If you could, how would you re-balance CAS in Ground Battles?

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
1760

This was done pretty nicely in some other games. You can’t take certain vehicle types if someone is already using them, which really stops spamming from happening.
Outside of that, disabling air spawn for aircraft and making it harder to spawn a fully kitted out CAS (not only a few assists/kills) would be decent options as well.

Fixing maps that have a fish-bowl style in which ground area is locked in a relatively small and flat area, while surrounding areas are literally filled with hills makes it extremely hard to counter a semi-competent helicopter player from the ground, as they can instantly dip behind solid cover.

1761

Will just increase the rate at which people quit matches early

Also, CAP is the best and for some nations, the only answer to dealing with CAS.

1 Like
1762

I think the fastest fix is to point out that it’s not broken….

No need to limit the number of aircraft in a match

1763

Well then a player who has lost all his ground vehicles, but has plenty of spawnpoints to spawn in an aircraft should be excluded from helping his team and forced to spectate, just because two other players happened to be in the air already?

No thank you. Aircraft in Ground RB are already the most restricted class of them all.
Balance and a limit of airborne threats is achieved by giving them spawn costs that are up to 10x that of a ground vehicle already.

5 Likes
1764

Pantsir feast.
Stinger rain.

1765

Arbitrarily restricting players’ freedom of choice by denying them their rightful access to their vehicles is an absurd proposal.

If you have gathered the necessary SP to spawn a vehicle, you have the absolute right to use that vehicle…what type it is does not matter.

As others have noted, trying this idea of restricting players’ access to aircraft would:

  • result in more ODLing (seen previously in similarly configured events, like Chronicles)
  • Arbitrary hard limits on vehicle quantities/access would encourage rushing to aircraft (Cap-N-Fly is mostly mythical…but hard limits would incentivize this)

The notion of depriving players of their opportunity to choose their vehicles is inconsistent with WT values and would not stand…players would go ape.

Implementing Fighters First is a far more sensible way of achieving the same effect…more protection for GFs. (FF also expands players’ freedom of choice too…it only enhances the mode.)

1 Like
1766

To start off with: RB GFs is the combined mode, shared between air and ground units. The vehicles’ stakes in the mode are 50%/50%, although RB GFs’ framing skews the mode in favor of GFs (due to capture points, initial spawn options and SP costs).

Having more aircraft than tanks on a team in GFs is a mixture/team coordination matter…it is too situational and tied to player choice for Gaijin to act on without infringing on players’ freedoms. If you’re concerned/upset about team mixture, try raising the issue in team chat…communication and rewards are what steer the outcomes with that.

As for that last bit about capture points…your take is quite mistaken. Outside Battle, a team that lacks an advantage or dominance over the relevant capture point(s) is unlikely to succeed. (For its part, Battle is chaotic and the importance of capture points there varies widely.)

While I won’t bother touching on the vulnerably capricious top tier BRs’ realities (where FOTM varies widely), the basic framing of the GFs modes means having more aircraft than tanks is almost always a disadvantage.

I saw that demonstrated in hundreds of matches years ago…amid the heyday of CAS hype too!

Spoiler

I played RB GFs in 2017, throughout the zenith of CAS hype, and I saw the folly of massing aircraft proven firsthand in matches with/against the aircraft. The aircraft did not live up to mythical boasts a handful spouted.

  • When the aircraft were ‘with’ you they’d be around the bigger map, often harmlessly strafing enemies with ineffective MG fire or away returning to base for (more effective) weapons.

  • When they were against you, they were expensive foes (480+ SP for you to fire upon with your SPAA that cost 70-100 SP or 480 SP defending fighter).

    • Often, it was strategy to encourage the enemy into spawning aircraft…just to shoot them down and thereby deprive the enemy team of the vehicle, the 100 tickets/vehicle and (especially) bleed that player’s SP reserves in an attempt to force them out of the match altogether.
      • Very often, this game plan was successful (tank SP costs were more expensive then and earning rates were a bit different then) and players who spawned quickly killed aircraft would have no further action.

As an experienced player, I can tell you it is not advisable to rely upon aircraft to win RB GFs matches…it will almost always be the caps and GFs that win the match–not AFs.

