kuroi neko

Although not so obsessed with stats as my comrade in arms Ray, I second the shot down / damaged proposition. As I said earlier, another way of assessing pilots performance is to evaluate survivability. An all-out agressive player will die quickly but may have some devastating successes before that. Since AI allows to train relatively safely up to considerable XP totals, these flying rednecks can be let loose on the rampage even at a considerable experience level! Evaluating some prudence/agressiveness ratio would (hopefully) be an incentive for some players to fly less recklessly .

More like fried Hurri II on a stick with crunchy 1/4 tank concentrations and a 1/2 convoy for starters, if I have any saying at the menu .

I think I get the idea, but as it is now, fatigue only becomes an issue with high-level pilots. Up to about 800 points you wont have to fly with fatigued pilots except if you really had 2 or 3 major defeats in a row. Above 1.5K XP, your pilots will be fatigued even when flying missions with average results. A single defeat and the element requires 2 or 3 missions by others to rest. Two defeats in a row and you're forced to fly with fatigued pilots. 3 defeats in a row and you will barely manage to fly with rested pilots ever again . Don't get me wrong: I do not question the design choice here, I'm just pointing out a possible need for a few tweaks. And by the way, with the fatigue only affecting leaders, gameplay gets a bit imbalanced. More often than not, the leader will go down and a fresh wingman will finish the mission. Hurts the role playing a bit, I think. That, I admit, is more of a design choice questioning .

You can use the create mission screen to check the points without actually creating the game. Simply cancel the operation once you're done checking.

I had the same issue with my top aces. Maybe another (simpler?) solution would be to adjust the fatigue computation to allow a set of high level pilots to rest a bit faster?

When you create an online mission, you will see the number of points a given element is rated for. This number also depends on the planes you will fly (if you take less powerful planes, the value decreases). Some kind of rounding up problem may cause this predicted rating to vary by one point. For instance, a game created with an element rated 16 in the "create online game" screen may sometimes be viewed by other players as a 15 or 17 points game.

Looking good ! And accurate color scheme, as far as I can tell.

kuroi neko: (casually stabbing Ron's voodoo doll with poison-coated needles) I'm not even worried. I just sank task force Z this afternoon, no way the bloody 4/7 target could show up again...

Dont complain, you're still in Malibu, you lucky Californian .

Yep, you gain as much bursts against wingmen or bombers as you play (unchallenged) positional cards, +1 for each manoeuver and +2 for each half loop. Getting two half loops in the same hand is pretty rare, though. The uncommon "spoiled attack" bomber reaction cards can still make your manoeuvers fail, and a manoeuver can still trigger a reaction burst.

Ah great, at least my wingies did not die in vain You could restore the initial condition for regaining ED (not being shot down) now, by the way.

That may actually be an optimal strategy .

This is an AI only issue. When playing against humans, the attackers are subject to an important points restriction. Each attacker seem to be limited to 2/3 max points of the defender or something. I only played a few of these, but I saw things as 2 109Bs against a spit V or 2 hurri Is against a 109F. Of course the über bots exageration factor offsets this restriction . I reckon the AI picks a plane with 50 to 100% more XP than yours, so the limitation will roughly end up with both attackers being around the same level as yours.

As I see it, the card system gets a bit stretched when handling high-end planes. The corrections should focus on preserving the current mid-level balance and toning down some phenomena tied to the increase in statistical issues above a given number of cards. The key to balancing the game at high level is to add some factors that would restore a meaningful, fun and tactically sound alternative between leader and wingman as targets. In order to correct these problems, the wingman resilience should certainly be increased, but his lethality should be decreased if anything . The excessive threat represented by the wingman contributes to force players to follow the "wingie must die no matter what" strategy. Allowing wingmen to become both more resilient and agressive at the same time would not change anything about this lack of alternative tactics, it would simply allow owners of the skill to wipe the floor with people not rich enough to buy the equivalent (or foolish enough to waste XPs on other gizmos) . Besides, and that is quite obvious if you have a look at the offense/manoeuver/defense cards repartition, gaining an extra attack is much more efficient than gaining an extra defense. One must also bear in mind that the attacker has the initiative: reaction cards are at an intrinsic disadvantage since the attacker has the choice to correlate bursts and counter manoeuvers while the defender does not know about remaining attacks. Yet again this advantage grows with the number of cards. This is why I proposed a mechanism that would tone down this "initiative advantage". Allowing the defender to turn one card into a counter manoeuver would limit the attackers options (thus toning down both leader and wingman lethality, but only against wingman), and give some additional information to the defender (attacker would have to keep a counter manoeuver to follow the attack, which would mean the last attack card would not be a burst unless the defender had already played the counter, the defender could evaluate the probability for a leader to have remaining counters from the previous turn actions, the attacker would have to deplete his defenses to get a successful attack, etc.). This would, I think, turn wingman attack sequences into something more amusing than the current "(re)draw and pray" routine. Basically it would make it closer to the leader vs leader attack sequence, the "free counter" capability of the wingman being similar to the capacity for the leader to spare a couple of decent defenses from previous turns. Since the effect would be more pronounced with large number of cards, this would also preserve the current low and medium level playability, and become more effective at the level the current issues appear. This could be a step toward the intended goal, that is to add more incentive to choose between leader and wingman as targets on a more equal footing. [ October 15, 2005, 05:32 AM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

