Here are a few questions and ideas that are floating around the gameplay forums. I hope my replies clarify some things for you all.  Discussions are always encouraged and we always strive to give you open and honest answers. They may not always be the answers you like, but sugarcoating a brick is not my style.

Replying to a thread in the hangar made me think - how easy would it be to simply double (for bofors) or quadruple (for flak30s) the value for rate of fire of AA guns to simulate later war AA platforms? If it is just a case of copy/pasting the gun and upping it's rate of fire, then what objections would remain, e.g. game balance or unrepresentative models ? Are there deeper technical issues with the way the data models or animations behave?
 
We can change anything to perform like anything we want it to. That’s exactly why we should never do it. Giving any weapon unrealistic performance or having two identical weapons that perform differently is the total opposite of the entire premise of the weapons simulation at the heart of the games design. When we add “later war” AAA to the weapons/equipment list, it will be actual later war AAA weapons, not Bofors guns with fantasy double rate of fire or that kind of thing. So yes we could do it but we won’t be doing it that way.
 
CRS responded once and said that since it has a high RoF, it will have a tighter grouping for the first few rounds, before it starts jacking all over the place, whereas the Allied LMGs fire slower, so you get fewer rounds down range before the thing is bouncing around. So short burst, re-acquire, short burst etc makes a difference.
 
That is precisely the correct way to use a LMG accurately. Of course in the real war LMGs were generally used for suppressive fire not rifle like accurate shot killing of individuals. Players in a game cannot be reliably suppressed where as in real life it’s very easy to suppress infantry with a LMG or two. It’s the whole physical pain/death/I’ll be a cripple for the rest of my life thing we cannot make a player feel. Losing your nads in real life is something a soldier really cares about. In game, you don’t have any to lose. You have fake invulnerable hero nads instead. Always remember this when you want to claim something about the game is unrealistic. The most unrealistic thing in the game by far is player behavior and the ease with which everyone can throw their life away and go get another.
 
So I was thinking, maybe the main reason the rats won't give us engine managment is because it would make it even harder for noobs to learn how to fly, well what if you had the option choosing to turn engine managment on and off. Novice mode would be like what we have now, just control over prop pitch, and turning on and off your engine, and throttle. Experienced would have things like the ability to increase and decrease the mixture, supercharger control, Magneto control, Radiator Control and maybe even fire extinguishers for those planes that had them if any. It would be something you just click on before selecting your air craft maybe.
 
That kind of thing is “simulation cool” and the simulation guy in us here loves that kind of thing. I love that kind of thing. However, with a list of work and features to do that makes a weekly shopping list for a family of 15 look like a post-it note, this kind of thing … as cool as it would be to have the option … is not a very high priority to pull coders away from other tasks to make possible. Really, if we had a much bigger team we’d probably do it easy, but we have a very small team.
 
Why isn't the map over, what are the victory conditions?
 
Until we get a bunch of code and the manageable mechanisms/tools that come with that code, in order to make more varied, cool and manipulatable victory conditions possible, a campaign is won when the side that capture the “entire map” captures the entire map.
“Entire map” in this case means the percentage of towns/cities that triggers the Headline Script to announce the winner of the campaign on our webpage. We are coming up with alternate “victory condition scenarios” here that we can design into the game this year, but right now it’s only possible to win by capturing in excess of 90% of the game world. I am deliberately not telling you the exact percentage because knowing everything is not always the best choice for immersion.