Airfield AAA Discussion Thread - Air Realistic Battles

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
38

If you get killed on the airfield it is because you threw away your alt and speed advantage and the enemy took that advantage and killed you.
It is a fair way to die, the next time you will think how not to die like this and you will manage your ammo better, take more fuel or take bigger risks to kill the enemy.

On the other hand with AAA the advantage of your enemy gets cancelled and that is way less fair, the enemy has no counterplay and there is nothing he can do to improve this in the future.

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39

I will try with the BI…and every time that I will run out of my 90 rounds I will blame myself. Dude do you recognize that just stating the the only reason to rearm and repair are related to a misuse or bad play is a very pretentious semplification? You have just decided to cut so many variables out of the picture. There are some planes which consumes fuel much more faster, others which have way less ammo…Sometimes you get damaged and you need to repair. So as an example, if i get damaged by a friendly, it will be my fault to have the necessity to repair? Than why bother if in that case i will have to accept to “threw away” my “speed advantage” and then again, die in a “fair way”?

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40

The BI is one of the most broken and unbalanced planes in the game.
It has the performance x4 of everything it faces, the only disadvantage is ammo and fuel.
No AAA is the best way to balance this vehicle because it would have a weakness and it could be killed by regular fighters.
With AAA is just an invincible plane to face which you cant do anything against it because the only disadvantage that it has it gets nulified by AAA.

If you get damaged by a friendly, it could be because of your fault (for example your friendly is about to kill an enemy but you are too greedy and step in between) or it could also just be bad luck.
If you get unlucky there is nothing you can do, just like when you get rammed or teamkilled.
But at least it is luck fault or your teammates fault and it is not how bad the gameplay is designed.

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41

There are a lot of designs air realistic has that punishes bad team, but the most important part is that they lose. And a team doesn’t have to lose due to running out of planes, they can lose because they run out of tickets (which is supposed to be the proper way to win, with team wipe only being an addon).

Your entire argument would be valid if this was on air arcade - but this is air realistic.

*The fact that airfields are protected are realistic:
You never have airfields undefended realistically. If an enemy flies close to enemy airfield realistically he should be placing himself in much more danger than in a random area with no military.

*The fact that planes run out of ammo is realistic:
in a realistic fight in the plane, if you have the chance to shoot someone down you will use as much ammo as you need, especially if you know you have a place to return.

With AAA: allow strategies to be made and has opportunity cost on landing at the expense of not being able to take down enemy tickets and being less relevant on the map for a while.
Without AAA: turns realistic into an arcade playstyle - because its not close to realistic if taking down enemy planes is the only objective in an operation, and conserving ammo is necessary because returning to one’s own airfield is considered dangerous.

Tickets was a good system, and is especially crucial to serve as the balance control air realistic and make it actually realistic. Any airfield campers can be denied by balancing the ticket system in order to prevent game from being dragged too long, including but not limited to automatic ticket drain if the entire team is landed, etc. Spawn campers on the other hand have very limited ways to be balanced, unless you actually make them suffer opportunity cost which in this case is actual danger around airfield. Removing AAAs on airfields are just destroying the gameplay experience of realistic players that actually plays in a realistic style, and punishes them for doing a standard realistic action - rearm.

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42

Strafing airfields was the most used tactic against fighters in ww2.
No AAA is more “realistic” than current AAA protection.

With good aim you will need way less ammo.

If you go to hit ground targets the airfield camper will be 3km above you, you will have no chance against him. How is that a counter?

In ARB “spawn camping” doesnt exist, you only spawn once. Everyone has the same chances and that is why it is easy to counter an enemy attacking your airfield.

43

I see most of your post as reasonable statement - and i actually support the proposal without af aaa, but with exit zones - but the quoted comment does not deal with actual realities.
My approval is solely aimed to force the majority of players to see the need to develop and to play Air RB due to the fun of flying and not due to economic necessities which encourage them to strap on bombs and bomb bases.

