It’s not separate, buffing bomber durability to absurd levels just made fundamental problems with bombers’ implementation more apparent than ever. It really doesn’t matter how durable they are when they have no purpose in the game, you have to fix the latter before attempting to address the former.
For the last few years, bombers were so easy to kill you could pretend they were not in the lobby, now we are back to the old meta where they make air RB insufferable to play… thanks gaijin
I don’t get this negative attitude towards Air Arcade regarding lack of tactical gameplay, when in this mode it’s always been possible (depending on the map type, of course) to achieve victory by any combination of bombing bases, destroying ground targets, decimating the enemy team and (if applicable) capturing airfields.
This variety of feasible approaches to a mission, the potential need to switch several times between them during a battle, and the viability of bombers and attackers in this mode should be something Air Arcade gets praised for in comparison to the glorified Team Deathmatch that Air RB seems to have become.
As an aside, changes regarding bomber gameplay over the years have not just been driven by the Air RB community, see the infamous “Yer-2 rush” tactic in Arcade and Gaijin’s reaction to it.
Even as this looks like largely off-topic: your reply showed me that i was not precise enough with my wording which led you to the assumption that i would have a dismissive attitude towards Air Arcade.
This might help:
From my pov tactical & strategic game play is centered around making informed decisions based on elements of surprise and diversion whilst working around similar attempts of the enemy team to do the same.
The setup of Air AB with permanent markers kills this approach entirely as everybody able to look around can immediately make informed decisions. Even as the Air RB markers (below radar equipped BRs) allow at close ranges a similar awareness, part of tactical / strategic game play the initial positioning centers around avoiding this awareness.
Whilst at least at prop BRs the game impact of non PvP designed or optimized aircraft in Air AB is widely recognized, the mode is still a classic shooter with more or less infinite spawns whilst the game play follows classic shooter logic - including a plain attrition approach like spawn camping.
Air RB still allows to use tactical and strategic game play - either by beheading the enemy team by killing their best player/aircraft combo or sneak attacks very late game with decisive PvP or PvE action even playing totally outnumbered - if you are are to play around orders or the red square.
That’s why i wrote partially displayed as mission goal / tickets. Whilst i do agree that Air AB seems like Air SB way more viable for strike aircraft or bombers - the main difference to Air RB is from my pov that the setup of Air AB being way more engagement optimized as a shooter.
Therefore my criticism:
Is based on gaijin’s successful attempt to align the Air RB game play objectives of an Arcade shooter (“kill em all”) with the main difference of being a single spawn mode with much better SL/RP rewards.
If you look at old and very old Air RB map layouts of Norway or Operation Iskra (see this post) Air RB had options for all plane classes to have a significant game impact even 1 vs 8 (see here, 2nd part of the post) - and Norway still offers these options but almost nobody is able or willing to use tactic or strategy.
The reference to low skill grinding tool is aimed at the rather low efforts to kill a respawning base (at least in the initial run) whilst granting 2-3 times of the RP compared to a player kill - whilst the base kill in itself has little to zero impact regarding the outcome of a match.
Therefore this remarks is basically correct:
…but fails to distinguish between fighting with full transparency allowing you a full risk assessment (who is where flying what with which treat level) with permanent markers like in Air AB - or assessing risks based on unknown variables like with limited marker ranges and severely reduced awareness.
That means that a bomber or strike aircraft being decisive in Air AB is a result of an informed decision by the enemy team allowing them to do this - whilst the same aircraft trying to perform the same became preferred targets in Air RB due to their inability to defend themselves.
Hope this clarifies my point of view - i see Air AB not as inferior mode.
Have a good one!
The issue with air ab is, that the objectives (NPC convoys) are quite often almost under the enemy airspawn. Its a bit meh. The frontline maps are ok. The advantage of air AB is the pace of the game. Maps are small…alot respawns mean target rich enviroment. Ammunition respawns as well. So you can rack up alot more kills than in RB. Means its number one choice for tasks and event missions. Its much quicker to do kill tasks in AB than RB.
Just had a fire spread from the inner engine nacelle of my b52… to the outer undamaged nacelle, but not the wing joining the two (???)
They are aware of the issues and working on fixing them.
Meanwhile wings remain ridiculously resistant to multiple R4M or 50mm HE impacts.
They are “tweaking” things, while there are problems in the very basic assumptions, like “bomber wings are semi-indestructible”, and the only reason bomber tails are destructible is because paper tail syndrome affects every plane in game and even boosting tail HP 80 times doesn’t help enough, lol.
This is the list of planes which received “bombers” DM (from update changelog):
What other aircraft can get it in the future? All twin-engine planes? Single engine bombers/attackers?
