Is this something Gaijin have added? I’ve noticed that when I line up on a bomber and it shoots me down before I even get a chance to fire (i.e. lethal bot gunners) my aircraft doesn’t need repairing.
Example.
I was in an A26 diving from above on a P8. The guy was a level 47. As I got to about 0.5 miles and ready to fire, his gunners sliced both my wings off at once and i never hit him once. I had no spare free repairs but after the battle the aircraft wasn’t damaged. This has happened plenty of times (all when being shot down by a bomber gunner). It has never happened when being shot down by a fighter (are there such things as bot fighters floating around?).
Is this some recompense against cheaters? Do they have an algorithm that can work out whether the other guy is cheating and remove the kill from him? Has this happened to anyone else? When it happens it always seems to happen when you take catastrophic instant hits from a bomber gunner. It happens in any tier, although I frequent II/III mostly.
If you were at 0.5 miles or about 800 metres in ARB, then it was not the AI gunner, it was the player shooting. The AI gunners in ARB dont start firing until 210 metres
(this is with max crew and expert)
Do you have premium time? If so this is probably repair insurance thing at work
Nope. No premium account or anything. Interesting in watching the replay that both my wings fell off at the same time, and no I wasn’t “speeding”. I would say that obviously if you are using a bot most things are possible (such as pilot snipes from a mile away with 7.62mm). Why would a bot obey max gunner firing range being 0.2km?
Doesn’t make sense! We don’t really know what kind of cheating can do on, do we?
Are you saying that gunner bots don’t exist? I’ve been here long enough to suggest that they do, and that this kind of behaviour is what it looks like.
I doubt if Gaijin will confirm it if I am right, but you think I’d be able to tell the difference by now. If you get shot down and you have auto repair off and no free spare aircraft but get given one then something is amiss…
Its also interesting that I’ve noted these players are usually ranked below level 50, and don’t seem to have been playing long.
BTW I play joystick sometimes but mostly joypad (which yes, I know is worst of all).
Bombers are very, very impotent against mouse RB players. The issues you faced (getting shot out of the sky at 0.5km) doesn’t come up when most players start shooting at ~1km or even 1.5 km out (unless cursed by horrible shell ballistics).
They’re also very random. They have significant spread to their shots and the bullets rarely go exactly where you aim. Given the exact same initial conditions and input, that bullet can have hit your pilot, went into the engine, went into radiators on your wing, hit your vertical stabilizer, hit your wingtip.
I do want to note though -
What were your relative speeds and approach like? With full-real controls, safest way to take down an attentive bomber is go for a head-on and then dive out keeping your speed as high as possible and never go behind them while your relative speeds are similar.
With vertical targetting at 600 meters convergence and nose guns, I found this approach decently consistent:
He had just turned and was slow. I had the big 37mm and the mgs in the nose.
I find it very hard to believe (as joseph was implying above) that he thinks bots cannot go outside manual gunner limitations! I am a software engineer myself. I KNOW that almost anything is possible.
Bombers can have A.I gunners. A.I gunners only fire under ~210 meters.
Bombers can also “swap seats” to the bombardier and the gunner positions. When in the gunner position, they can point the mouse at you, click and the gunners will do their best to put bullets where they pointed the mouse at. This can occur at any range (obviously limited by ballistics, bullet de-render distance and dispersion).
It’s so useless. What’s the point of wasting exp points on this? at 200m the plane already has its nose shoved up the ass of the bomber… no need to guess already know the reason being fighters want to pick low-hanging fruits and cry when they get shot down by AI gunners. I rather they just give the AI gunners their firing range that is useful, fighters should fight other fighters, and we shouldn’t have to reward cowards.
Yep, there was definetly an issue with AI gunnesr being way too strong before this nerf, but there was 2 choices to balance AI gunners.
reduce the range
reduce the accuracy
Option 2 would have required fine tuning, but would have actually been far more balanced. but takes far more effort and so they went for the easy option that might as well ahve removed ai gunners entirely
Cheats with the gunners. Bots in other words. There is just definately something going on. I would expect to be hit quite quickly with something like the 20mms in a pe8 with someone half competent playing it, but level 9s? level 30s? As a joysticker/padder with a lot of weekly play it took me 3 years to reach level 100. It took my brother who is a mouse aimer just 1.
What level you are does tend to indicate how long youve been playing somewhat but, yes i know some will upgrade their planes with GEs.
Morvran - my fully aced gunners never want to seem to fire themselves…
It was so long ago that I barely remember what it was like, but I do remember them having a reasonably good chance of sniping.
Basing it on more recent examples of AI controlled AA, such as in naval or ASB convoys. I do reckon that just leaving them be with a reasonable range (say 800m) is likely to be problematic. Gaijin has 2 settings for AI control AA. Guaranteed hit or Guranteed miss and I have yet to see evidence that they can do anything in between.
I do agree that bombers in general though have become incredibly weak and need some pretty major buffs. First and foremost should be a damage model overhaul
I’ve used cdk they do have the range and accuracy setting for AI gunners, hadn’t experimented it enough but I do think the accuracy is possibly weapon spread, just set a proper weapon spread value to punish ass sniffers who fly straight and set the AI active firing range to 800m that will be good enough, because a semi-competent fighter could still manage to hit bombers at 1km. Or just remove the AI crew skill as it is currently more useless than keen vision lol
