Hello, This might be a long way so please settle in and grab a cup of coffee(Americans), Tea (Europeans) or a Juice box(16 year olds).
Multipathing Introduction
As of recent I’ve seen multiple posts asking for a re-work of multipathing within war thunder. I’ll chat a bit more about multipathing at the end and how ARM missiles might handle it but I think to have a complete understanding of multi-pathing and why it’s an “issue” we have to do a bit of a history lesson on war thunder Air RB. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s essentially that radar missiles lock onto the ground when trying to track a target in the last 25 meters before impact.
What is Air RB (ARB?)
I know a big topic headline, but it’s important we cover it off quickly. The best description I’ve ever seen for what ARB is in War Thunder is “Realistic Fiction” , a definition which I think pretty effectively covers what ARB aims to be. Let’s break that down into two broad bucket categories of what’s “realistic” and what’s “fiction”.
What’s Realistic?
I’ll go in list format for these two sections.
Flight Models, faithfully recreated to the best of the devs publicly available information
Planes, we do have real planes after all, there’s no physics defying planes
Real weapons- We have real weapons, missiles, bombs, historical loads, IRCCM which is better than DCS for example
Real Radars- Radars are modeled incredibly faithfully in war thunder.
Real engines- Real consumption, damage modeling extc
What’s Fiction?
Third person view, unfortunately our best scientists have yet to figure out extra sensory perception view
Flight Model Modifiers- While we have true recreations of flight models underlying our aircraft they are given 1.5x modifiers to their G pulling abilities
Mouse aim and instructors- we don’t have to fly with a joystick, which is honestly awesome because while I enjoy DCS occasionally, it’s a pain in the butt getting set up.
Spotting systems- Contrary to popular belief aircraft do not have big red name tags over them, nor do missiles come with big diamond alerts.
I.E. perfect situational awareness that has actually been the biggest change from the 4th to the 5th generation of fighter jets.
Maps, Missions and Team composition- In real life planes don’t typically take off so close to each other and just fly at each other with the only intent of shooting down other planes.
Early ARB
Now that we’ve established what’s realistic and what’s fiction it’s important to chat about why some of these were put into place. When ARB was first started it was balanced around low tier prop aircraft, mainly WW2. These planes were an order of magnitude slower, did not have any radar and could not pull very many G’s. The fictional modifiers placed on G’s made for much more dynamic and fun combat. The spotting system allowed you to find other players without literally just aimlessly flying around the map.
Current Top Tier ARB
Now we’ve arrived at the current top tier air battles, things that were initially put in place for prop tier ARB have not scaled well into jet air RB. These are: spotting, maps/missions and flight model modifiers.
Spotting and proposed changes
Spotting remains the chief issue in top RB, it basically nullifies the use of radar, having two person jets to help with SA and leads to overall poor gameplay. However the solution is not to just delete spotting. We need to have spotting tied to radar illumination of aircraft. We need Gaijn to implement ground radar stations and AWACS aircraft. We then need that spotting information to percolate to each plane individually based on different factors including pilot skill and number of pilots within the aircraft. Once an enemy team’s radar sites and AWACS have been destroyed they should be on their own. This change would also open up a vector to have 5th generation aircraft distinguish themselves by being able to have datalinks which actually do something compared to earlier 4th gen aircraft.
Maps/missions
I know this is often a topic of suggestion so I’ll keep this brief. We can do a few different things here, we could increase map size, decrease player count or increase fuel consumption below 10,000 feet artificially to help add some realism to trade offs. The mission changes should revolve around spotting, i.e. awacs, ground radar and maybe command and control.
Flight model modifiers
I think these should basically phase themselves out by the time you get to battle rating 10.0, they should be a gradual step down from where they’re needed to where they are not needed. I think that jets feel way too UFOey at top tier currently, I’m looking at you JAS-39C.
How’s all this related to multipathing?
I know I just talked about alot of not multipathing but I’ll try to link it all together here. Essentially what’s going on with multipathing is we have a ton of very advanced fighter jets taking off at unrealistically close ranges, who can pretty much always see who is where with 100% certainty, running at each other on full burner and lobbing missiles. If this was the case as in real life you’d probably see real air tactics involve ground hugging. By implementing changes related to spotting, mapsizes and or fuel consumption we can do a few things. Fuel consumption at low altitude will drive combat much higher- if you can’t run the entire way in on burner you will lose a fair bit of advantage, AWACs or Ground radars will illuminate targets at high and low altitudes making your approach almost always seen. High flying AWACs will drive combat higher as you will want the kinematic improvements altitude gives you. The reduction of flight model modifiers will make missiles impossible to kinetically defeat, which is the case in real life.
Final Thoughts
The final nails in the coffin for the ground hugging meta should be two fold. After the introduction of 120C-5 variant and equivalent we should see IOG take over in the last 25 meters of flight so that if you don’t turn hard at the last second the missile will fly into you. AIM-9X and equivalent missiles which are un-flarable should force you to re-thinking trying to ground hug as opponents will have kinematically superior 9X’s headed your way if you’re not at altitude. Hopefully the spotting and fuel consumption changes will give players a reason to fly higher and an actual distinction for higher tier jets. The advent of better IRCCM missiles will also force players to want to have kinematically superior missiles instead of trying to make themselves immune and abuse the spotting system.