Allied Air Independent Property
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Looking to see if anyone knows much about the history and function of this property. It appears there used to be the inverse of this property "Allied Air Dependents" which this replaced and that old property does nothing but appears in many map XMLs. My assumption is this is primarily to handle the A&A classic rule where allied fighters on carriers could be taken as casualties when attacking but that they don't fire.
@Frostion It appears your Star Wars maps are some of the only maps that set this to true. Is that on purpose and did you do testing on what this actually does?
<property name="Allied Air Independent" value="true" editable="false">Here are the searches I checked:
- Allied Air Independent = true: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Atriplea-maps+"name%3D\"Allied+Air+Independent\"+value%3D\"true\""&type=Code
- Allied Air Dependents = false: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Atriplea-maps+"name%3D\"Allied+Air+Dependents\"+value%3D\"false\""&type=Code
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@redrum I am not in a position where I can test the map. But as I remember, on the Star Wars maps, a player may land on allied player's carriers, who may then fly/sail away with the planes. And I remember it as ALL players defend if attacked. I am unsure about what happens if the allied player sails into an attack with another players fighters.
When I adjusted the carrier rules for Star Wars maps, I wanted to make them support the most rational and intuitive behaviour. And I saw this as being able to use, support and protect other players' carrier.
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@Frostion ya me thinks you are cor frosti
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@Frostion I actually did a quick test and actually on the Star Wars maps, any allied air units on carriers participate in attacks not just defenses:
I'm not sure if this is what you intended though I would generally advise against it as it allows you to shuttle your allies planes into battle and have a kind of weird multi-nation attack. If it is intended, you definitely should add it to the notes as I think the Star Wars maps are the only ones that appear to be using this property and unless I read the XML, then I'd never guess that was how it worked.
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@redrum I think it makes the most sense this way. Why would those allied spaceships just stay there doing nothing?
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@Cernel You could say the same about allied fighters on a carrier for a ww2 game. Honestly, the biggest reasons have nothing to do with realism IMO but around opening the can of worms of multi-nation attacks and this being a weird special case breaking that. If you created rules allowing true multi-nation movement then I think it would makes sense but otherwise it just muddles things.
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@redrum And, yeah, some multi players attacks would be cool. That has always been my pet hate, that Americans and British cannot possibly attack France together.
I agree that this property, while touching an interesting field, does it in a far from polished way, also since TripleA completely fails to display where the fighters actually are.
Actually, I would not say the same about allied fighters on carriers in ww2. Beside auxiliary carriers produced in U.S.America and turned to the British, that I don't consider part of this case, as it would be just turning the carrier to British ownership, carrying British fighters, maybe produced in U.S.America and turned British too, I cannot think of a single instance in which any aircrafts ever attacked anything from a carrier not under control of the same country. The main or only case of allied fighters on carriers would have been American carriers flying British fighters to reinforce British Malta.
Anyways, in general, if I were to decide the basic carriers rules, I would have them working extensively differently from now, and in particular allowing the fighters to take off from the carriers at any moment, also at the end of the carriers' movement, not forcefully at start turn, also since if you think that a turn is like 1 month (and in the standard games is likely several months), a carrier could make back and forth all the Atlantic, while the autonomy of the fighters for a single flight would be over an order of magnitude more limited (but air should be able to fly multiple times in a turn). The current carriers' rules just completely fail realism in the moment, for a single turn, the carrier would have bigger movement than the fighter, as it should be, since they are clearly made under the assumption that the carrier is going to be at least 2 movements slower than the fighters (and there are no fuel costs, so you always want to launch your fighters, and never to transport them as cargo, which is silly, as they were not launching fighters all time just for fun, unlike these games, where fighters on own carriers literally never actually move as cargo). A minimum of realism could be added by allowing the carrier to decide to keep the fighter on board, and move them around, that would be highly relevant also for fuel consumption. But some minimum realism might be actually added by splitting all powers into two, one for air and land and one for sea, except probably sea transports, due to the overly limiting rules around transporting allied land units (that don't make sense, as well, since it's not like transporting the Afrika Korp on Italian ships is harder than transporting Italian stuff).
But when it comes to spaceships is totally a different story.