This whole conversation is imho pointless, as mainly experienced players discuss well known facts. So what ever position they might take, they are not really the problem (besides a few players mainly bundeled in squads, another fellow player has profund knowledge about them) - the problem are the masses outside this forum.

It is the same with the guys flying op planes like Wyverns - dominating high score list and racking up k/ds of 15:1 or more - they are a few, not active in the forum and only a problem if you meet them in a match.

Despite playing props only, i observe what fellow players report from their game play experience in jets - and i watch enough replays and vids to see that there are two different words:

A) highly effective af aaa in prop BRs (few exceptions)
B) much lower effective af aaa in jet BRs (can be countered)

Some guys want to reduce effectiveness of af aaa in word A, others want to increase effectiveness in world B, others like to get rid of all af aaa without changes.
Others see the need for changes for af aaa and support a removal if there is an exit zone for weaker plane classes, as they hope quality of Air RB improves.

So there is no real defending of anything as most guys do not differentiate their opinion what exactly they mean. If some guys ask for the same effectiveness of af aaa in jet BRs like they got used to this in prop BRs, this sounds comprehensible.

Your whole argumentation regarding “fair and square” or “team or own decisions” is on the same level like “bad decisions” or “bring enough fuel”, “don’t get damaged” like seen here or in the old forum is right from a certain pov, but simply not the whole truth.
It comes mainly from fighter mains which do not consider that PvE is part of Air RB too - and usually the guys playing PvE are their main victims - at least those guys die usually first.

If you follow the overall logic there would be no need for anything else than fighters in Air RB - No ground targets, no bases, no additional objectives - at the end of this chain there is no need for an airfield at all.

It is the same like a guy taking off with 7 minutes min fuel - hoping that his performance increase helps him to get kills (or easier kills), and some others try to manage to outfuel him to get an easy kill if he runs out of fuel.
Both parties try to benefit from game mechanics, the major difference is that in prop BRs af aaa can’t be countered, there are just a handful of maps without af aaa, one got lost today.

Same with this teamplay mantra - outside a (communicating) squad you will have some kind of teamplay as soon you play with some smart guys in 2 vs 2 or 4 vs 4s. Just assuming they understand English. Otherwise you are randomly assigned to strangers. Even without the 16 vs 16 setup the outcome of matches became a random event in the last years.

So if you have a team with 5 Wyverns you will most likely win on Tunisia, but you will lose most of the times on Ardennes map. Just based on experience.

The majority of matches is decided just by numbers in the first 6 to 10 minutes - you play either 8 vs 2 or 2 vs 8 in most cases.

This is true in 1 vs 1s in prop BRs if just 2 players are left, fully agree.

But from my pov this is rather the exception. I support your proposal for a removal of af aaa with exit zones just to get rid of such scenarios:

replay/84883092236110574 (sorry, link does not work)

I played 2 vs 1 in a major ticket disadvantage and their last player, a Wyvern (what else) camped his af aaa with 9 minutes left and 2.000 points ticket advantage.
Based on current game mechanics the game is lost, cause on this map i had to kill 20 tanks or pillboxes with MG 151s as arty or aaa kills won’t reduce tickets fast enough.
I see others with MG 151s killing pillboxes, but i can’t.
In addition i saw that my teammate was not experienced and patient enough and i assumed he might die to af aaa, which happened quite soon.

So just by the fact that my enemy was going to kill me (as slow and clumsy heavy fighter) and left his af aaa bubble (instead of just keep running) i had a chance to kill him - as he a had a rather low experience level i was able to built up energy and the necessary speed to dodge his headon attack (what else) and managed to kill him.

I agree to this just from a very holistic pov - as written above team play is a random and very rare event just due to wide spread of experience, plane classes and BR spread.

