Yet if someone is saying that SPAA is effective he should be able to prove it. K/D is the lowest we can ask for.
SPAA is effective only with HE-VT and guided missles. Open-top SPAAs are a joke at the moment.
K/D will tell you zip.
There are lot of matches where as SPAA you’re killed by tanks before you even ever see a plane, and there are matches where you down 7 planes without losing a single vehicle. So what does K/D tell you? Nothing.
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A single person’s K/D is irrelevant to the balance of the game. The game doesn’t even have skill based match making, whether someone is good or not doesn’t have an effect on the overall game.
They’re a joke IRL too, that’s not going to change. Direct fire SPAA was never effective against CAS unless it was low flying, as it is ingame. Lower BRs are a mess to balance but the payload and capabilities mean one plane isn’t turning the tide of the battle. High BR is where CAS becomes an issue, a single plane can get 6+ kills without ever facing serious danger from SPAA as they can outrange it.
K/D will tell us how many games where You just simply die without doing anything there is compared to the games where You are able to do something to the plane.
If one is stating that SPAA is effective against planes it means that there should be more kills than deaths.
If someone is stating that SPAAs are effective he should be able to prove it, K/D is the lowest we can ask for as an evidence.
It can. I can spawn with 2x 1000 lbs bombs right after capping a single zone with reserve vechicle and then procced to bomb the best tanks of the enemy team without them being able to defend against it.
As I’ve stated, I’ll reiterate. K/D can not be used as evidence. It’s irrelevant. If they had an absurdly high K/D it would be irrelevant. If they had an absurdly low K/D it would be irrelevant. Skill is not a factor in the game’s overall balance.
2 1000lb unguided bombs aren’t netting you 6 kills unless 5 tanks are stacked on top of eachother at which point it becomes an issue of the enemy’s rather than the game’s inherent features.
I’m not saying that K/D means that things are balanced/unbalanced, what I mean is that if someone is making a point that SPAA is effective, he should at least be able to prove it (meaning, that he should have something to back up what he is saying).
They don’t. But MGs used later in battle do.
MGs?
Like 20mm on my F4U-4B that can pen Panther roof without any issue and kill the whole crew in it.
No, that’s exactly what I meant with my statement: It tells you nothing about that as the K/D doesn’t tell us what we died from.
I don’t have acces here atm to the game, only Thunderskill, and here for example what I found there for the Roland, one of my most used SAMs:
So I have a K/D here of 1.87. But again, that tells us nothing about what I died to.
ItO 90: 2.11
FlaRakPz 1: 1.54
FlaRakRad: 1.64
And still, those tell us nothing. Neither what I died to, nor what happened around me and whether and how well I could defend my fellow players from threats from the air. Or not, of course.
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I thought we are talking about range of 4.0 to 6.7. At higher B.R. SPAAs can handle the job.
Ah you’re right, sorry. Down there I did not do a lot of air defense recently. My remark about that was about the fact that I experienced little pain from the air as tanker when I played those BRs the last few weeks/days. ;-)
Perhaps a lock for number of planes/helicopters up at once would be an idea, say a max of 5 aircraft for both team, not sure about the number of helicopters. And then as the match progresses the number of active cas could be expanded as more people would spawn in as spaa. This of course could be exploitable though…
When was the last time you’ve used Rolands ?
A week ago, I think…
In one match I was happy with I think 4 kills, another one very bad luck with very foggy weather. Also got kills there, but was more hard work and could not do my job well, and planes were overpowering us.
Not saying this does not happen, just saying that in my experience it does not happen as much as others claim (or experience…).
Often it is actually however the lack of air targets that make the matches boring. So I had one or two of those as well recently, or ones where I got taken out by tanks before even becoming useful.
(Oh, another note: used VR in those last matches, which is NOT a good thing to do for tanks, especially AAA, because of very clumsy turret direction control…)
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A repost from one of the many other threads on the subject:
- Increase the SP cost of bombs exceeding 1000kg in explosive mass at all BR’s dramatically. These are the lowest skill CAS options in the game with, typically, the least counterplay. If they work like a nuke they should cost something approaching a nuke.
- Give all SPAA spotting, including aerial spotting, and increase SP gain for air kills. SPAA is already spawned in large numbers when a team starts to lose and run out of SP/tanks. Rather than fight it, double down and reinforce SPAA’s dual role as air security and as a catch-up mechanic for players falling behind. This also makes SPAA the best way to save up for a CAS plane of your own, putting CAS players against each-other for air dominance and encouraging them to respawn and continue to the air fight.
- Remove the SP discount for spawning a plane that has a much lower BR than the current map’s matchmaking if the plane has any payload options. This will penalize suicide bombing with ju88’s and other SP-cheap CAS options to force players to spawn planes with a more honest intention to play the game.
