Game mode // Fitting Interceptors into Warthunder

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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I think Realistic Battles could benefit from some new game modes.

In War Thunder Air RB, gameplay has increasingly converged into everyone rushing into a small central area, resulting in constant dogfights. While that’s fun, it creates a structural problem: certain aircraft types are effectively sidelined, especially interceptors like the MiG-25 and MiG-31, AWACS / Airborne Radar Platforms and others.

This isn’t a balance issue with the aircraft themselves — it’s a consequence of the current gameplay format.

I’d like to hear the community’s thoughts on introducing an additional game mode with much larger maps (e.g. 500 × 500 km or more, depending on balance) and larger teams (potentially up to 64 players). Different spawn points for each type of aircraft roles and maybe balancing RP and SL for each role (e.g. CAS makes more RP/SL for destroying ground targets; Fighters - bonus for destroying air targets, so on). Victory conditions should be centered around the ground targets being destroyed and not the fighters getting downed.

Such a mode would create meaningful roles for aircraft classes that currently struggle to contribute (Jet Bombers, Interceptors and Attack aircraft).

Right now, Air RB heavily favors fighters and close-range air-to-air combat. That mode should absolutely stay !!! — it’s fun and popular.

But adding an alternative, large-scale mode could diversify gameplay and make more aircraft types genuinely viable, without taking anything away from existing modes.

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The thing is, for the lower BRs, interceptors have sort of a place in the game (even though they are mostly used as regular fighters) since they get a decent airspawn and there’s bombers they can hunt

But for higher BRs, there’s nothing similar to bombers and with how overpowered multipathing is, there is no incentive to fly high (apart from the top BRs but that’s a whole different can of worms)

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THIS is a decision, every single player choose. ARB has much more to offer, but the player base choose only this part.
ARB has many problems, sure, but another game mode isn’t the answer at all.

It only will divide the player base in two parts, and ARB become much more the abusive mode of GRB players than it ever was.

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If rushing the center is purely a player choice, why does it happen in almost every match, at every BR, on every map, across years?

When almost all players behave the same way across maps, BRs, and years, it’s not a choice—it’s an incentive outcome. ARB’s map size, match length, rewards, and spawn geometry mathematically force central convergence. Changing player behavior requires changing those incentives, not blaming players.

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True in some sense.
That’s what I’m talking about in many topics in this forum over the past.
In my opinion rewards are the main part, especially for GRB players.

But you don’t want to change anything, you want an additional game mode.

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because people tend to optimize their grind, rushing headfirst into a furball is much more sl/rp per minute than carefully setting up positions and playing to win

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And this is the decision they made. No one forces them. They have the choice.

Not in the long run.

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Nah 2025 prop avg skills don’t have the brain for this to be a decision. I’d rather call it natural instinct

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Related to this topic on interceptors, I wonder about the flight models of various heavy fighters.

Namely ones like the Mosquito family, the German Moskito (Ta-154A-1), various P-38s, the F-82E, the F7F-1, the Ki-83, the J5N1, the Whirlwinds, the Brigand, and the Hornets. Are they all really much terrible bricks in reality as the game portrays them?

Given that the bombers they were meant to intercept were even more bricky, this would normally not be a problem, but ingame they are routinely made to try killing fighters to do everything better than them.

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I agree with you.

Most people care about most RP/SL per minute. Especially when grinding for top tiers.

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This is a really good point.

We need game modes where these Interceptors (jets and props) have a proper play and I believe that currently we cannot play these planes on the roles they are meant to be played: Hunting Bombers.

Also, on that note: Bombers themselves are … not really useful. Maybe some prop bombers have a point, but even low BR the props are bad. Usually picked apart by fighters.

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The sheer irony is that the game already has the means to give them their roles.

You take an RB EC match, you populate the front line with lots of AI ground units not directly part of the battles you see periodically appear, you add a line of simple frontline airfields with little or no AAA defenses, and have say 100 AI controlled attackers and bombers buzzing around per team all along the front line to kill. Between those and the recon planes and bomber swarms that appear periodically in EC, purebred interceptors would be just fine - even if they may not be “ideal” for killing those, they would at least be able to do something.

This is a result of the “fighter mafia” types you occasionally see on this forum. People of that ilk look down on bombers (and also attackers) as “beneath them” in terms of “skill,” and therefore think that just because their jobs are different they don’t deserve to matter as much as fighters do.

Bombers once did have some level of purpose in matches via airfield destruction (an objective which is still occasionally present on some maps), but that objective being all-or-nothing was sloppy mode design, pitting bomber and fighter pilots on the same team against each other. If bombers won their objective, fighter efforts were irrelevant. If fighters won their objective, bomber efforts were irrelevant. Likewise with ground attack aircraft.

THAT, right there, stood out to me as the actual problem. Without ripping out and utterly replacing the currently zero-sum objective setup, attackers, bombers, and “bomber hunters” cannot improve their place in the game all that much, because the fighters doing their job will always render efforts by those other classes irrelevant unless you get someone climbing to space nobody can catch or a particularly egregious airfield camper.