1767

Stakes definitely aren’t 50/50. As an experienced player you should know by now what’s the only prerequisite to joining Ground Battles. This should be clear enough, totally optional military branch can’t have the same stakes as other branch that’s literally required to join in the first place.

Even in case of helicopters that can be immediately spawned (with certain loadouts), you aren’t allowed to queue if you lack ground vehicles in your preset. That being said, vehicles from optional branches should never be allowed to get bigger in numbers than required ones.
If one team can have 16 players, I think limiting optional “picks” to 1/4th of the total size should be more than enough. From 32 players in total, 8 could be in the air at any given time with 24 others on the ground.

Implying all 15 of the random teammates can/will understand you is wild.

My point still stands. You don’t need to capture points in order to win a game, even outside Battle. In order to win, you either have to deplete enemy team’s tickets to 0 or basically kill every player to toggle that “No more enemy players” ticket bleed. None of those require you to capture anything.

Do you realize what leads up to that advantage or dominance over capture points in the first place ? Kills.
Taking the cap is just an RP/SL bonus to award a team that did better at killing the other team around a certain area on the map.

So your claim could be easily changed into: “Outside Battle, a team that isn’t able to kill the enemies with same effectiveness as the other way around is unlikely to succeed.”

1768

Remove scouting reducing aircraft spawn cost. Remove SP gained from capping your first point of the game. /s

1769

Half the vehicles that you may spawn are ground based, the other half are aircraft. That’s how you get to 50-50 (in theory).

As I mentioned, things skewed toward GFs in practice because GFs are given better costs and are favored mechanically.

Similar efforts have been tried before…and all of them resulted in negative effects for teams (notably ODL).

It’s best to not interfere with players’ freedom of choice at all…let them spawn what they wish and let them/the enemy team sort it out in combat.

I didn’t say you’d be successful, I said you could try to bargain with the others. (Ultimately, their choice is theirs anyway.)

Beyond that, there’s little to be said except that efforts here to control players’ choices are an effort to affect thousands of players.

Not really…the main mover of tickets (outside Battle) is traditionally the capture zones. More often than not, one side will best the other via tickets than via TDM. In Battle, the avenue to winning varies between these.

What role aircraft have in all of this is…“limited” to put it flatly. Kills are about the only direct means they have to influencing tickets (100 tickets/kill)…a measly sum in the grand scheme.

1770

Had a match last night that really puts this thread into focus. Match is going badly, our team is losing and they have an F-16C raining hell down onto our team. Stopping us from pushing. I get killed and so decide to deal with that F-16C. So Spawn in a Sea Harrier FA2. Over the course of the next few minutes. I deal with him and a few other aircraft (which was stupidly easy because no one knows what chaff is in GRB) and the next thing I know, the entire enemy team has quit, as they’ve spawned in CAS/CAP and then died and our team has capped the point to go on to the win.

TLDR. CAS is only powerful if you let it be and CAS doesnt win games. Ground forces do, they lost because they spawn in CAS.

3 Likes
1771

Goading the enemy team into aircraft was a common strategy back in 2017.

At that time, tank costs were higher (roughly double) and so it was easier to knock players out of matches by coaxing them into aircraft as second spawns…before immediately killing them. They’d be low on/out of SP and out of the match based on that. (It was also an ideal time to grind defending fighters/SPAA…CAS hype lulled many to obliviousness.)

Sounds like your experience played to a similar tune.

1772

Sorry but a totally optional vehicle type can’t have same stakes as required one, we’ll have to disagree on that. It’s obvious who’s much more important there.

On the contrary, you could argue that limiting number of CAS at any given moment will also help reduce ODL, because some people will ODL when being killed by air units.

More planes → less ground vehicles → bigger chance for a ground instance to be CAS’d → more CAS related ODLs

Giving players the freedom to do whatever they want is a double-edged sword to say the least.
I’ve seen whole squads spawning Reserve tier meme vehicles at top tier and doing absolutely nothing.

Is this in line with respecting their freedom of choice ? Yes.
Is this healthy for the match/game itself ? No.

Language barrier is a thing for a reason. It’s not easy/quick to bypass that in order to even try to bargain.

