovaTopaz wrote:

Also did not really read or understand what I said. I said ALL aircraft fire once, period, per 15 minutes. This includes DEFENSIVE FIRE

Regid wrote:

I like your random timer Clan, but the problem that 1 stack receives fire from 5 stacks still persists. We can go even further by randomizing the stack that your stack will attack. Every X minutes(X is random), your stack will choose one stack randomly and attack it and receive fire from that one stack back only. So no more 1 vs 5 situation

NovaTopaz wrote:

I said that they may have said it indirectly, but I was referring to the fact that it may be worse than it sounds, because using that multiple times has a snowball effect that will drop aircraft in hours instead of days, were they to be separated a bit.

DxC wrote:

Even though I mentioned removing patrol ability as a possible solution to the 1 stack vs many issue, I didn't really see that as a viable option. Removing patrol is s drastic change, but i guess we can see how it goes. If you do that though, then you better fix the combining of stacks when they are doing bombing runs. Even though people that say they can't play as often as others are the few that complained about this issue, the patrol is actually something that helps people that are not on a lot. Forcing bombing will be more of a benefit to very active players. It is obvious that very few of the commenters understand the actual issue, and given the choice of option, which do not address the issue, it is very doubtful that the freezy or sasri do either.

I don't buy that it is too complicated to make a better change. That is total bs. One suggestion was to limit the patrol attack on other planes to two stacks. This would allow some advantage to the persistent warrior but not allow a zillion to 1 scenario. That could simply be implemented when iterating through stacks to see what is in range like:

if ( isAir(stack) && numAirStacks >= 2 ) continue;

I use patrols to attack enemy tanks quite effectively.

Regid wrote:

You really need to work on your layout Nova, It looks confusing with all the bold and quote in quote.

Well, I like using this method. It makes it far easier to address multi-point posts such as what you've been doing, as I can hit each point individually instead of having to try and respond to it as a whole, where I may lose the focal point of the entire discussion(as I've clearly done in a lot of my other posts, obviously... Kinda bad, TBH, but I was skimming all the discussion at points and may have missed stuff.). The bold(and other stuff) is for distinction from the original post. The first one will have it, but besides that, I will use it more sparingly.

Spoiler

Oh I read what you wrote like 5, 6 times, couldn't understand what you were saying.

Ok, let's use this situation: we have 5 friendly stacks of planes, and the enemy has 5 hostile stacks of planes. We send them in to patrol on top of each other. We send them up in sequence, cause there no way in hell we can time them to arrive at the patrol spot at the same time, hence each of the stacks have different tick time.

So our first friendly stack fire first, it shoots at All hostile stacks patrolling in that area, and All of them shoots back, Once.

1.Now what would happen if our second stack timer goes off? Would our second friendly stack fire, since it's just a few seconds behind the first friendly stack timer? Or would it wait for another 15 minutes?

First, put one and two together because they are the same question. As for an actual answer, I did not really care... I was explaining how it comes about, not the exact method for which it works. There would be a lot of different methods for how it could work, but I was explaining the basics for how it comes about, not exact implementation, which would be another thing ENTIRELY.

2.What timer are we talking about? Wouldn't it still be one stack receiving fire from every hostile stack?

Yes, but ONLY the one stack. All the other stacks would not receive return fire. This is assuming that they don't all attack on the same turn cause of reasons...

3.If each stack has different timer then they will fire at a different time during that 15 minutes cool down.

Yeah...

4.So you're using the first stack's timer, then what about the rest of the stack's timer?

... Why is this a list, again? 1 and 2 were along the same line of thinking, and now 4 and 5 and 6. Makes the list bullets kinda pointless, if you ask me...

5.Also, if you saying that you treat 5 friendly stacks as one big stack, that means using SBDE, then how is this calculated?

... I didn't say anything on this...

6.Players can wait 14 minutes and send in tons of planes to the patrol area so let's say we have only 2 friendly stacks patrolling over 2 hostile stacks. After 14 minutes, the enemy suddenly send in 3 more hostile stacks . Wouldn't it be 2 vs 5? the SBDE would not help since it would not reduce the damage enough nor would it depict the crowded skies and friendly fire that could happen.

... Also goes with the previous stuff. Again, I was not referring to specifics. If you want those, Montana should be coughing those up, not me. I was referring to where his idea was coming from, as I will personally not add to his idea. If you make it so defending aircraft do not have unlimited defense chances, it severely nerfs the exploit, if not eliminating it entirely.

7.Please be more elaborate so the devs can understand, like my professor always says "You do not understand it well enough if you cannot explain it well enough". Throw in some examples.

... I understand it very well. I just find using examples is a tad redundant. Also, your professor is quoting Einstein indirectly. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough". I personally take from that quote, not whichever one you just said. And in that regard, examples just show that I would not know it well enough, if I used them constantly. I do not take the time to simplify mine(though I really should), but I also go on the assumption that my peers may not know it as well as I, and a simple explanation just doesn't cut it. Hence the really long comments...

8.You said "as it relies on the fact that defensive fire on patrol is, well, infinite" which was not the problem that everyone's been talking about, it's the fact that 1 stack receives fire back from 5 stacks as patrol attack everything its radius, including every single hostile plane. So the damage dealt is spread out amongst those 5 hostile stacks but that one friendly stack takes full 25% damage from each of those 5 hostile stacks. That damage is not spread out evenly amongst 5 friendly stacks, but only one. You got it right?

Yeah... Otherwise I wouldn't be talking in this discussion(unless I have an interest in the discussion and think I can contribute, I will usually stick away from the discussion itself. And that's assuming I even know the discussion exists.). And you haven't worded yours the best, either. The damage isn't being spread across 5 stacks, it is doing the normal damage to each stack, but the defenders are defending for each nominal attack, and therefore inflicting 5x the damage onto a single stack. But it wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the fact the defenders have an unlimited number of defensive strikes(IE they can defend against as many attacks as there exists). If it was just one, then the other 4 stacks would be free to strike with impunity against the defenders, compared to now, where they suffer the same fate as the first stack.