I think this will go a long way in alleviating the most irritating problems people are dealing with while still giving everyone a chance to continue to play the way they want to.
Do you remember what did you kill ?
After the nerf Rolands are really bad, to the point of being able to hit afk players only.
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I’ve seen some inteligent people here suggest very good ideas, among the crybabies that cry to remove CAS completly or absurdly increase its SP cost.
IMO, the role of CAS in ground battles is important, as it counters power-position abusers and keeps the flow of battle. However, in this current system the availability of CAS is what makes it so insufferable for many. Not only an SP cost increase won’t fix CAS, in fact, it would actually make the problem worse! You might wonder, “how?”. Well, I’ll explain:
How do you currently earn the ability to spawn aircraft? By earning spawnpoints, of course. How do you earn spawnpoints? By capturing points and killing enemy players. Players who earn a lot of kills and capture points earn more points to spawn CAS with, and that is the fundomental problem of CAS in my opinion. Imagine the common scenario where team A does really well in the beggining of the match, capping all points and pushing to team B’s spawn. The leading players of team A now have an abundance of SP to spawn CAS with, whereas the players of team B have barely any SP to spawn tanks with, let alone aircraft, due to being spawncamped.
Let’s take a look at something completly different: Battlefield 1’s Conquest mode. A team of attackers and a team of defenders fight each other, with the former pushing the latter through different sectors. Every time the wave of attackers fail (they have 3 wavea total), they get another chance, but now with the help of a behemoth, a large multi-player vehicle which will help the attacking team get an advantage over the winning defending team.
You see what’s going on here? the losing team is being aided with an advantage in an attempt to level the playing field. Now, compare this to War Thunder’s CAS which does the opposite and helps the winning team dominate harder.
Now onto my methos to improve the CAS mechanic and make it overall more fun and balanced, I will begin first with the BR-generic solution, than speak about BR-specific issues and how to solve them. The main issues IMO are how quickly CAS can be spawned and how CAS is earned unfairly due to how SP works, and I will focus in those problems in my solutions.
Issue number 1: CAS can spawn too quickly - First things first, I’d apply an air grace period. No matter what, no aircraft of any kind are allowed to be spawned in the first 5 minutes of the battle. This will prevent people from rushing, dying after a kill and a point capture, and spawning with an ATGM-filled helicopter or a fully equipped strike aircraft 2 minutes into the battle. The air grace period would have a minimum of 5 minutes, but would go up to 10 depending on how hard each team is winning or losing tickets-wise. The harder a team is losing, the faster they get access to spawning aircraft.
The way I suggest to do this is the following:
- for every precentage of tickets a team has above 50%, the air grace period will be increased by 6 seconds. For example: if a team currently has 70% tickets, (assuming they keep that value) aircraft spawning would be allowed for that team at 7 minutes after the battle started.
- I’d also make it so aircraft spawning is allowed regardless if 5 minutes passed or not, if a team is losing so hard that they have less than half of the enemy team’s tickets (for example, one team has 40% tickets while the other has 95%). This way, if a team gets crushed, they will still get access to CAS before the match ends. I’m here to solve the CAS issue, not the spawncamping issue. As for how will the spawncamped team get the ability to spawn aircraft in the first place, I will get to that later…
- For the last point of this issue, I just wanna make it clear that all of what I said untill now also applies to aircraft with a pure air-defense loadout. I don’t want people to quickly spawn in fighters and camp the airspawns of the enemy team.
Issue number 2: Current SP system is unfair aircraft-spawning-wise - The main issue with the SP system, as I said before, is that it gives CAS access to players that do well (particularly by getting a lot of kills), and punishes players if they are killed a lot without getting kills themselves. The way I’d handle this is by overhauling the SP system entirely. Now that might seem a bit extreme, but hear me out, I assure you that you will like my idea:
- All ground vehicles no longer require spawn points to spawn, this will incentivise players to spawn more ground vehicles, especially at the late game where a 5th tank spawn usually costs as much as (if not more than) an aircraft with a whole load of air-to-ground weapons. Not only this will give a good reason for players to make huge lineups (meaning more people buy GE to afford more crew slots, you’re welcomed Gaijin), but it also makes early rushes and spawncamping much less severe on the receiving team, as they are no longer starved for spawn points and can continue spawning other ground vehicles.
- Of course, ground vehicles no longer requiring a spawn cost means the spawn cost of aircraft (and the nuke aircraft) needs to be higher, but IMO it should not be a massive increase. I suggest an overall 50% increase in SP cost for all aircraft. This way, the nuke would also be rewarded not just to people who abuse power positions and camp in a corner for the entire match, but also to people who stay for very long and support their team as much as they just can.
- Aircraft spawn cost should be dependant on the BR, with lowtier aircraft typically costing more than hightier and toptier aircraft due to how weak SPAAs are in the lowtiers and how powerful they are in the hightiers. I will explain in further detail later in the BR-specific issues section.
