so aircraft 'abort' an opposing aircraft on a roll of '1' and kill them on a roll of '2' or'3'? That would make even more aircraft left as the game moves on.
Yes, that is the idea. It is really designed to allow the guy who is sitting there with less air unit to still use them. If not for this kind of rule, they will just sit there until they have enough to come close to parity.
And then they may finally have enough to only have them decimated in one roll of the dice. The other night I rolled well against the Germans, but some of them were aborts. It allowed me to kill a bunch of his fighters, but it wasn't a clean sweep since a portion of the rolls were aborts.
Instead of me killing 9 of his 11 fighters, I only got 7 with 2 aborts. Still a very good showing, but not the total crushing that the base rules allow. He hit me for like 4 kills and an 1 abort leaving me with 8 fighters after the battle was done.
So in the battle that we had he escorted the Urals bombing raid with 11 ftrs and I responded with 12 ftrs. The numbers would mathematically be: Germany kills 3.66 and aborts 1.83 while the USSR kills 4 and aborts 2. He got around average and I got above average, but the abort rolls helped to minimize the kill factor.
It also addresses your idea of the ftr rebuild. Why come up with a special rule for bringing back ftr units when the abort roll allows units that are already on the board to last a bit longer?
With your airbase rules have you found it next to impossible to root the Italians out of the med? Allies could never build enough airbases, it doesn't matter how cheap you make them. Can you keep increasing them past a '5'?
I have seen that the airbase issue has been more of a problem in the Med during this game, but I also know that it can just as easily be attributed to how badly I am getting my ass kicked in the whole game! The Germans are so powerful that they are just flooding the Med with units (ground and air) that getting enough of my air units there is tough. Normally, the Axis don't have enough resources to
be that powerful in the Med so the Allies are constrained by the airbase rule.
The main thing about our game right now is that it should have been called long ago based on VPs, but I talked Eric into playing it all the way out just to see how things go. As such, things like the airbase issue that you are talking about are coming to pass simply because we are out past the "norm" that is usually seen in a game. In our usual experience (in a game that doesn't skew this far outside the norm), the Axis isn't powerful enough as it concerns the air situation that the airbase rules are a problem for the Allies.
They eventually are able to slowly roll back the Axis in the Med through patient work in the Western Med and eventually look to tackle the Boot after cleaning up North Africa. My problems in this game stem from the loss of Cairo, which really come from getting behind in the Egyptian arms race thanks to an unsuccessful defense of the North Atlantic Convoys. That money drain affected the balance and it cascaded from there.
The part here that helps with the Allies work here is the change in naval AA that we came up with. We always found it hard to move forward in the Med with Allies when using the base rules since the ftrs just dominated the navies. It was too much. That is why we now use our targeted and abort AA. It give the navies better survivability while also allowing the air units more life too. They can be sent away to fight another day. And it causes a bit more drama/decision making before and during a naval battle.
As for the last question, no we don't go past a five airbase. Allies just need to have carriers to help address any imbalance in airpower that may exist. While I am getting my ass kicked as badly as I am, I still can't understand how you are getting the amount of air units that you are describing into the game to have 30 ftrs in Sicily? How you can strip the other theaters of action to have that many in one place?
Eric probably had around 50 total air units at one point, but he needed to have them spread between Russia, Germany/France, Egypt, and the Central Med. You seem to be able to ignore other areas of the map and just jam them all in one place. I don't get how that can realistically happen.