From russian forum, translated:
So basically by virtue of having more than 1 engine plane’s module HP goes up 100+ times. Makes perfect sense.
I find it hilarious that Gaijin first makes everything made of paper, than turns aircraft selectively into absolute tanks.
Not 100 times, they stated that there are many factors to that. Engines count, material type, size…
Doesn’t the airframe need to be reinforced to fit more engines?
Yes and no. Single engine aircraft are made plenty strong. Things like F-82 do not have some kind of magical reinforced wings. Is Potez or Pe-3 a stronger airframe than P-47?
Bigger aircraft should be stronger and more resistant to lower calibrt weapons.
So f.e. Spitfire should get some serious damage from 2 20mm M-geschoss to a wing. A 50% bigger plane should f.e. require 4, as the durability vs explosives is not linear.
Gaijin seems to not be able to just give shells a damage modifier based off target module, so f.e. Soviet FI-T deals damage in a fairly consistent way (but loses power while running out of kinetic energy) while M-geschoss has certain threshhold where it works very good and then it starts dropping off, getting relatively ineffective vs bigger compartments, like f.e. bomber (or f.e. P-61) fuselage and wings, while retaining effectiveness vs ailerons, rudder and elevator to some degree.
Etc. Etc
The Pe-3’s wing structure actually needs to be substantially more robust to support not only its own weight, but also the engine blocks and wing fuel tanks (much larger moment arm) on top of handling its design G-loads during maneuvers.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean higher damage tolerance, which mostly comes down to structural redundancy.
P-47 can support 1000lbs bomb under each wing, on top of being a goddamn fighter able to maneuver at high speed and at high G-s, that Pe-2 will most likely not be able to pull anyway.
Also, that’s beside the point, as anything PAST the engine (most of the wing) has no reason to be stronger anyway.
And even if Pe-2 wing is indeed stronger than P-47, it’s basically related to aircraft weight and wing area. I have no issue with Pe-2 dying f.e
in 8 shells as opposed to P-47’s six.
By that logic, Zeros should be much more difficult to kill instead of flying tinderboxes
Well, Zeros should burn and they have no armor, but wings should be quite strong due to superior aluminium alloys. But not super strong, Zeros were light and could not turn well at high speed, so the load on the wings was not that great.
Pulling 13Gs at 670 IAS is just Gaijin being Gaijin.
Structural strength is not a simple function of “role” or “number of engines”.
It is set by the specific load cases the aircraft was required to meet: design speed and dynamic pressure, positive and negative G limits (including dive pull-outs), mass distribution, the moment arms (leverage) of engines and fuel tanks, external payloads, and the safety factors applied by the designers.
A side note looking at Pe-2 vs P-47 exchange:
This comparison demonstrates the severe weakness of gaijin’s approach:
Damage tolerance depends more on redundancy, spar and skin arrangement, and which structural paths and parts are critical when hit.
Ranking airframes by role or by engine count therefore misses the actual engineering drivers.
Gaijin’s current approach (distinct configurations mainly by engine count, size and “bomber or derived from bomber”) is basically the $1 shop solution for a $1,000 challenge.
Even acknowledging that this is technically an improvement over the old paper-airframe model, it remains an approximation that cannot correctly represent the differences between airframes that were designed to very different load cases.
It boils down that gaijin’s announcement to extend this approach to other twin engine aircraft makes it even worse as (even when they have the same roles in wt) the underlying design requirements lead to different load factors.
Also extending this to twin engined aircraft while keeping single engined aircraft in its current state is just ridiculous. And all of that is done while keeping the absolute disregard towards shell design, filler type, chemical and kinetic energy, which results in Shvak hitting harder than Hispano and 30mm incendiary being unable to “knock out” pilot or tank crewman, on top of dealing next to 0 damage to the airframe.
Gaijin creates real sh*tter and decided that instead of fixing it, they’ll just adjust entire game to stop HMGs hitting like cannons and 20mm cannons nuking aircraft.
But especially hilarious is the fact, that 20mm with 6g of TNY and 30mm with 90g of TNT are super close to each other. Which results in bombers shrugging off 100+ 30mm hits. Because under real shatter 30mm does maybe 50% more damage. So if bomber wing can tank 300 20mm shells, it will happily tank 200 30mm shells.
So instead of, you know, adjusting damage so 30mm just hits harder in general and size of bursting charge makes a difference, they are creating some arbitrary modifiers for larger calibers to be useful, as fixing real sh*tter would be Gaijing admitting to failure, and as we all know, Gaijin is ALWAYS right.
Too bad this game aint made to be real now isnt it?
If you want to play a simulator just go play Arma and complain there