Mud Mover Flight Lead

[HerrMurf]

As a mostly MP player, I was thinking about the general lack of multi-engine bomber formations online. One of the most important things for encouraging online attack and bomber pilots is making ground targets worth a significant amount of points and therefore worthwhile from a player standpoint. When BoX changed the scoring a year or two in, there was an obvious uptick in mud moving. With ships being a significant target in this series, I think it may be somewhat less of a factor. Once we move to the next installments, however, Betty's, Nell's, Mitchell's and Beaufighter's (et al) will become far more important.

While thinking about all of the above I had another thought. What if the multi-engine mud moving player can select or decline taking an AI wingman or flight? It would make bomber formations more realistic from a quantitative standpoint. It could improve the success/survival rate for such missions as well. It would make stopping an attack run a lot harder to defend against which is realistic. A single Betty vs a Corsair or P-38 doesn't seem like much of a challenge for the fighter jocks. Bombers are largely ill suited to surviving the MP experience which I suspect is a primary reason few take them up. Solo bomber attacks, other than some night harassment flights, are equally unrealistic.

The thought here is, if the flight leader's plane is destroyed or abandoned he/she automatically jumps to the next AC in their formation so long as they are not PK'd. In those cases the AI just takes over the remaining AC. It also accounts for the significantly more time those pilots typically have to put into setting up a mission and climbing to a proper altitude than the fighter pilots do. I would limit the ability to use the feature to multi-engine bombers exclusively. No single engine bombers like Dauntless or Val's. No multi-mission AC like P-38's, Betty's/Catalina's/Beau's with torpedoes, etc.

It's just an initial thought and not fully fleshed out yet. Possibly too gamey but with the right tweaks could be really good for everyone's experience as well. Maybe even the SP guys.

Edited August 15 by HerrMurf

[wheelsup_cavu]

Always disliked the finality of Coop play in 1946 but I did like how you could lead up to 15 other planes if you took the Pilot position in the lead aircraft. I always wanted to have something of that nature in the Dogfight style of play where in the arming screen you could choose how many aircraft you were going to lead and possibly even add some escort flights so the bombers would not be flying naked to the target area. It would have also likely required you to be able to plot a flight plan so the game could generate flight paths for all the ancillary flights. 

Wheels

[CPT Crunch]

Brilliant idea, worth fleshing out thoughts on implemented it.  Would bring the big bomber formation show to life and could be done to minimize resource drain.  Simple clones mimicking everything the human does. 

Only a few guys together and you already have a fleet flying nice tight mass formations.