Why? What does this achieve? The current ground forces already take too long to accomplish anything to the point when they do make progress it just gets flattened by a 5kt warhead.
I mean, in most cases the aircraft are even more expensive so idk
the least they could do is stop all convoys spawining with SPAA (like the fuel trucks driving around in the backline) to help mitigate the sheer volume of SHORADs.
They’re already poor anyway
I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve beyond spacing out the combat zone and adding EW, creating a safespace for fighters to have another ARB style furball.
16km is absolutely not a safe space. That’s well within the engagement distance of the SAMP/T & S300, and only gives 6km of room before you are being shot at by AA again.
Sure, if you’ve got a team that has ARH missiles that can kill them from their airfields. Half the teams I play on either do not have those, or simply do not use them.
What? Reducing backline SHORADs would just make it even easier to get to enemy airfields once you break through the frontline…
The current ground forces take too long to accomplish anything because nobody is really killing convoys because they’re getting beamed by AA from depots that are far too close whilst also having to defend from the AA on the convoys.
S-300 can be defeated by a few seconds of notching (it’s a SARH missile that can’t relock like a 27ER) and the SAMP/T can be kinematically defeated by doing anything except flying at the missile. The only value they provide is filtering ppl who are new to NE, turning your RWR/MAW into obnoxious noise and making it so a nuke carrier can’t just fly at 9km and nuke your AF for free.
Which never happens and backline bases have AA anyway.
Convoys can breakthrough without CAS, ground pounding is also the easiest method of boosting Score/SP/Escalation Level so nukes will start flying regardless. Just because you can’t ground strike doesn’t mean nobody is doing it.
Until the AAA and SAMs all get lobotomized, I have little to no interest in bothering to play the BR of jets even able to queue for Nuclear Escalation. Playing the original April Fools version told me everything I needed to know. It’s a mode that looks like it wants to be more than Dumb Fucking Deathmatch, but the AAA and SAMs are so overtuned that it requires saturation bombardments to kill them. Which means the vast majority of weapons on modern multirole jets are still useless as the weapons all get shot down.
But I broadly agree upon reading the opening post that the map is too damn small. PvP should NOT be the point of a mode like that, but rather an occasional afterthought. The actual point of most aerial warfare is to blow stuff up on the ground. But the AAA and SAMs effortlessly intercepting everything even without radars deployed means you frequently can’t do jack shit to the ground units under their envelope. Which leaves playing just a worse Team Deathmatch with infinite respawns until one side just gives up.
I recently decided to give this game mode a try, and it’s great, but Gaijin really needs to work on AA—it can shoot down almost all the gliding bombs we send at it, and even light armored vehicles can hit us from a distance of 3–4 kilometers. The anti-air defense is a bit too strong, especially at the highest tiers.
Another issue is being matched into battles that are almost over. Yes, yesterday matchmaking placed me three times in battles where both teams had around ~400–800 points. Great—five minutes of play and a loss (I ended up on the losing team twice) :)
Another issue is the number of maps—it would be nice to have at least three available today; we only have one… That’s definitely not enough.
In short, this mode is awesome, and Snail should focus all its development efforts on it—it feels like a breath of fresh air.
Playing Nuclear Escalation would be so much more bearable, if Units that have been spotted once would just remain spotted, even if it’s on a “Last seen at…” Basis. it’s really annoying that these “short” Range SPAAs and SAMs get spotted only after they already launched two Missiles at you, while operating on Frequencies not covered by some RWR Systems
I love this game mode and I play ARB solely for the purpose of unlocking aircraft and modules to play in NE. I used to seldom play any air modes until this came along.
Personally I think a major part of the issue with the game mode are how the air defenses are too tightly overlapping. Everyone hugs the deck because of the long range SAMs constantly saturating the area and how quickly (and without warning) the SHORADs will engage. The detection and engagement ranges of the SHORADs could easily be reduced and the long range SAMs moved further back. My wish is there was a larger no-man’s zone both laterally and vertically where PvP contests the airspace the most.
I mostly play 10.0-11.3 BRs and the lopsidedness between red and blue is pretty apparent. To kill a long range redfor SAM, you need to kill 3 targets, and if you kill a BUK TEL, you’ve reduced its effectiveness by 50%. Conversely, a bluefor SAM site has THREE independent track radars and a search radar that needs killing. Compounding the issue is the limited fire and forget munitions that redfor (soviet) aircraft carry (not to mention the AV-8B NA is at 11.3 with flippin JSOWs).
If I want to make lions, I go play bluefor and enjoy the ezmode. If I want a challenge, I play Soviet. I would love to see the BRs rebalanced a little to account for this, or go back to BR bracketing.
Absolutely. That’s my biggest gripe with it - not the quantity, but just how many are overlapping.
I liked bracketing whenever I wasn’t using 14.0s. The overlap resulted in 50% of my games in the F-15E getting uptiered, which was a huge pain when trying to play with friends who wanted to use 13.7s.
Man. What the fuck. How is anyone able to reasonably attack enemy targets that are literally driving past friendlies while staying a safe enough distance away to not get shot down???
This is absolutely ridiculous and is exactly what I mean by the distances need to be increased.
Flying another 4-8km is not going to kill you regardless. The A-10 similarly does not operate in threat environments that are contested to the degree that NE is. It is an edge case.
