Since GJN deletes automatic ticket bleed on most maps, this mechanic is more broken than ever because they forgot about the rest.
On some maps AI planes still crashes like Lemmings into the ground, deny the team the rewards and the ticket bleed. And if it happens early game, they don’t kill targets anymore.
A view days ago GJN updated ground vehicles to drive again. But they still have their weird behaviour driving half in the ground or in air so you can’t destroy them.
AI planes kill ground targets without bleeding tickets. Ok, no auto ticket bleed. BUT! This results in weird situations: Sometimes there aren’t enough ground targets left to equal tickets. Most of the time the AI planes shooting the weaker targets, so you have only medium/heavy tanks, no one is able to destroy. If enemy is very low on tickets, you only have to wait for your AI planes to kill the last targets.
I think this whole system has to be reformed, so no team gets an advantage out of it.
I never tested it, but I thought, shooting down your own AI planes could be an advantage in some battles. :-P
Something that would be nice would be the ability to change your payload when you return to base, that way if the only opp left is camping his airfield you can still rtb and get back with bombs to finish the targets
I am not sure that gaijin is actually aware of certain game mechanics on old legacy maps and from my pov those guys who implemented certain changes should get punished to play every map they have ruined at least a 100 times in a row.
An example:
If you play on Sicily around 4.0 and you play from the eastern side of the map you can relax - the current game set-up guarantees you a ticket win.
Open the replay, skip to 12 minutes and enlarge the minimap. You will see 3 tank columns at grid C 5 running into enemy pillboxes. As this is a very old map tank kills have a disproportionate ticket reduction - and my tanks died like flies. Within 4 minutes my tickets melted from 1.700 to 200 and then: Game over.
The only way to avoid this defeat is to kill the enemy pillboxes & arty/heavy aaa before your tank columns are in their gun range.
Peak map/ai interaction design.
You will get kicked due to the friendly damage counter.
I flew years ago on the old Rhine map and got jumped - i released my payload (B-18B) to dogfight with this enemy - and got kicked. One of my 2 bombs has hit the railyard and killed about 30 own train cars…😂😂😂😂
That ai planes are often unable to do anything is annoying like hell, on the large Lagoda map (when you play from the left/west side) your ai planes tend to circle between the 2 enemy airfields…enemy ai planes are (ofc) attacking…
The new map like falkland is annoying to play too at specific BRs.
A Su-7 on falkland in a full downtier is able to win the map on its own, because only AI plane and base-kills bleeding tickets, though the light red colour of ground target markers signals they would bleed tickets too. Even destroying ships is useless. And AI planes sometimes crashes too on this map.
Just more evidence that having any single objective being able to decide whole rounds as the underlying issue to all this talk about fighters, attackers, and bombers not interacting properly with each other.
The mode’s underlying foundation isn’t built to support it, and to my knowledge hasn’t been since day one.
Well it makes sense that if the last opp is hiding, the other team can win by just attacking ground which is the original purpose of military aviation. Fighters are meant to destroy others planes that are themselves meant for ground attack, so if the fighters hide the attackers win
Yes for evidence that gaijin does not test individual maps & changes
No regarding single objectives or team interactions
I used Sicily as an example to show how idiotic certain people (gaijin employees? or 3rd party service providers?) fiddle with maps which were perfectly fine years ago and got ruined in various steps or change rounds. And almost every long term player has played on Sicily in the old axis vs allies world in 1 hour long battles.
Sicily - history & changes:
The map was the best map for any experienced Ju 288 pilot - with a high risk / high reward approach you were able to kill 40-50% of the enemy tickets in under 3 minutes. All you had to do was to find the right diving angle and right bomb release points and you were able to kill up to 7 enemy tanks with one SC 1.800 attacking their left column, turn sharp and kill another 6 or 7 of the right column with your second SC 1.800 and back to base.
With the right approach even very ambitious AD-2/4 pilots had zero chance to intercept you - and the guys in F8Fs needed way too long to get in gun range and got jumped by my team. The A2D-1s were a challenge but thy were “manageable”.
Each tank had a ticket value of 100 tickets - 1.200 -1.400 tickets lost out of 2.900 was not bad and put a high pressure on the enemy team. If you had a booster running and activated an anti-mech order you got ~200-280 k SL just for using brain & experience. And you were the scoreboard leader as each trank granted 300 mission score.
But almost parallel to the 4 bases approach (May 2020) gaijin changed the map layout - the 2 main columns were divided into 4 smaller ones which prevented these massive score.
In addition they increased the total amount of tickets without changing the number of ground targets which reduces the relative ticket impact of killing a base as the mission objective “kill all bases” produced previously an additional ticket drop. Killing of a tank or pillbox is the main goal on this map - with the new setup these kills had now a higher relative AND absolute ticket impact.
And recently some guys fiddled with the column spawn location and or speed of the ai tanks. Even in one hour long matches i could not remember to have seen tanks in gun range of pillboxes. And i played a lot of those matches and i killed mid to late game 8 moving tanks with the 8 x SC 250 loadout.
