Ok guys I've put a lot of thought into this and I've come to the conclusion that something has to change with the combat system. Right now it seems like the key to success is to cram as many countermeasures on your plane as possible and beat the enemy by bleeding their munitions dry, and the enemies can't do much but explode once their own countermeasures are gone. Regular enemies get rolled the forget over with zero effort, and there's no point coming up with special named opponents anymore because they cannot carry enough munitions to get through everyone's personal wall of countermeasures. To combat this, I am considering turning to a place I had originally wanted to leave out of this for simplicity's sake: Stats. Or rather, just a single stat.
What I am proposing is that planes will now have a hard numerical value that reflects its ability to evade incoming missiles, and flares will play a part in modifying that stat. Here's a few examples of how this sort of system might change things (obviously the mechanics are in no way final and feedback would be appreciated)
-A Huit mook shoots a heatseeking missile at Gus' Flanker. Gus has two flares, but an enemy ace is present possessing All-Aspects, so he would prefer to save it for them. Instead of dropping Flares, he performs an evasive maneuver. The Flanker possesses an evasion of say, 75, and the heatseeker imposes a penalty of 20 on this value, meaning the Flanker's effective evasion is 55. A d100 is rolled, and the result comes up 34, meaning he successfully dodges the missile without using flares.
-A few turns later, the ace on the field fires an All-Aspect at Gus. Compared to Heatseekers, All-Aspects impose a 30 point penalty to evasion, so he opts to use a packet of flares. Flares increase the dodge value by 40, so it cancels out the All-Aspect's penalty and in fact increases his dodge value to 85. The roll comes up 78 and he once again avoids the missile.
Named NPCs might have slight boosts to their evasion to make them a more difficult adversary, player characters might get a boost too with specific planes if you keep using it to represent experience and familiarity with it (each mission = 2 extra evasion, up to 10 or something?), and your run of the mill mook might even have a penalty.
Of course, you don't need to memorize any of this statistical wankery, that's just for me to crunch numbers with. All you'd need to know is that the higher a missile's penalty, the more difficult it is to dodge; and the higher a plane's evasion or whatever i call it, the more agile it is (duh). Moves would still be taken as usual, you'd still be saying like, "i try to dodge the missile" or "i use some flares", only then I'd roll to see what happens. Hell, you can even still opt to pull off advanced maneuvers, they'd just probably have a slight penalty attached to them too for more of a risk/reward system instead of everyone flawlessly cobra'ing all the time. The only issue I can find with this is trust, really. I really have nothing at all to gain from being a forgetwit and fudging the numbers, but words alone mean nothing. I suppose I could puush the window to show what the roll was, but I just don't know. If you want to see this system in practice, then there can be another aerial VR sparring match with Raiden or something so we can see how it works.
tl;dr i want to fix flares and make them less of an "i win" button
Poll