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!
US95Pickett