Big fat bombers only appear together with the two top planes of a given nation. At least this goes for Britain and Japan. If you're still in a hurri II you wont see a lanc. If you dont qualify for flying the A6M8 you wont see no rita either.

I can assure you these are real vacations from the bloody horrible spitfires you'll have to face when flying for the other bad guys My own copyrighted recipe for killing the fat cows : 1) natural pilot + zoom climb + evasive + shake him off for the leader 2) distract wingman + check six + natural pilot + teamwork for the wingie. A sweep tail may help too. Then a spoil aim in case you want to fight other kites than the Japanese top cow. Bash the wingie no matter what and you'll soon litter the ocean floor with tiny bits of Japanese scrap metal. Keep only defensive cards in your leader hand. Dont dream of building a balanced hand, even a fully defensive assortment often melts in one turn under the combined efforts of the bad guys. Dont camp on the leader's six, it is far better to stuff your occasional leader ammo up the bad wingie's nostrils, even if it means letting go of an advantaged or tiling position. If you are disadvantaged, a climb will dry the other leader's hand. Even diving will gain you one card and force him to discard one for a random replacement. That is, provided you bought zoom climb+evasive+shake him off. Additional benefit from the climb is of course to dry the other wingie attacks too. Never use your own wingie against the leader: bathing in an endless stream of hot cards, the fat cow-in-chief will lazily fart in the general direction of your puny attacks. On the contrary, the bad wingie will sustain continuous damage from both your pilots and give way far sooner than the bad leader. Now if you did not pick defensive skills, well... You should have. You really should. [ October 14, 2005, 08:49 PM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

You've dreamed of it, DVG has done it Click on the vertical timer bar and Bob's your uncle. by the way, and completely off-topic: you seem to know a bit of Russian. Would you by any chance want to have a look at the translations from various speeches I posted on the "additional lobby sounds" sticky thread?

Ah ok, I never really had a thought about that wingie fatigue matter since I always try to play with fresh pilots (except when doing suicidal experiments ). However, the different handling of fatigue may be a good starting point for debugging. Maybe the "ED-regaining-without-having-scored-any-kill" code has been restricted to leaders along with fatigue attribution or something?

Well, for now I have played 25 games against bots. 20 games where with a wingman without ED scoring no kill. No ED was regained. 4 games ended with a dead wingman, 3 to target pilot (the last target pilot was a bit overkill, the little guy seem to have failed the bailout check first). 1 game ended with the wingman killing a plane and regaining ED in the course of these 25 games, 3 EDs were lost by leaders and 2 regained, including one without downing any plane. THe interval between loss an regain was 2 and 3 games with kills scored half the time, which fits nicely within expected results. Too bad I ran out of wingies, I would have hoped to reach 21 games, where the probability not to regain ED in a row drops just below 1% (0.92 exactly). As it stands now, I may still have been selectively unlucky, since the probability of not regaining a single wingie ED in all the 20 games was a confortable 1.15%. Anyway, all my demo wingies are dead now, I can go back and play against humans . More seriously, I do not doubt the code you vere looking at does the right thing. There must be another less obvious glitch somewhere else, like the ED being given back to the wrong pilot (maybe the leader, maybe a non-existent pilot, computer software is such a strange and wonderful universe). At any rate the bug is still there. I did not have the patience to write down the exact outcome of every single game, but I assume you could have a look at the logs on the server, all games occured between my two last postings in this thread. P.S: ah and also I noticed wingies NEVER get fatigued, at least in online games against bots. I flew with a -8 structure leader just to see what happened and the wingie was as fresh as if coming right out of the box. I assume wingmen fatigue is not a campaign-only feature, so I tend to classify this as a closely related bug. Maybe working on this one will help pinpoint the other? [ October 14, 2005, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

