Zeppelins & Bombers - New/Old Info

[Thom]

This is exciting!

[maeglynn]

wow this is awesome, i can't beleive this will happen.

great job guys

maeglynn

[Jerba]

This is going to be good.

[Patrick]

Hopefully it lives up to everyone's expectations.

Here's a few sneak peeks of what to expect once it's ready:

Campaign plays out over a number of turns. Each turn may or may not result in combat which would play out as a Crimson Skies typical game, only with customized results based on what the mission was and how much firepower was brought to the party. For example, if your opponent chose a CAP mission for a specific zone and you chose an air superiority mission into that same zone, then it would be a simple yours versus theirs scenario. If you committed 4 aircraft to the sortie and they committed 2 aircraft to the circular air patrol, the it's 4 on 2. Either side can flee, but it has consequences and you sacrifice points towards victory.

Say you have 12 aircraft. Turn one you know nothing about your enemy, where he (or they if you are playing against multiple opponents) are hiding. You will need to locate their aerodrome (or zeppelin), their supply chain, etc. This can be done with recon flights, offensive missions (air superiority,) etc. But there are other things to consider. You want to protect your airspace. It would be disastrous to allow everything to fall in one turn! There are 6 zones, so you could allocate 2 aircraft to each zone (Here's hoping you don't start the game with 4!) But flying everything each turn would get expensive, and you risk spreading yourself too thin. If your opponent commits 8 aircraft into your 4th zone, and you have 2 aircraft there, you've all but given up those victory points and pulled your opponent closer to the win. You can be super aggressive and go for broke, or you can sit back and wait for the enemy to arrive.

One tactic (if you have the cash) is to buy as many aircraft and pilots as you can at the beginning to help bolster your numbers. Just make sure the new pilots are qualified on the planes they need to fly. Also don't forget those new aircraft need fuel, ammo, rockets, etc. When you build up your forces, you need to stay within your budget. Those players who are able to get the most out of cheap aircraft and cheap (read: inexperienced) pilots will do well.

Another option is to fly a lot of training flights. They don't locate enemy resources or destroy enemy aircraft, but they give your pilots valuable experience that might be the different between a kill and a jammed gun.

There are priorities for the unit you will set, but no matter what order you put them in, you will be giving some advantages to your opponent. Maybe your opponent is quicker at repairs than you, because she made it her top priority and you thought the other four things were more important. But you are better are espionage and downed pilot recovery. Etc etc. If aircraft are not important to you, you might be stuck with older "hogs" while your opponent flies the latest and greatest offerings.

There are a ton of special characteristics you can choose, a large number of missions, and even a way to allow custom designed (but legal) aircraft if you desire.

Right now I'm still bringing across the campaign pricing tables. Last night I spent a couple of hours going through the source books to verify which aircraft are primarily with which nations, since it matters where the campaign is concerned. There are however many aircraft that are available to "all nations" so even if you really want a certain aircraft from Hollywood but fly out of the Maritime Provinces, it might still be available. (The Devastator, for example is available everywhere, as are all the autogyros.)

I didn't realize all of the tables I have are still the "rough" versions. They are accurate, but when they sent me the final version files, they didn't include them. This is because the art/design team would have made them look nicer than what I did. As a result I am rebuilding them to make them look more presentable. Since I (and a lot of you) are making an effort, I want this source book to be pretty decent looking when we are finished and it is available. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, but also working against a deadline, so it shouldn't take forever. At the current rate of completion and assuming the others have the resources I need by the time I am done, I am guessing sometime in June.

My hurdle for tomorrow night (I can't work on it much tonight) is double checking the prices for everything, including the bombers and their ordinance.

Stay tuned.

[Cyagen]

Wow sounds great!

Although I never found that the pricing system of FASA made sense but what you describe sounds a lot like what Yazhuk worked on all those years.

[Phoenix]

Sounds awesome! I love the different mission types, the need to keep an eye on your finances, and the strategy of it all. This should be a great help to those of us who run recurring campaigns.

I haven't had too much in the way of problems with the FASA pricing system. It might not be the most accurate, but it seems fairly well balanced and seems to work well in play.

[Patrick]

My problem with the pricing in CS is that the smaller the fighter, the more it costs. I assume they did this thinking that people would gravitate towards interceptors (and to be fair, that's exactly my tendency when I play CS), but honestly, the most well rounded fighters are the ones that be successful. Size 4-7 presents a good mix of armor, performance, and firepower.

Oh well.

[[GSS]Bandit]

There are a ton of special characteristics you can choose

When you say "ton of special characteristics", do you mean that there are a whole lot of new ones that add to the game similar to the ones from BtCV?

If yes: do they work the same way, concerning weight, cost and possibly aircraft stats?

If so, I sure hope they can be added to Aeronaut without too much of a hassle, i.e. that it doesn't require any code changes but only modifications to the config-file...

[Cyagen]

My problem with the pricing in CS is that the smaller the fighter, the more it costs.

Exactly my problem. A B-17 costs a lot more to make than a Mustang or a Me-109.

This made me change the equation so that the bigger the BTN the higher the costs. It made sense then. But over the years I followed Yazhuk's lead and moved away from a cost based system to a ressource based system. It turned out to be simpler and more effective.

I am however very curious to see this "official" system.

[Patrick]

When you say "ton of special characteristics", do you mean that there are a whole lot of new ones that add to the game similar to the ones from BtCV?

I mean special characteristics at the squadron level, not for the aircraft. Bombers will have special characteristics too, but no new aircraft special characteristics were added. Things like "Elite Pilots", "Aerobatic Background", etc. I actually downloaded and messed around with Aeronaut last night as well. Very cool.

As for the "officialness" of the source book, my advice to everyone would be to use it if it makes more sense than what you've already come up with in the last decade, otherwise just stick to what you're already doing. I'll admit I haven't looked at anyone else's custom rules for campaigning, zeppelins or bombers, but I would say this is like an ice cream recipe you never got to try because the county creamery went out of business. In the years since, many of you have developed your own ice cream recipes. Even though this is what the "real" recipe was going to be, it still might not be as tasty as what has come along since the cows stopped getting milked.

I pasted in the rest of the campaign data last night from the FASA files, but didn't have time to get through it. It is pretty complex and there are a lot of rules. Things like new aircraft have to be flown into the game (and can thus be attacked by your enemy), weather affects every round, there are multiple sorties possible per day (round), etc.