Yes, because you are trying to separate two connected issues in context of mechanics and two connected issues in context of balance and argue against my position with each other separately, but it doesn’t work like that:
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Air AB / Air RB being the only standalone/not combined arms mode is there because being granted a ground vehicle when you have a plane as starting vehicle wouldn’t be a reward/an upgrade, so people wouldn’t play it and sit in the vehicle.
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But combined arms where you can choose ground or air from the start is not going to work properly because picking out just planes would be a winning strategy all the time, and AB SQB was a proof of that, so this is a proof as of right with current balance data air is indeed stronger than the ground, and because of that gaijin will not jump into this kind of approach right away because it would effectively kill the ground usage before the balance would have happened.
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Ground having air component is a choice of gaijin to have combined arms and because of that there are SPAAs and because there are spaas, they should be in the arcade as well so players grind them out as well, so they won’t have a friction point of not having SPAAs ready when jumping into RB, so effectively there needs to be a reason to use them in ground AB.
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CAS vs Tanks in ground AB is not balanced, and I agree with that, and it can be balanced, but this is a separate topic from the game mode issues mentioned above, meaning this can be handled separately regardless of decisions made for how spawning of aircraft works for the mode, but this doesn’t mean that mechanic of spawning doesn’t have any effect on balance - the current one definitely does.
Again connecting two separate issues together - it can be done that there will be a balance between CAS vs Tanks, getting rid of planes in GF AB IS NOT the only solution. In Titanfall the asymmetry between the pilot and titan is just a perception of player because actually titan is not really stronger than pilot, it’s just like exchanging light tank for a heavy tank as a reward. It’s a perceivable reward because you feel like you’re stronger and it’s cool to be a mech pilot, but titan has its drawbacks as well. It is possible to do the same thing with planes in combined battles.
Haven’t played those in awhile, but it doesn’t matter - you’re again focused on what is there now and not what can be. Imagine having similar air strike like artillery strike/scouting where you just mark a vehicle or position and there’s few CAS planes coming in quickly to attack those marked vehicles or heavy bombers to drop bombs around area. SPAA has just a brief moment to defend against those, similarly to how it is now. But in such situation there’s more room to balance it towards bombing being less effective if player is not piloting the plane on its own. So effectively it could be another attack similar to artillery strike that is not given to be effective, but can force enemy team to move from their fortified positions.
That is beside the point. SPAA being SPAA doesn’t mean it is supposed to be aimed 100% time at air units. In war those multi-gun turret SPAAGs were used against infantry as well, 88mm guns were used against tanks and bunkers as well. Being useful doesn’t mean they should always have planes to shoot at.
This is a similar situation as if you have heavy tanks with thick armour - you need enough penetration to get rid of them and lets say mostly the vehicles that have enough penetration are SPGs that are weakly armoured and open top and can be easily killed with MGs. So you’d want to get rid of heavy tanks because you don’t want to use SPGs and are forced to?
Again - the reason here is that they should be used - if you don’t farm those in AB and go to RB where they may be required, it’s a friction point for you. Any such friction point for moving towards the mode where gaijin wants players to be, probably needs to be handled, and seems like their decision is to put planes into the ground AB and virtually force us to use those SPAAs against planes through seasonal tasks and challenges.
With current CAS vs ground balance and mechanics - obviously yes. What’s your point here? My point about CAS being the counter is that some unique vehicles, would be hard to position between being completely useless and being top dogs of their tier, and having CAS and artillery adds more parameters to balancing. So rather than making their stats non-historical and having community argue about that, or pushing them forward to highest possible BR where they stop being OP but also make no sense, they can stay in BRs they fairly make sense. And I’m not talking about actual premiums and event vehicles that are OP because gaijin wants them to be, but the general tech tree stuff and principles of having CAS, IF it was balanced.
Spawn camping is a separate topic, and there is a valid solution to it, it’s just that CAS or artillery, or covers, or spawn protection, or mine fields ain’t it, but everyone thinks they know a great simple solution LOL.
They would, it’s just a game, and we already got rid of crashing planes into the ground and exploding vehicles. Kamikaze makes sense in naval and not in ground battles btw.
It’s not making a game too realistic, but representing human behaviors with mechanics that make specific balance between units work when mechanically they have their historical statistics. You either have to make fake balance between CAS and ground through inaccurate/non-historical stats so there is a balance, or you need to implement behaviors that did historically make those work correctly.
SPAAs principle wasn’t to shoot down every plane as it was with large amounts of heavy AAA flak guns. SPAAs principle was to deter plane from attacking a convoy, a formation of units, meaning the pilot wouldn’t risk dying by diving into the stream of bullets.
This fear factor isn’t going to work with players not caring about crashing their plane, so there are two choices here: make the spawn system like in RB/naval, so losing a plane is costly, but there will still be people that need to fulfill some tasks with planes, and so we will still have player doing those annoying kamikaze runs. OR make mechanics that force the human behavior on the pilot as pilot being a proxy for this feature like it is with all tanks’ features with their crews being the proxy.
RP isn’t the only reward in the game. Sealclubbers (me included LOL) are playing on lower tiers to complete seasonal tasks and event tasks. It’s not about research points in their fully spaded tree - it’s about the in-game score, either collecting it up to 40K like now, or killing specific amount of specific type of vehicle etc. Make it only count when someone calls for it and it’ll be significantly reduced because you won’t have team full of scouts.
Again - this is a separate topic and there’s endless ways to actually make it fair. Disabling bomb sights would be one thing, the rocket sights are already hard to use, but you can ram into the targets now, so it’s not a problem, or have tiny tims - if you’ll have your own plane as in naval, getting so close will be really risky. In arcade we could have indicator about aircraft coming your way, similarly to how artillery is indicated on-screen. But make it 100% that you get the indicator that aircraft is coming there and not like the bomb whistle that is not always there because of realism.
Survive long enough if they have interceptors on their tail. Right now it’s not really a skill, but RNG, but if it’s made as in naval spawn, there will be higher incentive to survive because most likely that’ll be the only time in the match you’ll be able to take the plane out, and there’ll be fighter planes sitting up in the sky waiting for bombers. It can be done as long as getting killed in a plane is not “free”.
Yeah, that’s right, but what’s your point? That this is the argument that the only solution here is to completely get rid of planes? This is the rubbish here…