There is no such thing as proper interaction within teams - teamplay exist if you squad up or by accident with a random stranger in your team. Even at peak times 2018/19 (regarding average player skill) the players were rarely interested in teamwork.
Cooperation / teamwork is mainly a matter of player IQ and is usually rooted in the operational necessity - somehow logical as from a holistic pov players in a team compete for the same targets.
Example:
I remember especially the old unrevised Spain map. Asymmetric layout - allies with light tanks as targets, axis targets were 6 light tanks and pillboxes. I was able to kill the 6 light tanks and 6 pillboxes with 8 SC 250 bomb drops - whilst the majority of German & Italian fighters had just 20 mm cannons unable to kill pillboxes.
So in every match i used team chat and asked for support whilst killing these tickets as i needed time for these bomb drops and became extremely vulnerable as i had to bomb low and rather slow.
The few real smart fighter pilots understood the issue and often decided to help but the overwhelming majority of fighter pilots were (as today) just plain stupid scrublords unable to understand game mechanics even as i guaranteed them that i would win the match for them - after the timer was just 25 minutes as the map was way too large for multiple attack runs.
So in about 60-80% of the cases i was able to kill the promised 12 targets (=40% of enemy tickets and 3600 points mission score) and in the other 20-40% i got jumped by the usual suspects.
Needless to mention that axis teams lost the majority of the matches just by tickets as every aallied moron can kill a light tank with 0.50 cals whilst axis had severe issues with the pillboxes as stuff like Do 335 As/B-2s was rather rare.
As described in my (way too long) Sicily & Spain essays i see a mix of lack of IQ of players and devs as root cause - you could (and can still today) win a very tight match even in a plain high performance bomber, fighter or attacker with smart game play, but these cases are more or less reduced to a handful of old legacy maps.
But it became way more difficult / almost impossible thanks to things like stupid contrails, added ai planes, 16 vs 16 and the red square.
Example:
So if you have some experience you can win with a single P-47 against 5-7 enemies (in case the tickets are close) by last minute bombing of a single cluster of these 3 x 6 vehicles spawning very late match. Ofc you need to know if these cars will spawn or not and where they will spawn.
The challenges are to stay alive that long and to “arrange” the enemies behind you in that way that they are far away from own ground units, feel the need to kill you and give them the impression that they can catch you.
The rest is positioning in that way that you flight path allows you a shallow high speed dive (~ 850-900 kmph) in order to bomb such a cluster with 2 x 1.000 lbs bombs at about 24:30 game time - there is zero time to react and equalize the tickets for the enemy.
Works perfect with a lot of aircraft on most legacy maps. You need a very high dive speed, good top speed at 6-8 km with a sufficient bomb load to kill such a cluster in one pass and at least two 5 minute orders to delay the inevitable blind hunt / avenger order.
True, and the reason for is the public server system. Nothing else. Bad map design has nothing to do with it. You can create the best map, you will never have teamplay on WT servers, except these two situations.
That’s the reason why I played Counterstrike for 20 years on private, password protected servers only.
And I think that’s the reason why squadron battles are so popular. If this mode would exist for Air only, I would through my first money at the snail.
But again, back to topic. :-)
So we can put Sicily with it’s weird behaviour like in the replay to the list? Is this a pure “bug” like the problems I listed above?
What’s about Afghanistan? Here you have the same mechanic more balanced and it’s not a programing mistake. Even the old map versions were the same. In the old days I won dozens of battles on my own in my beloved Ho 229 on this map. Same with experienced Do 335 B-2 players on sicily.
i still don’t know they forgot about it, Gaijin is a mutli million or billion Euro/dollar company how can they fortget things like that either there sloppy or idk
From my pov the map needs a fix regarding various topics - and yes, if you would classify a stupid design-change as a bug, this map design fulfils this criteria 😂
As i am a fan of useless lists, i added this map on my own thread with maps with design flaws in July, 2025:
Next topic:
I play Afghanistan way too seldom to have a valid opinion.
I refuse to play even my 6.7 Me 262 A-2a as long as i have to focus my entire attention either to severely undertiered USSR rocket planes or Korean war era US jets. I played there a few weeks ago the last time in my P-59A and before that in the 190 F-8 and i was too busy with other things to analyze the tickets.
I am not really sure if you can call all of these things programming mistakes.
From the outside it looks that certain changes were made valid for all maps (like ai plane ground kills have no ticket impact) and other parameters (like contrail altitude or bomber spawn altitudes) are set for a few maps on individual values.
So these crashing or passive ai planes look connected to a mix of them being unable to detect targets they are allowed to attack or their individual ability to deal with terrain obstacles - which would be a classic programming / design mistake.
But ai pillboxes and ai tank interactions look more like that an intern has fiddled with marching speeds and ai ground unit gunner accuracy & efficiency.
So without really knowing which changes lead to which effects on which maps all you can do is guessing. And my educated guess would be that gaijin doesn’t care (enough) and that the staff tasked to implement certain changes have never heard about things like testing or quality controls.