It’s been a while since I’ve commented on the subject of CAS because I’m getting on quite well with it.
I would just like to throw into the room that I personally feel “compelled” to do CAP if I want to win.
The ignorance of many towards enemy aircraft is now enormous.
I’ve played a whopping 50 battles today. Every second kill was an aeroplane. 138 ground vehicles and 75 aeroplanes. At this point I just want to shout my only wish into the room:
TANK ONLY MODE! I NEED A BREAK!
Planes need to lose markers and ground needs more markers for air, would also go a long way.
No reason why a plane should be notified of a tank’s location from 5km away because they got hit by an MG, a mechanic that doesn’t make sense on the ground either and doesn’t fit a ‘realistic’ mode.
Planes also should not be able to see zones being captured, it’s like moths to a flame and impossible to cap with CAS around.
Being able to scout air needs to be a thing.
It’s way too difficult to spot things.
What? How are you supposed to spot this?
And drones appearing as planes is also weird.
And nerfing thermals sights without explanation
Literally worse now to use them
To be fair
That is a biplane
I’m not sure if that explains the stealth tech tho.
IKEA power™
A few CAS nerfs.
Cas spawn on runways. This limits revenge bombing and easy cap bombing by delaying their initial response to the battlefield.
Add more Inclement weather that affects flight characteristics and visibility. Have a few matches where they need to rely on ground spotting more. There are often stories where battles have been delayed or executed on days due to weather affecting air support, not every day in war is a bright and sunny day.
Do something about bombing spawn, like make bombs not fuse in the bomb zone. You want a guaranteed kill? just drop a big bomb in the enemy spawn and you are likely get a few kills. I’m guilty of this as well.
Increase the SP cost of laser guided bombs. I keep seeing top tier matches end with one A-4E Early dropping paveway from low orbit.
And then a few AA buffs.
Make AA more rewarding to play (Increase plane kill rewards) and give them more to do like scouting
Fill in tech tree gaps so there is more AA options to play.
Lower BR of a few non radar autocannon AA but remove the AP belts or something. Feels like AA is balanced of how well they kill other tanks and not how well they performs at their roll.
Add a resupply spot that is outside of spawn but not a cap point for AA (And other tanks). This could just be for maps that are single point or very large maps. AA thats not good at killing tanks going to a cap point seems like a death sentence.
Some good ideas there, I think one other big issue with CAS is also the sheer number of planes up at once. Anyone that has played SPAAs at any rank is familiar with shooting at one plane and having several others strafe you, the stream of tracer from your guns is a giant “FREE KILL” sign to every other plane in the sky.
Here are some Ideas I had to deal with both the spamming of planes and the sometimes long periods of inaction when playing SPAAs when the enemy team isn’t spawning planes (and yes some of these are better then others and many of them could be combined):
A) Simply limit the number of planes that each team can have in the air at any one time. If you die in a plane you get a few minutes of CD (only for pulling planes obviously) to give some others a chance to fly for a bit and prevent people hogging the air slots.
B) Implement something similar to GAB, where a battle triggers and X amount of people can pull a plane in their line up every few mins. There are a few options here, you could just let the “event” go until everyone is shot down or have a timer where they RTB at the end and avoid a repair. (this would have to be reworked significantly from the arcade model, from letting players use their own planes and load outs to how the point system to determine what load outs they could pull)
C) Have a dedicated SPAA slot that that players can switch to to control their SPAAs, when they switch the SPAA would spawn in at a dedicated SPAA site, preferably safe from ground fire, to engage enemy air threats. once they switch back to their main tank, or the CAS takes them out, the SPAA would go on a CD while its repaired and rearmed. This could be implemented in tandem with B where a number of players could switch to SPAA to engage the air battle. (something like this was used in the Strumtiger event I believe)
D) Dedicate (X) amount of slots per game to dedicated air, players in those slots can play air and only air, nobody else can pull it (maybe both air and ground players can pull helicopters?) Those players will start out with only the base plane and have to earn points to pull air to ground weapons, much like how Naval EC starts with destroyers and works up to heavier ships. (This would also eliminate revenge bombing, and the “Air support” modification in light tanks could be rework to make it a requirement for planes to see a spotted target)
That would help a lot, but if I could suggest a more protected rearm area behind the spawn, some of the more modern SPAAs have the massive radar unit that pokes up out of the cover in most spawns that just begs for a HE shell, not to mention that the spawn it the first place that plane/ helies check for SPAAs, but its better to return there to reload than try to drive a bus across the battlefield. Also increasing the rearm speed of SPAAs (at least the ones that dont moonlight as TDs) and letting Spaas like the Ozelot re-arm a spent missile while stationary (Like replenishing an auto loader, but obviously as it would require the crew to exit the vehicle it would need to stay stationary) would also help massively… also proper Grid sights and fire control for SPAAs… here’s a WW2 training film for SPAA gunners that shows (SOME) what the current system is demanding of players trying to hit a plane need to do blind:
What is actually wrong with CAS ? Is it not doing what its intended to do ? Trouble is it seems the devs are constantly nerfing ,often in secret and still the forum mob scream for more nerfing and the game just loses its purpose.At some point gaijin have to say " no,we are happy how it is,play or dont"
LOL, before I answer that… name ONE time CAS was (as you claim) nerfed! last I checked they buffed the hell outta it by allowing air to ground guided munitions to fired even easier ( it was already possible) with out using the actual sight.
