Contribution to ATAG mission sets

Does not appear that the ATAG discussion is heading in the direction I suggested, in fact, the trend appears to be in the opposite direction. Attention Deficit Disorder has a firm grip on the younger generation flyers who want instant and all out action. "The hunt" as it were, may be a thing of the past if they force everone to converge onto one of two predictible targets. The scenarios verge on simple death match already, this will move them decisively into that realm.

Too bad, CoD has so much potential that is not being explored.

Yes, I was watching that thread (and posted in it) to see what the ideas would be that were fixated on.

Our campaign series is great, and would probably be even greater if a decent server could host them and accommodate many players, however on an 'always on' server, players who jump in at the wrong time would have no chance to intercept bombers or effectively participate until the next mission, something that might be 20minutes away. It makes it difficult.

I'm a little disappointed that my idea of adding air spawns that allow bomber pilots to take a flight of aircraft was deemed 'controversial'. There would be no difference to the bomber flights that they have right now (spawning in the air at predetermined locations) except that at least one of those bombers would be human and able to direct the flight intelligently instead of along predetermined routes that everyone memorizes after the first couple of times through the mission.

If the bomber air-spawn players could take 6 or 9 aircraft in their flight, it would only take two players willing to fly a bomber (a prospect made more enticing by the fact they don't have to spend 30 minutes taking off and getting to altitude) to have a group of 12 to 18 bomber aircraft heading towards England! And player controlled to boot! I see that as a significant improvement to what is there now.

However, I won't argue the point over there. I've made the suggestion and if they like it they can implement it.

We'll continue to do our thing here. Those of us who fly on Saturday know that it's a good time. It's also something we can build on. I'm still tweaking and working on "Project Rhubarb" despite not having posted about it in a while. We've made great friends in |450| Squadron and with Hawk. Maybe we could advertise for a few more pilots to fill out the 12 aircraft squadron on Saturday and make some more friends.

But in terms of ATAG's mission set, a persistent online server like that isn't best served via long format objective based missions unfortunately. I think what they really need to do is forget about the symmetrical design (blue bombers vs red bombers) and create missions that focus on Red destroying flights of bombers and Blue protecting them. Send loads of bombers across in a 2 hour period, and then set a kill point that results in Red victory (50% of bombers destroyed or something). Since Red pilots go after bombers ANYway, you'll very quickly see Blue shift tactics to protect bombers at altitude when they constantly see Red has won the mission.

I admire your sentiments, though DNR. I'm hopeful that with future improvements via Team Fusion the game will open up even more for people and bring us new players.

Yes I liked your ideas pertaining to bomber flights and the fact that one person considered air spawning controversial is of limited significance. If ATAG wanted to limit their scenario runs to 2 hours, they could have a major bombing raid event every thirty minutes with recce flights and AI sweeps in between to keep things hopping. It's just that they need more than four scenarios as these get stale quickly.

We can continue to create our own experience via the campaign and I would like to suggest that we all give some thought to the best night outside of Saturday night, to get together for training and at least one squadron mission on ATAG against live pilots. We have dropped off a bit of late on our Tue night flights so we need to get our collective preferences in to pick a night.

Agreed regarding Tuesday. A few of my old gaming buddies have come back to play on Tuesday (which was traditionally my old gaming group's 'Fight Night') so some of the Cliffs of Dover action has dropped off.

I'd like to have another flying night that would allow Alpine to jump in since I know he can't get in too late on Tuesday.

Thursday evening might work. I'd probably only be able to get in after 10:00 though. Monday and Wednesday are hard since I coach on those nights and don't get back in until late.

It took me a couple of days but I got through that thread as well. I'm not sure missions are the way to attract new players, but I liked both of your ideas.

Thursday's work for me, at least until Thursday gets here. Real life has been relentless lately.

Thursday nights would work for me now that my secondary Army duties are complete. CFL is currently interfering with flying time on Saturday nights and they often schedule games on Thursdays as well, but the happy time is only five months long so for most of the year I'd be good to go. We should continue with Saturdays since that's the best time for the Squiz, Devil, Target and Hawk to join us.

While we're on the subject of our mission campaign and as we build out the final installment in this first series to the end of Sep 1940, we might want to consider looking again into a server of our own? I don't know much about this and I certainly do not want to suggest that we take on any ongoing costs, but if we could find one that didn't cost an arm and a leg, that would run our full scenarios rather than scaled down versions, then we could really experiment with and enjoy the full scope of what CoD is capable of delivering. Also, as we move forward in time, we can push our scenarios beyond the BoB through the Blitz and into 1941 when the squadron were re-equiped with Spits and conducted the famous Rubarb runs into France to strafe trains, ground units and pin down the Luftwaffe. Golly good sport ol' chap.

Regarding a server of our own:

I have a possible line on something of this sort, but I have to look into it a bit more to see if it's viable.

If we were looking to rent on our own, we're talking close to $200 a month. Not sure we can justify that cost right now.

Yeh, that was what put the brakes on this discussion before. No way a small group like ours can afford that.

One of us just needs to win the lotto!