- Yes - Lineup vehicles
- Yes - Preset vehicles
- No
Basically allowing players to deploy and control AA vehicles at strategic points around the map. This is to allow players to defend themselves from air regardless of vehicle. It also means more players can spawn effective ground vehicles without completely sacrificing air defence.
Being limited to strategic locations means pilots don’t have to deal with SPAA popping up everywhere around the map, rather incentivising avoiding those locations which should keep it more balanced.
These locations would likely include spawn locations and capture points as they are both the most targeted by aircraft and non-coincidentally areas with a lot of players, often without air defence capacity.
Blue circle shows cap area, red circle shows example area for AA to move freely.
I think limiting the selection of SPAA which are allowed to spawn is a good idea to prevent meta vehicle shenanigans and keep the function focused on the air. This could be either only allowing preselect vehicles or disabling some. Another way would be to set an extended area around the cap where AA can traverse, allowing freedom to move around but not move to other capture points.
On deployment, the vehicle would have a short construction time before allowing the player to switch vehicle. Switching would have a 5-10 second delay and sub 30 second cool down which could be reduced with the crew agility skill. The player’s main vehicle would continue to exist similarly to the nuke plane deployment. Killing the main vehicle would kick them out of the AA and back to the deployment screen. However killing the AA would return them to their vehicle.
If the mechanic uses the player’s own AA then it would function as a regular spawn of that AA - using backups to respawn/redeploy but allowing as many deployments as vehicles. If the mechanic uses preset vehicles then one deployment per life seems adequate. The player would be able to retrieve their AA with the same button however it should have a long deconstruction time to prevent exploitation (such as dodging slow missiles). The player can leave during this time but the AA can be destroyed.