Thanks for the explanations and code changes. About wingies being downed more often, this is only true against humans. Bots tend to concentrate on the leader, except for "wingie duels" if the AI leader is already tailing the player's (which, by the way, means that being tailed by an über bot and its intact wingie is a pretty hopeless situaton, yet again to be avoided by mauling the wingman at all cost ) Anyway, I'll risk a couple of "old geezer" wingies against bots to see if this goes any better .

Well not wanting to make sweeping generalizations here, but after a few hundred games against humans, my conclusion is that above 200 XP, if you have the "distract wingman" skill (or 400 XP if you were foolish enough not to buy it ), going after the leader is only a last resort strategy. Above this level, avoiding the fight until you've built a hand allowing to damage the wingie is a far better option if available. Even in demo games the wingman was rarely not down or pouring smoke after 3 turns. If your initial draw did not allow to maul the wingie, you had to pray for the adversary to be unable to do the same to you, or the rest of the fight was just a struggle for survival. Natural pilot, check 6 and distract wingie was the choice combination of skills you could afford for 100 XP and it was by far the most successful against humans. The wingman scored few kills but the leader could down a lot of wingies. Here again you could do stats on the server on human vs human fights and get an idea of the relative durability of wingmen and leaders, depending on the average XP total. I suspect a curve of this kind would be pretty telling. Frankly the manoeuver+IMS2:D or 2 x manoeuver+OTS3:4 are the most frequent "fun killer combos". After 150 XP, loosing a leader in the first turn is exceptional, but above 500 XP, seeing a wingman smoked or kissing him goodbye before turn 3 occurs in more than 50% of the games. Until you reach 100-200 XP you can do little to protect against it, and after that the number of attack cards will grow at the same rate as the number of defenses, which will more than compensate for the increased number of defenses. I do not support your views on the redraws, for several reasons: 1) as I said, a random assortment of cards is weaker than a purposely selected attack combo of the same number of cards, and even more so as the number of cards increase. 2) there are many cases where for instance a 4 hands defensive draw will yeld a couple of mild defenses and a redraw will do little to improve the situation. It may also yeld even poorer results, which is just a cause for frustration. 3) as things go now, buying 3 to 6 redraws for wingies is a kind of mandatory 15 to 30 XP tax above 500 XP, simply slowing down wingman progression in an arbitrary way. This is aggravated by the fact that wingies gain far less XPs than leaders since they are far less likely to deal the final blow to a plane (although they will often allow the final leader combo to get through by depleting the enemy leader's hand). Since at this level practically all the XPs are gained by smoking or downing planes, the wingies cant really afford to buy a fresh assortment of redraws each game. 4) the tactical choices involving redraw are limited to an estimation of the offensive potential of the leader, which does not depend on many "computable" factors except the relative hand sizes. Having more efficient defensive skills like a way to turn any card into a defense would give more tactical depth to the game, both for the attacker and the defender. [ October 14, 2005, 10:11 AM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

Which is probably why you find a Raiden there. Be happy, where you an Axis pilot you'd have to cope with the infamous spit XIVs : only one burst but the extra performance make them even more of a pain in the backside .

Man, some of these records are excellent! I could maybe find a couple of Russian old songs and speeches from the WWII era for the time VVS planes will be added. EDIT: As it goes I've put a few official "great patriotic war" speeches and a post-war song (whose lyrics fall dead on target ) here. They are in MP3 format for reduced weight and uncut. I could add a few more songs or typical era music (beside the broadly available Red Army choir war chants ) if you're interrested. By the way, if any Russian speaker would kindly translate the rather garbled words of Comrade Stalin... [ October 14, 2005, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

That is a cool way to regain the escape death too. Maybe a benefit of being part of a squadron or socializing a bit in the lobby .

Cool idea, but only after having sent the "wingie cant regain ED" bug down in flames, for the precious few surviving wingies to have a chance to last more than a couple of games .