@KurtGodel7 said: Germany sends four fighters and four dive bombers to attack a Soviet territory. The Soviets defend with 4 fighters. Neither nation can send more because they are both at the cap. (The attacker is limited to four bombers + four escorts; the defender is limited to 4 fighters.) Step 1: a dogfight between German and Soviet fighters. This lasts two combat rounds. Each side's fighters fire at their dogfight value. Step 2: Any Soviet fighters which survived the dogfight get to attack the German dive bombers. The Soviet fighters fire at their interception value, the dive bombers fire back at their air defense value. Destroyed units are removed. In this case, if you want to have all Soviet fighters firing both at the German fighters and (if surviving) at the German bombers and do not want to have different dogfight values for escorts and would-be interceptors, then I would say that the change which I would suggest to this system is having the surviving German fighters firing during step 2 too, meaning that (during step 2) the surviving German fighters fire against the Russian fighters with their dogfight value at the same time as the German bombers fire with their air defence value (meaning that this time any fighter downed by other fighters get to fire at the bombers anyway). To achieve this, the rule may be that on phase 2 up to as many surviving fighters as the number of enemy bombers fire at bombers with their interception value and the rest of the surviving fighters (if the surviving fighters are more than the enemy bombers, meaning them all if the other side has no bombers) fire at fighters with their dogfight value (or do nothing if there are no more enemy fighters at this point). Alternatively, the rule may be that all surviving fighters fire at bombers if one or more bombers are present and fire at fighters otherwise. I think the best would be having a prompt to decide how many fighters are firing at enemy bombers (the prompt being given only if the enemy has both bombers and fighters at this point). If both sides have fighters but no bombers, this would be the same as having an additional dogfight round. (The attacker is limited to four bombers + four escorts; the defender is limited to 4 fighters.) I really don't like the number limit and don't understand why having it.

And reserving a post here in case I end up needing another section for anything. Thread open to discussion now.

@Cernel I have been playing low luck for this scenario and it is quite interesting.

@alkexr said: @Cernel Why have you chosen to have it this way instead of having a specific starting time? Well, the War of the Ring is the obvious candidate, but there was no Arnor or Angmar at that time, so all of Eriador would be practically empty. And that's not all, Dáin's Halls and Framsburg, for example, were also abandoned by that time, along with the surrounding areas. The dragons are also all but gone, Smaug being the last truly relevant one. The orcs in the north were also decimated in the Battle of Five Armies and the aftermath, to the point of irrelevance. So a War of the Ring map would be missing too much for my liking. Sounds like having a secondary game for the map depicting the War of the Ring (maybe with a much over-powered Evil and a non-military victory condition for Good) would be very good as that would be the scenario which most people are interested in and would also provide an easier-to-learn reduced game. I guess doing that after having finished the main "all-times" game would only add a few percetage points of additional work beside the play-testing part for balance. Unfortunately, I cannot do or help with making that because my knowledge of Middle Earth is almost at average Joe level.

Updated a few more categories to now be visible to guests. Rationale: SEO, letting google crawl the maps section is good maps can link to their forums page, and with visible to guests random players can see those pages without having to be members first. It's generally better to see those pages as guest users rather than 404 or otherwise hide them, which makes things look broken. I'm still not sure whether to move the AI, Development, and Feature Request sections back to being visible to 'guest' users.