I saw some months ago this amazing F-16 player - killing all af aaa (SAMs) with skill and Mavericks and the remaining fighters with AAMs - i respect that. But i saw also a hell of players celebrating af aaa bugs giving them free kills without efforts.

So if your suggestions will be considered - i appreciate that and hope that quality will improve as assumed and predicted. But tbh - i have serious doubts about that. I mean if your goal is to improve quality of Air RB there are much more important issues, but i respect deviating views.

I mean we have just a few days with revised maps and i noticed that some af aaa is way less effective on some old and some revised maps. And of course we have some guys who learned quite fast to benefit from that. I watched today on “Battle of the Rhine” my last 2 teammates dying as they got killed directly on the runway. The 2 (out of 5 left) enemies thought it was a funny idea to kill all af aaa after that.

You argue that they got killed fair and square, but imho they simply died as they relied on game mechanics which were broken and they got killed whilst trying to repair and not to camp…btw the af aaa on the other side of the map is not that easy to kill. No idea why…

Finally: The overall game play experience in the last years went downwards. This game is full of major flaws regarding game play, game mechanics and implemented changes nobody asked for - like real shatter or 16vs16 recently - everybody is aware of them.

If af aaa is seen by some of you as a major concern - try to get rid of it. I hope it will help to improve game play, but i have my doubts. Mainly as gaijin is following this topic for years now without any substantial changes - i mean their business model is based on protecting new players in more or less expensive premium planes - af aaa is a very cheap way to keep them spending money…

1 Like
44

imo they should make airfield aa only work within 3 km of the airfield, but keep it as it is, also add more bases to bomb per match or make them respawn faster since 90% of players in top tier arb just bomb and nothing else, and make the aa slowly damage you over time like in low tiers instead of instant missile annihilation

45

refering mostly to jets - its hard to believe AA missiles are way worse than the missiles jets themselves are using, like rn

its simply inhumane to tell pilots to reserve ammo especially on stuff like mig21smt, or a lot of other jets that has a few seconds burst at best, imagine yourself in an actual combat

you have not read my statement carefully, I talked about ticket system as an alternative way to reduce airfield campers, for example automatic ticket drain that does not require you to clear ground targets. It’s obviously not the best possible solution we can get to, but the key idea is that we dont need to kill airfield campers at the cost of a normal player trying to enjoy the game.

Overall, you are denying the fact that airfield is necessary for any player in ARB, and considering landing a punishment rather than a backup. You might as well suggest removing airfield as a whole and shift the gamemode to arcade style TDM where first team that gets wiped loses, I see no ideological differences.

tldr: you are ruining the game for people that uses airfield as intended, there can be other ways to deal with airfield campers without hurting normal players

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46

Replied to metra but realized you wrote a comprehensive and accurate statement of what I was trying to say in broken language - sincere thanks to you
On the flip side I realized that I have not touched props for quite a while, and by reflecting on that I saw a major difference that may cause the differentiation as well. In prop matches planes need to spend a lot of effort to reach enemy airfield which leaves their team slightly more vulnerable by default, making it less practical to lead to game victory or to actually profit efficiently considering time costs.
But for later jet variants, quite a few airfields are easily reachable and can be done by those supersonics, making the effort and opportunity cost to camp the airfield borderline non-existent, which ultimately leads to different results.
I think at this point ARB for props and late jets can be treated as 2 separate game(mode)s using the same wonky frame - maybe the entire ARB system (or at least for one side of this split) needs a rework to make stuff more fun

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47

During the Six Day War in 1967, the IDF also attacked aircraft on the runway, and gun cams from that time have been uploaded to YT.

Pretty sure you can find gun cams from Korea and Kashmir as well.

I’m so sorry but sounds like massive skill issue because MiG guns are not that extremely hard to aim.
You just need to learn point and click. Also, you can take another aircrafts such as F-5s that has one of easy guns for aiming if you have crappy aim.

