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
Yeah, AI AA though seems to problematic in all gamemodes (naval AA in NRB and convoy SPAA in ASB for example) so they really need to come with a good way of balancing it overall. And yeah I agree. that entire skill tree is rather useless, even with aircraft with turrets. Seems really stupid to still have that line in aircraft with none. Shame crew skills arent aircraft specific
Single crew, it does something entirely different, not sure what
2 seater with a RIO/navigator buffs them (maybe radar buffs?)
multi-crew/Turreted - buffs the gunner
And against a bomber, even stick & throttle can land hits from nearly a kilometer out. They’re wide, they’re big, they’re fat and most importantly: slow. Hardest part is estimating range because some gunsights don’t follow real-life scale and you also don’t know what you’re shooting most of the time either - is your revi 2 marks filled by the wing because it’s 600 meters away in a small bomber or 2 marks filled by the wing because it’s 1000 meters away in a big bomber (there’s also, depending on gun, added challenge in keeping nose steady long enough for enough shots to land. Easily said with hispanos, less so with peashooters).
This is just not true at all (more like 70%). There are plenty of console players not using mouse. And yes, even a good few players using joysticks in rb too. Remember - Play Station/Xbox players. A pad is perfectly capable. It’s just not, well, as accurate as a mouse.
Im talking bomber gunners vs fighters 1km out. I managed to hit a bomber in the ki-109 with a lucky aimed shot.
I guess what I’m asking is that
has anyone noticed what I have said happen to them?
do they think bots are at work here?
what was all the whoha a while back when those 1000s of Chinese players were banned? Wasn’t that about using cheating mods (bots etc?). Some of it must have been for using bot gunners.
controllers are good enough - if you’re not up against an “expert” mouse aimer. He can utilize all the (unfair IMO) that a mouse gives such as stutterless aiming. If you are careful and dont go steaming in you should be ok.
