Random thoughts...

Post here with your help requests and suggestions for RoF War
Locked
Thud
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:54 pm

Random thoughts...

Post by Thud »

This post might come across as a little negative, so I would like to state that I would play in the tournament again even if absolutely nothing is changed.

A few observations:

1. The Allied side has a big advantage. Their big bomber has more gunners than the Gotha. Their fighters are faster and can carry bombs. The Allies can put bombs on SE5s and Spad-13s there is nothing the German side can do to stop them, since these aircraft are faster than anything on the German side. I think the VIIF has to be made available to the German side.

2. It's kind of difficult to tell the factories apart. It might be better if they were spread out on the map instead of grouped together.

3. We need more people playing.

4. Once a bomber has dropped it's bombs there is no reason for the pilot to try to get home. He should crash and start a new flight. There has to be some way to give the pilot incentive to get back to a friendly airfield.

I am going to see if I can come up with a good points system from the stats you posted from the game.
User avatar
US95Pickett
Posts: 1175
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:20 am
Contact:

Re: Random thoughts...

Post by US95Pickett »

S! all, Thud, all of your points are valid.

point 1 - The Allied Handley Page bomber has one more turret gunner than the German Gotha bomber; the allied fighters (SE5a, Spad 13 and Camel) can carry bombs but they are more sluggish and slower with a bomb load, plus, they have no bomb site for accurate bombing - you have to practice quite a bit in bombing using the fighers in order to be able to hit targets; although the German fighters can't carry bombs, they can be used to shoot down observation balloons, and straffe/destroy the truck convoys and supply trains - which leaves the factories and supply ship to be destroyed by the Gotha and DFWC bombers. To try and make up for the German fighters not being able to carry bombs, I had the DFWC bomber enabled at both of the German front line aerodromes (along with the Gotha and DFWC available at the rear bomber aerodrome)

point 2 - After the week 1 match, I created pages that displayed images of all the factories and even included screenshots of the layout of both the Allied and German factory areas, with each of the factories numbered; they were also available for download so you could print them out and use them during the matches.
http://us95th.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=871#p3170

point 3 - There is no doubt about it, it would have been a better tournament with more pilots playing in the tournament imo; that is my fault, I failed to create a tournament format that would generate enough interest for pilots to fly in it...

point 4 - The same can be said for fighters that have expended all of their machine gun ammo (about finish flight to relife instead of returning to their home base and then hitting finish flight).

When I created the RoF War format, I was trying to create a tournament format that would be easy and fun for beginners and intermediate pilots. I chose the fighters available in the Rise of Flight Iron Cross Edition of the game because all pilots would have those fighters, whereas, not all pilots have purchased all of the extra planes; the bombers have to be purchased only if you want to fly them, but any pilot can man one of the machine gun turrets without purchasing the bombers.

I grouped the factories together to make it easy for pilots to locate them. The factories can be confusing being somewhat close together, but they are far enough apart to distinguish each factory group. In preparation for the week 2 match, I (for allied team) spent a lot of time practicing my bombing and had printed out the factories and studied them in order to recoginize each numbered factory group, plus we (allied team members) kept track of the factory numbers as we destroyed them so we didn't keep attacking factories that had already been destroyed. And the practice and tracking destroyed targets worked, as we were able to destroy all targets (including all 8 factories) to win that match. I could spread the factories out across the map, but they would be hard to find unless marked by an icon on the map (and 8 factory icons on one side of the map covers up a lot of the map).

A big negative for creating Rise of Flight tournaments, is the lack of a scoring program to use for scoring the matches/tournaments. 777 Studios has been contacted and numerous requests made for the creation of a scoring program for RoF, but they have no plans for making a scoring program for the server operators. So we are left with creating tournaments that will have to use defined destruction of targets to win a match (such as I did for RoF War) or we could use screenshots of the scoreboard that is displayed at the end of a mission/match. Unfortunately, there is no log files of the displayed scoreboard scores at the end of a mission, you have to make screen capture shots of it to utilize the scoreboard scores. And, there is no way to figure out how the RoF game does the actual scoring of the games - it appears to be some type of dynamic scoring based on the number of machine gun bullets fired/bombs dropped, the number of bullet hits/bomb hits to destroy the target, the time it took to destroy the target/plane, etc.

Vampire made a suggestion about having the match end when a certain number of planes have been destroyed, but that can't be done in the mission editor (there is no way to create the mission so that a victory is won by X number of enemey planes being shot down). The only way would be to set a fixed number of planes availabe for each aerodrome; but every time you click on "finish flight" when you run out of ammo or crash, you use up one of the planes from the aerodrome. It wouldn't take long before you ran out of available planes at the aerodrome during a 3 hour match unless you made the available number of planes a high number.

