Here’s the idea, rather than paying to repair your bases at the begining of your turn, they now auto-repair, but this happens at the end of the turn. This is key to the new bombing concept.
Basically, the bases now function like the old battleship, which repaired at the end of the turn for free. What this means for bombing options… Instead of doing economic damage at the risk of aa fire on your bombers, here you are risking the bomber against AA fire for potential tactical damage, by messing with the enemy’s options on movement, repair, or the scramble bonus from bases.
My friend and I were discussing this the other day, trying to think of a way to make bombing bases (to inopperative status) more interesting, more frequent, and more valuable for the cost of aircraft risked. I think this would make the tactical bombing of bases even more significant to the gameplay and a better option than the current system, where the enemy can pay to fix bases immediately. Here strategic Bombing against factories is treated the same as OOB, but tactical bombing now feels more tactical since it directly affects how they can move rather than how much they have to spend. This is offset by the fact that bases auto repair at no cost.
Any thoughts?
I don’t think I would like this idea. One of the main reasons to bomb air and naval bases is to cost your enemy even more to repair them.
For example: when Germany is conducting a bombing campaign against England, there are a lot of times where they will bomb the factory and bases. If they are successful, a lot of times England has to suffer the choice of fixing their factory OR the bases. Usually they will fix the factory so they can get more new units there but leave the bases because they simply run out of money. Allowing the bases to auto-repair would be unfair to the bomber.
Also, if you bomb an air base and are successful at damaging it to inoperative status, during that turn the airbase can still scramble because the scramble option happens at the end of the combat movement phase while the SBR happens at the beginning of the conduct combat phase.
Now, I heard of one idea where repairs that you pay for don’t take effect until the end of this round. That would disallow the extra movement bonus of air and naval bases and not allow you to fix your capital ships at the naval base that round. However, since scramble is a defensive action, that would not be affected. Also, ICs would not be affected because you don’t place new units until the end of the round anyway, when the repairs would take effect.
While making repairs take place at the end of the round would perhaps have some minimal effect, the main advantage of bombing is costing your enemy the money to make repairs, which of course means less money to spend on new units. While your idea has merit, I prefer the cost to your enemies’ facilities.
You may be right, and its good point about the scramble. I was running some solitaires as noticed this as well. Perhaps the auto repair is just too easy.
What interested us was this idea that you might somehow be able to shut down bases with bombers, even if it’s not part of an all out strategic bombing offensive.
I see the point you make though. It may be too distorting to have the autorepair.
I bumped this up because there is a similar thread to compare with.
