I left this on another now locked NE thread so I’m gonna repost it here.
Here are my thoughts on NE and what could be done to make it one of the best game modes in Warthunder.
First I want to start by saying that NE is conceptually great and has really good bones. The idea of a longer semi-progressive game mode that makes full use of the games vast roster of aircraft types and capabilities is everything I wanted WT to be. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of Warthunder back when Realistic Battles were called Historical Battles.
Positives out of the way there are a few keys problems that I think Gaijin needs to address to make this a truly amazing game mode.
Quickly before I start my list though the honorable mention:
AA sucks in NE.
I’m going to bring it up a few times later in this post but I think many of us agree that AA in NE just makes the game mode unfun. It desperately needs to be reworked in a way that doesn’t make trying to do the most basic things a more frustrating task then playing RB in a strike jet. That being said I don’t want to get to much into detail on AA in this post because, in my opinion, the current state of AA and Gaijins unwillingness to do anything about it is a symptom of flaws in the modes design and not the problem in and of itself.
1: The Nuclear part of Nuclear escalation needs to go.
By how can you do that? Some of you may wonder. The nukes are the whole point you can’t remove them? I’m imagining some of you saying. Well hear me out. One of the big complaints I keep hearing over and over again regarding NE is how infuriatingly OP the AA is. It’s annoying to deal with, it limits options, and it’s generally unfun. The problem is that without the super OP AA the game would end incredibly quickly due to the nukes. If there were easier targets to go after that weren’t covered by the OP AA then players would farm these targets, unlock nukes incredibly quickly, and game modes would end very quickly. Nukes are also the reason rewards can feel rather lackluster in the NE. NE can be an incredibly lucrative game mode if you are regularly getting nukes, dropping them, and eliminating multiple targets. I’ve had an 80k SL game in NE because I got a lot of nukes off. If you don’t get a nuke though the rewards can feel like barely anything, especially if you get shot down by AA even once. When the respawn cost for a plane is 10k sl on the low end, it requires at least 4 targets to equal that 10k, and your very likely to get shot down by AA before with only 1-2 kills it’s very easy for players to rack up a bill in NE greater then any single defeat in air RB would.
So how does removing the nukes from “nuclear” escalation solve this. For the sake of this argument lets suggest that instead of using nukes players had to use their own aircraft with conventional or specialized ordinance to eliminate specific objective areas on the map. Lets also suggest an idea where AA still exists but only attacks aircraft within a certain range of the HVT’s. This incentivizes players to work their way up eliminating forward defenses to those HVT’s so that players can move in and then eliminate those targets. Now without nukes in the picture this game mode takes a bit longer, doesn’t feel like a race for the players, and AA doesn’t have to be nearly as oppressive everywhere on the map. The lower rewards are less of a problem because they are more easy to achieve so every player can have a fun, rewarding, and enjoyable experience. A design like this would also allow developers to tweak to push problem number to in a butter direction.
2: Warthunder is a PVP game not a PVE game.
What do I mean by this? I mean to say that at the end of the day most players playing warthunder would much rather die to an enemy player rather then the environment, notice how this comes back a bit to the AA problem. Because the most effective way to make money in NE is by dropping nukes players are more incentivized to get their own nukes and then go nuke racing for kills rather then play A2A, this also isn’t helped by A2A kills being rewarded far less then perhaps they should be. Combined with AA being so powerful that a fighter player might find their target dead before they get in range the reasons why someone might not want to play A2A further compound. In my opinion AA should be nerfed and incentives for players to run interception of ground pounders increased so that it falls on the players to both protect their own skies and push the objectives in order to win. A rework of high altitude SAMS so that they aren’t omni-present or only placed to protect certain targets or areas of the map would also open up different tactics for both attackers and defenders to use in how to approach the problem of achieving victory for their team. This type of design would be further encouraged in a game mode where victory isn’t simply the team that can race to nukes the fastest and then race the most nukes to the enemy team the fastest.
So as you can see the Nuclear part of NE has created a game mode that incentivizes the devs to create unfun environmental enemies while disincentivizing the pvp elements of the pvp game. NE could be an amazing game mode where each aircraft should be able to play a role in a fun and engaging way. In my opinion for NE to become that game mode it needs to replace the nukes with a variety of hvt objectives and, possibly, objective points that can be captured my friendly ground targets.
Thank you for attending my TED talk.
