Quote:
Originally Posted by 43Supporter
You put some deep thought into your setup.
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To be honest 1/4 hour max. I just asked the obvious questions, and responded to the obvious answers. There is nothing there that hasn't been done a million times in a thousand conflicts since infantry have been subjected to artillery or air bombardment.
I haven't read Aeroduel in any great depth, so I am sure there are some subtleties that I will have missed.
I am not sure about Aeroduel in general. If we are forced to accept that a/c are vastly superior to ground vehicles (since they can attack from great height with no range penalties), seem capable of extraordinary carrying capacity etc. I am not sure why ground vehicles would ever be used. As the name of the game is Car Wars I am looking to find where the flaws need to be to make the game work.
One of the major aspects that is overlooked in the whole game is the the cost (and time) for general maintenance (not repair or replenishment which are covered as they are extras that fall-out from combat). In one-off games this is an irrelevance, but the cost of servicing a/c should be extortionate (at least if our support costs are anything to go by). The simpler the machine, the easier the maintenance and the lower the cost. This should mean that ground vehicles (whose service intervals are measured in years) should be cheaper to operate than aircraft whose service intervals are measured in hours. Pedestrian equipment may credibly never need significant maintenance.
A few percent of the original equipment cost per year should suffice (maybe increasing by 1% every year after manufacture to represent the fact that eventually it all becomes too hard to fix). Of that a third will be labour and $50 per hour gives you how long it all takes. That $200K rig needing $4K and 26 man hours per year doesn't seem unreasonable.
Aircraft seem to need an hours maintenance per 10 hours use (ROM). Cars maybe 1 hour per 20 (based the service schedule on my car and an average speed of 40 - according to my cars computer). Gun maintenance is more a function of how often I have fired it, it can go all year with a 1 hour service if it hasn't been fired, but I spend at least 30 minutes after every shoot (but mine is a musket and they seem to need a lot more cleaning than a modern gun).
EDIT:
I had a dig into Aeroduel and I note that there are indeed additional maintenance rules. Unfortunately a/c still seem massively unbalanced compared to ground vehicles. Why use anything other than airships - 100 tons of load allowance! The Anti-Aircraft rules introduced there hardly offset the massive penalties you will suffer firing at high altitude aircraft (you need Tanks to get stuff like long barrels and stabilised mounts and even that only gets you so far). As a/c don't suffer an equivalent penalty with bombs (which can be pin-point accurate - unless you rolled 12, even grenades that hit could scatter a bit) and it doesn't seem to matter if you drop a bomb from 1000 ft or from orbit, the scatter doesn't get any worse, it seems a bit biased. It seems the only way to take out aircraft is with other aircraft, and I cannot be bothered with that (and I'll play Wings of War if I do).
I can probably stay safe regardless of whether I agreed to your interpretation of CBs as I would just adjust my foxhole design to have a roof by using 8" log supports and a sandbag and earth roof (which would also completely foil your IR) and provide almost total immunity to any BE. I would probably be more careful in selecting my site so that I could use existing hedges and trees to effectively hide from enemies miles above (2" concealment wholly blocks both optical and IR spotting) and maybe utilise existing animal burrows to speed setting up (though I can really spend as long as I want if I choose my ground carefully).
But, I guess if you are using exclusively aircraft, I'd rather not play.