Here are some of the positives and negatives of Rise of Flight War Tournament 1 as I see them:

Positives
1) very simple rules - easy defined objectives in order to win matches/tournament
2) no need to adjust fuel mixtures or radiator controls during the game
3) easy for new pilots to find the targets and planes on the map
4) fighter planes are availabe to all without having to purchase them (standard fighters that come with Rise of Flight Iron Cross Edition of the game)
5) 3 hour matches were about right - neither too long or too short; start time at 1pm US eastern daylight savings time was a fair compromise so a majority of pilots from around the world could participate at a reasonable hour for their timezone

Negatives
1) being able to see all planes on the map - makes it harder for planes to penetrate into enemy areas without being spotted and immediately attacked
2) fairness of plane match-ups - lack of German fighters to carry bombs (but that is set by 777 Studios, not much we can do about it)
3) not all planes available to fly
4) factories in one area makes it harder to identify and easily destroy each of them without a lot of concentration on which factories have already been destroyed
5) too few participating pilots - need to create better tournament format and post at all squadron websites and not just RoF, SimHQ and CombatAce forums

Please make your suggestions to help make RoF War a better tournament - all suggestions welcome. If you have a completely different idea for a tournament format, post it - we can try it too! :D
US95Pickett
Thud
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:54 pm

Re: Random thoughts...

Post by Thud »

point 1: While the bomb carrying fighters are slower than normal, they still seemed to be fast enough so that German fighters could not catch them. And if they got in trouble all they had to do was drop their bombs and run. None of the German aircraft can run. The Allies have much more flexibility. They can all launch with bombs. If they don't meet any Germans they can all bomb. If they do meet Germans, some can still bomb while others escort.

Also, I don't have any solutions for this problem, I'm just pointing it out.

point 2: This is definitely not a problem with the mission, this is me having crappy situational awareness. I think SA would be easier to maintain with factories spread out, but you are right about the map icons. What if there were 2 or 3 groups of factories instead of all spread out?

point 3: I certainly wasn't blaming you. I'm not sure why more people didn't play. I think it was lots of fun, but I think it would be AWESOME with more people.

point 4: Yes, the same problem exists for fighters. I think we need incentives for pilots to return to land at an airfield.

Of all these issues, the only one that really bothers me is that pilots that are out of bombs or ammo (as well as Camel pilots who take low fuel loads) have an incentive to crash instead of returning to base.
User avatar
US95 2Lt Blake
Posts: 134
Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:24 pm
Location: oxnard shores ca

Re: Random thoughts...

Post by US95 2Lt Blake »

Salute all
I just wanted to give my 2 cents worth. This was my first tournament and I asked before the start of match one the very questions about what prevents a pilot from ditching after ammo and bombs are gone. I was told Its bad form and we should try to make it back. I think you could look at the parsed log to see if anyone was doing that. If you burned up your engine like I did a couple times it might appear that you ditched to respawn. Honestly I dont think any of the US95 pilots did this.

Also I dont know if you could edit the mission, to allow each pilot a given # of planes for each match.

I do know that the allies were limited to the # of camels that could be flown at the same time. Maybe limit # of same type planes in air at same time like it was in the final match.

After the first match, the allies realized we were going to have to come up with a strategy and know which factory was which, we all made copies of the factory group and used pennies to cover ones destroyed. I also practiced alot of bombing with camel in Pickett's server #1. It payed off.

We also tried to bait and switch. Planes that had no bombs left ran interferance for planes with bombs heading for factories. I tried to avoid contact at all costs so I could deliver bombs. As fast as I could fly with about 35% fuel load. Not sure what others use for fuel % loads and I dont think you can check.

Just one of those give and takes. Camels fastest, DR1 turns tightest. Jurik demolished camels, SE5A, and SPAD and he was in a german plane.

Id like to make another observation you made about the bombers looking at it from a different perspective. I havent purchased the page. I think the US95 had only 3 pages and generally only 2 were being flown at any given time. apparently its pretty boring. The germans had the gotha and DFW two larger bombers. so in the end it seemed to even up. And really I truely believe the only reason the allies took match 2 was because pickett was flying the page. and flying it well.
just my thoughts.
"up and at em"
Thud
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:54 pm

Re: Random thoughts...

Post by Thud »

]We also tried to bait and switch. Planes that had no bombs left ran interferance for planes with bombs heading for factories.

This is an option the Germans do not have. If you see a German fighter you can ignore it if you want to. The German side can't ignore any Allied aircraft, because any one of them could have bombs.
User avatar
US95 2Lt Blake
Posts: 134
Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:24 pm
Location: oxnard shores ca

Re: Random thoughts...

Post by US95 2Lt Blake »

I see your point.
I am new to this game and flight sims period, Ive been flying here for about 4 months now and part of my personal survival strategies was to avoid any and all enemy aircraft while heading to factories with bombs. However, I did get shot down more than once trying to deliver said bombs while DR1s and DVII protected the german factory. We all did, part of the strategy I guess.
Curious to know, historically which german fighters, besides the DFW(which Pickett, and Wilbur Wright both flew like fighters) could carry bombs? And if they did carry them historically, why arent they allowed to carry them in this sim game?
It only seems fair, if they had em in 1918 then they should get em in 2011.
"up and at em"
Thud
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:54 pm

Re: Random thoughts...

Post by Thud »

We were able to kill your fighters because they had no choice but to bomb from low. What you should have done was send in fighters low to force us to defend low, then hit with a high bomber. We could try to do the same with a DFW low, but the DFW can't act like an escort when it's done bombing, the SE5 and Spad can. You could use your fighters to pin our defense low. The DFW can't stop your defense from going after a different threat.
Locked

Return to “Help and Suggestions”