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Mosquito family - primarily a fast bomber, also a specialized NIGHT fighter (1. directly against German night fighters, which intercepted British RAF night bombers; 2. night intruder operating near German airfields and tasked with destroying German bombers as they landed)

Ta-154 … unfinished development, decent prototype, which was to replace the night Me-110 and Ju-88 … hunter of British RAF night bombers…

P-38 is one of the best from your list, capable of day fighter operations, but also, beware, it can approach the performance of a single-hull fighter, but not in every situation…

F-82E … escort aircraft for B-29 and B-36 bombers, fighter primarily intended against Tu-4, when controlling the airspace probably day escort, otherwise definitely night … finally quite successful in ambush attacks on ground targets in the Korean War…

Ki-83+J5N1 … again night fighters, in various stages of development, the primary fighter of the B-29

Brigand … it is a torpedo and dive bomber, or an attacker as a fighter it was not even considered

Whirlwind … considered heavy fighter, but throughout its service it had weak engines, so it fulfilled more of a combat support role

Hornet … day fighter, which came late, if it had come earlier, it would have perfected the requirements that the RAF had for the Mosquito and could also have successfully competed with the first jet aircraft…

So it follows that the majority of the aircraft you mentioned were night machines…

Which in RB, where the markers will give you away, you cannot use 100% and you need to know what you can do with them in the game…

  • duels with single-seat fighters- NO
  • attack on the enemy’s aircraft from the so-called second wave - YES
  • support/destruction of ground units - YES
  • game in a simulator without markers - YES
  • if you know what you are doing with the aircraft, you can participate in air battles…

In the game there is usually a minimum of heavy bombers on the players’ side, there are no AI, night battles without markers are also nothing, so just choose an enemy machine that has similar or the same capabilities, or eliminate ground units…

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New modes are planning only as events. Players love to play standard modes with 1-3 points to capture.
Have not you watched devs video?

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They did say something about Aerial Warfare mode next year something…
So i already believe they have it in mind that the game is lacking in gameplay.

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Yeah, but is this “Aerial Warfare” mode going to be more of the same one-&-done, R&R game modes? And are they going to make it only for high tier jets?

Because Jets merely strain problems beyond their breaking points…which begin as low as 2.3 props.

People only “love” to play those modes because there are no better options currently.

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He didn’t say about one and done.
The question was about RB EC and he answered that RB EC didn’t really have teh participation they expected and that it won’t get implemented. Instead they are working in ^Aerial Warfare mode^ .
Starts 5.45 in the video and the mode it’s mention 6.10.
Now , that being said… i don’t mind if they have rotating events like …every week , like we used to have somewhere back in time.

That’s tanks bro…
And to be fair what modes you’d expect tanks to have? DM /point capture…
The problem is not the ^modes^ in tanks… the problem is the godawful maps . They need bigger maps.
They need less CAS , i won’t go no CAS i don’t want to have this talk in a talk about AIR (you see INTERCEPTORS in the title) , it needs spawn protections … It’s not the objective that’s bad. The gameplay is.

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Yes, I watched the Dev Q&A, and other than one event in particular, it only ever allowed specific historical vehicle lineups, causing people to dog-pile onto whichever side had more powerful planes. Thus of course it had limited popularity in that state.

If Naval RB EC is a rotating weekly event, there is no excuse for Air RB EC to not be the same.

Most planes ingame don’t get to really make use of all their different loadouts, even high tier jets. Because in current Air RB its a big dumb dogfight most times, while in Ground RB its “carry the biggest bomb you have until radar AA, then use only the biggest AGM you have.”

Air RB shows that merely making maps bigger doesn’t fix much. Not when all the relevant objectives are crammed in one small portion of the map.

And frankly, Ground’s CAS problem is partially linked to that CAS not being worth much in Air RB. People have nowhere else to use it and use it well, as the only time it does well is at very low ranks, and if players let it live. But even if it does well, the fighter deathmatch objective ensures that CAS (and also bombers) are functionally irrelevant unless the last enemies are hiding in low earth orbit with nobody able to catch them.

To save Air RB, Ground RB must solve its CAS problem. To save Ground RB, Air RB must solve its problem of Fighter Deathmatch smothering out all other objectives. To save Simulator EC (which is overrun by bombers and bots), Air RB must solve its CAS, Bomber, and Interceptor problems. They’re all linked to each other.

If CAS and Bombers actually mattered to Air RB whether fighters finished their objective or not, people would have less need to bring that CAS to Ground RB. If Bombers actually mattered to Air RB, people would have less reason to flood Sim EC with bombers. If Bomber-killer interceptors actually mattered to Air RB, well those would actually see real use at all beyond being headon idiot magnets or bad attackers.

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A PVP mode with bombers in like the SEED missions with B52s and interceptors have to intecpet them and things like F106 and F14 could get some use

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I see plenty of good points here.

What I see, and this is my point, is that the missions are too short; maps are small and all this creates an enviroment where people have little to no choise but to go AIR-to-AIR OR being called a “noob” or “match looser”.

I believe that we can propose a better game mode where we have B-52’s droping nukes. Nuke dropped: Match won. Nuke disabled? Match lost. This could be an escort kind of mission that many fighters are actually assigned to do in real life.

There could be many other real life scenarios that we can implement that would make all types of airplanes, in their own way, usable and reasonable.

Many new aircrafts could be added (just mentioned the B-52) and … premiums … something that the Snail likes offering.