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48

Strafing so unrealistic…

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49

Meanwhile the additional camouflage description section of my beloved Hunter F.1 says that
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/827935942790610955/1123672706395668563/hunter_.png

50

No offense dude - but comparing a pre-emptive surprise attack approaching below radar detection altitude (so no defending fighters airborne) with war thunder makes no sense, wt is more or less pure fantasy with realistic looking planes. You know that…

I mean just with your statement “point and click” you confirm using a totally unrealistic mechanic called mouse aim and you complain about totally unrealistic af aaa?

Imho you should check your sources. Even if you refer to Barbarossa 1941 or ETO of U8th/15th AF with 2TAF 1944/45 or Bodenplatte - the strafing fighters killed mainly material - so unmanned parked aircraft and not their pilots - major difference to wt. Same as above - reality and wt does not fit together.

Imho the actually most used tactic against fighters was to kill them with fighters in aerial combat. Counting dead material is pointless.

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51

In all honesty, I do not even care about it being realistic. I care about gameplay. To add insult to i jury, some maps have AF AAA that deals next to no damage. But there’s no in-game info about this, it’s pure trial and error. Which makes it even more infuriating.
I wish all maps followed the same principles instead of AF AAA being all over the place.

And of course preferable AF AAA is lack of AF AAA and j-out exploit being fixed.

52

The AAA is extremely consistent for me. If I get with in 4000 yards my pilot gets knocked out. If I am on the run way and they decide to strafe me while I am repairing, my AAA doesn’t realize there is a enemy plane on the map, let alone right over them

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53

It all depends on the map. On Palestine it basically does nothing. On old maps it’ll kill you before you reach the target on the runway.

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54

Actually the previous post nailed it. On some prop maps airfield aaa is useless, so your map know-how becomes a decisive factor in tight matches. These inconsistencies are extremely annoying as they artificially alter the outcome of very tight matches.

I mean it is not really a challenge to win 1 vs 4 on Golan Heights if you kill 2 or 3 of them in one pass on their runway on the forward airfield. From a holistic pov such an example de-validates any “real” 1 vs 4 turnaround you had before on “regular” maps, so it kills the long term motivation - at least for me, as winning by exploiting design flaws is imho no real victory.

The recent changes like real shatter, “improved ballistics” or 16 vs 16 turned the outcome of 40-50% of my matches into a random event - in addition to the still increasing premium spam. 12 months ago matches with 5 XP-50s or 7 Wyverns were extremely rare, but recently it is very common to play with or against such combinations…

What ever your pov in this debate is - it would be simply fair to delete useless af aaa on certain maps, otherwise less experienced players suffer even more as they rely on consistency.
Those maps are known for years and gaijin has changed nothing. Even brand new maps have certain airfields (mostly main af) without fully functional af aaa and on some older maps the af aaa became way less effective…

1 Like
55

I like bases to spawn differently, I think mostly in the form of the airfield base. That is because I like the battles to be more mission/objective oriented. But a deeper, maybe more rewarding line of bases sounds better then just endlessly respawning bases.

On AA defending the AF, I don’t care about about airfield camping. Teams can fly the mission/objective instead of focusing on a single enemy fighter left.
The Luftwaffe would not have won Germany the war if it destroyed the RAF in 1940, it would have won the war if it after destroying the air force would have bombed all factories and military structures or the army landed and occupied.

Air supremacy is no goal in itself, not worth the blood and investments if not for enabling bombers/attackers to do the work.

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56

The Rolands on top tier ARB dont work. I always fly to the enemy airfield and have only ever been killed in older jets (~br8.0-8.7) but for top tier i think they need to switch it to something slightly better for top tier, as it feels unfair to just fly in a straight line at Mach 1.2 and the missiles not be able to hit you, leaving the jets on the runway vulnerable.

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57

Yes, the enemy can counter your AA-advantage, the enemy can go and get to work on the mission objectives. No country would send fighters into the sky for a team death match.

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