Many (if not all) changes will affect thousands of players, don’t really know what you’ve tried to say here.

This is true when teams have almost the perfect balance of player’s average skill. This doesn’t need to happen though and is often not the case with steamrolls being pretty common.

In theory, 16k tickets equals to 160 kills, meaning every player has 10 vehicles at their disposal which is surely way above average. In reality though, for example, your enemy team of 16 people might only have 30-40 available vehicles to respawn in total (remember, you only need a singular vehicle to get into a GRB game), so getting 30-40 kills will effectively equal to 16k tickets or ~400-500 per kill in this example.

It’s also important to note that even if you have enough SP and something to spawn, you might choose not to for various reasons. (your team got curb stomped, spawn camping, CASpam, bad map, etc…).

1773

I’ll pop in here with some comments, based on my AB experience - CAS’s main advantage is that sudden shock/flurry of death, especially to problematic/hard to kill vehicles.

Used right it can be fairly lethal - I have won several AB games due to well-timed rocket/bomb attacks, but without tanks, or if used incorrectly, its not good.

1 Like
1775

I mostly play top tier and currently the only SPAA that can effectively and consistently counter CAS in the Pansir. Gaijin said they will be working on new multi vehicle AA system so that they can also give NATO countrys good SPAA.

But I think that atleast till we get those we should greatly reduce the spawn cost of aircraft with a air to air loadout. So that instead of spanning in your useless ADATS you will beable to spawn in a F15C and protect your allies on the ground. If we make it that a for example the F15E gets a spawn cost of 250 with a 9M loadout and 300 with AIM-120 people would beable to spawn them even after dying. and of cource make air to ground weapons more expensive so that it still takes the same amount of point to spawn in a air to ground load out.

This in combination with increasing the spawn cost for some of the super OP CAS weapons like KH-38MT would help fix the CAS problem in top tier. At least untill we get more effective SPAA.

1776

Even pantsir often cannot defend their team effectively + spaa rewards for killing planes are a joke.
Imo, augmenting the spawn cost of planes with ground ordnance + making the rewards for killing them actually viable for spaas would start to help. Same with helis, and the ones with fire and forget can even simply pop in and out of cover, shoot their load and hide, before any spaa can hit them which is straight up unbalanced

1777

Remove ticket loss for ground vehicles destroyed by CAS

1 Like
1778

Massively increase spawn cost for AP belts and dedicated ground attack armament, SL rewards for downing enemy aircraft, plane module research if you kill an enemy CAS aircraft in your own, and add a spawn point penalty for very short lives/slamming into the ground to discourage revenge bombing

1779

I will say it again and again.
Ground spawn for planes without exceptions. And place the airfields in top tier even further away then now.
The surrounding air map of the GRB map is also big enough to place either AI Patriot or S300/400 batteries or equivalent systems + some SHORAD to protect them in random places behind the respective airfields. And if not, make the maps bigger.
The modern battlefield isn’t a free fly zone. Players need to work for that.
Likewise ARMs can then be introduced to give CAS players more to do then just ruin the fun of ground players while being unchallenged.
Seeing helicopter players just climbing straight up above their field without even retracting their landing gear because they know that (in lower BRs) IR missiles and SPAAGs can’t reach them drives me f****** nuts. Heli play in absolute top tier is harder but even there you get the occasional match where for some reason nobody thinks about spawning some AA in. That is the players fault. Otherwise you also see the edge case where every AA is just overwhelmed by CAS and get killed by planes far out of reach while trying to deal with the helicopter threat.
War thunder always claims to depict a realistic battlefield but CAS gameplay is so abysmal and so far away from actual combat on a battlefield with two peer factions that it genuinely ruins the fun for the majority of the players in every top tier match.
And don’t even mention the combat drones. Whoever had that idea hopefully gets the same socks for Christmas every damn year. Just get rid of them (although Patriot/S-300 etc. would cover this bs)

2 Likes
1780

Add CEP to weapons, currently they feel like they are laser accurate, add a few meters drift here and there, a lock on should not guarantee a kill, having to commit more than 1 missle per target would be good, but bombs would be relatively unaffected