Its hard to say because so much is done in secret that it leads to so much paranoia its hard to tell if something has changed or not.Certainly auto air crews have been reduced in effectiveness and it seems SP has been raised in many cases. Question when do we say we have arrived at our destination? Is Warthunder currently fit to play or not?
when the altitude GBU’s guide was changed, i’ll consider that a nerf cause its easier to overshoot compared to before the change
CAS IS in a nerfed state currently. And that’s not mentioning the fact we should have aircraft with very good A2G weapons by now like Brimstone but don’t only because of Ground. Despite the fact they’d be great for air modes
Now, as clearly demonstrated in my long comment above. I recognise that the current balance isnt tenable. But CAS is in a far more nerfed state than it could be and some of those nerfs are actually pretty bad.
The issue with “CAS” and im going to use that term very loosely. Is that at some BRs, on some maps, in some nation vs nation match-ups. CAS can be very very OP.
A well played CAS, under ideal conditions can essentially be untouchable by SPAA and can put down a constant stream of fire that a lot vehicles may not be able to defend against. For example:
I queued in my 11.3 line-up and got a full downtier (10.3-11.3) on the big Tunisia map. I eventually spawned in the Tornado Gr1 and spent 10-15 minutes firing PGMs cross map and the 10.3 SPAAs the enemy team had were doing nothing. Now a single CAP would have killed me with ease. But none decided to spawn a CAP.
(CAP SP costs is an entirely seperate issue and I think CAP shouldnt cost more than maybe 150-200 SP)
The challenge is balancing CAS that is fair without nuking it. The biggest change should be a total ground up overhaul of how SP costs are calculated for aircraft. Which would both simutaneously buff and nerf CAS.
But first they need to add SPAA to fill all the holes, generally buff/refine SPAA and especially at top tier. Decompress and add better SPAA. I think until thats actually done. “CAS Nerfs” are rather tricky to get right, for example for me playing Britain. I have no SPAA between 5.3 and 8.3 So the Skink or Bosvark gets used extensively throughout that BR. A 5.3 Skink SHOULD be bad vs a 7.7 CAS jet. But despite the fact that Britains only SPAA for that BR is a 5.3 doesnt mean that 7.7 CAS should be nerfed…
I read that and see the issue but you nail the real issue and that is not the Tornado but the fact nobody bothered to spawn cap so why nerf CAS if that is the case? Its a human vs human game with every permutation that brings so why keep nerfing and fixing the program when its the players that are the issue?
Yeah… Its a… tocuhy subject that. But in fairness. SPAA costs 70 SP and pure A2A jet (with stock belts, air belts often add a load of SP) is often in the region of 550 SP.
I routinely fly the Sea Harrier FRS1e as CAP at 10.3 and do a good job at maintaining air superiority (at least when im not competing with 11.3 CAS/CAP). But it does sting that I have to spend basically ALL my SP to spawn in to do that role and there isnt necessarily any guarantees that the enemy team is gunna spawn in any aircraft for me to shoot down. I had a match the other day where I got a nearly immediate triple kill vs enemy CAS and then immediately followed it up with a match where I was ciricling the airspace looking for trade for about 10 minutes.
So in that regard. Something needs to be better. Pure CAP aircraft, like the Sea Harrier (running no rocket pods or bombs) should have an SP cost of maybe only 150-200 SP at most. A lot more people would run CAP under those conditions I think.
I want them to drop the spawn cost of ALL aircraft down to like 200 SP, but have loadouts cost significantly more SP to compensate. So in the end, something with bombs costs exactly the same as it does now. Lower BRs where guns can be used effectively as CAS, maybe it should be higher, but often you need ground belts to be effective for that, so just maintaining high ground belt SP cost would mitigate that too a fair degree
Additionally. Some dont want to play aircraft. So may not have a good CAP (or maybe even CAS) aircraft to spawn in. So they could also do with adding the NRB fighter/bomber spawn option so that everyone is on an equal footing on having something they could actually spawn in
You didn’t really witness what CAS used to be in 2016 when British tanks were introduced where single RP-3 could land just near your tank and blow it up. No not even hitting it. Just landing near it. Given how many rockets most planes could carry, single plane was able to wipe entire teams.
After that all rockets were nerfed into the ground requiring direct hit which also translated into AirRB.
Helicopters used to be able to spawn at the start of match with guided missiles. Ka-50 spam we see today is nothing compared to swarms of them back then.
??? what do you mean? SP can significantly be reduced with just 6 kill assists and can spam the same jets multiple times after each death. Fighter jet has their own set of SP and Ground Striker role as well.
In some games capturing a cap is enough to spawn a plane and in other games its not.
I know