- Spawn costs of an aircraft should depend not only on the type of weapons and munitions carried, but also their quantity, it should be more expensive SP-wise to spawn an aircraft with 6 AGM-65s than to spawn the same aircraft with just 2 AGM-65s. This way, it would give players an incentive to spawn CAS with less PGMs rather than spawning CAS being an “all or nothing” scenario, especially as spawning cheaper aircraft means less penalty towards earning a nuke.
BR-specific issues and solutions
Not all issues with aircraft in Ground RB are universal, some of them are confined to specific BR ranges. Here I will discuss them and offer possible solutions.
Problem 1 - SPAAs at lower BRs are significantly weaker and less effective than SPAAs at higher BRs.
Those who mainly play on WW2 BRs are all too familiar with this issue, SPAAs in lower BRs have no lead indicator (on ground RB and SB), and most of them are open-topped and/or have incredibly slow turret and gun traverse rates, making them incredibly vulnerable to machine gun strafing. Due to this, aircraft in lower BRs feel incredibly confident to the point they allow themselves to hover right above the battlefield not even paying attention to SPAAs firing at them.
Solution 1 - I suggest to introduce to SPAAs a lead indicator calculated by rangefinding in a similar manner to what ships have: the player using the SPAA needs to keep his crosshair on the aircraft for the entire rangefinding duration, and than the gunner beggins to calculate a lead with the lead indicator being updated every 6-4 seconds (actual time would depend on how upgraded the “rangefinding” gunner stat is, I suggest it would be half of the time it takes to initially rangefind a target). With this manually measured lead indicator, SPAAs at lower BRs would have easier time hitting aircraft, but this would also not give them a lead indicator as accurate as the one from a radar.
Problem 2 - Many SPAAs are often dragged up in BR due to their own statistical performance (according to Gaijin at least), and away from meta lineups, resulting in a player sometimes needing to make a decision wherever to take a much weaker SPAA or uptier their entire lineup just for that SPAA.
Solution 2 - I suggest that SPAA BRs would be a bit more flexible statistics-wise, that is, if statistics indicate an SPAA should be 5.7, but its nation has a meta lineup at 5.3 and no tanks at all at 5.7, than let that SPAA stay at 5.3. If there are no viable SPAAs below the mentioned SPAA that could serve as a replacement, said SPAA should remain where it is despite its higher statistical efficiency (unless it is blatantly overpowered, of course). For example, the Falcon could be brought down to 7.7 and either the Skink or Bosvark could be brought down to 5.3.
“But ofekk213, won’t that make SPAAs more powerful than they need to be?”
Well, yea, but SPAAs overall need a power boost anyway. And besides, we are not gigabuffing them, just giving them a small offset to remain viable, the only other alternative is introducing an SPAA at a lower BR. As a villan from an overrated film once said: “When everyone is super, no one will be”. Obviously, as I said before, not every SPAA should be given that offset, only those who match the two following points:
a. Statistics determine it should only be 1 BR step (0.3/0.4 BR) higher than a meta lineup’s BR, and not another step higher.
b. There are no other ground vehicles whatsoever in the BR the statiatics want this SPAA to be at.
Problem 3 - Ever sience the SACLOS nerf, most SAM SPAAs at toptier Ground RB feel incredibly weak, with their SAMs being quite easy to dodge by enemy CAS either by defensive flying or by simply space-climbing.
Solution 3 - I understand that War Thunder (particularly Ground realistic battles) need to be realistic, but why is it that SAMs operate in their full-real physics, while aircraft in Ground RB get the asistance of the mouse aim, letting any pleb fly like Tom Cruise? Of course, making pilots fly with full-real controls in Ground RB is out of the question because one of War Thunder’s biggest selling point is its sheer accessibility and ease of gameplay. Instead, I suggest that SAM physics would depend on the physics gamemode you are currently playing:
a. On Ground AB, missiles have nigh-perfect controls, are highly responsive on all ranges, and ignore gravity. This will help accounting for aircraft being able to pull 20Gs with ease.
b. On Ground RB, missiles would be affected by gravity, but the rest of the effects of the SACLOS nerf would be mildly midigated to a certain degree, improving the overall performance of all SACLOS SAMs ingame at that physics gamemode. This will help SAM SPAAs fight enemy aircraft which use mouse aim controls in this physics gamemode.
c. On Ground SB, all missiles would fully obey to all laws of physics, being modeled fully realistically. Aircraft cannot efortlessly evade missiles in that physics gamemode, so flying defensively often means giving up guidance to a PGM you released prior, unlike in the current state of Ground RB where pilots can both evade missiles and provide guidance to their PGMs.
The solutions I offered are far from perfect, but I hope Gaijin begins from somewhere. I love Ground RB and I personally don’t mind the current state of it too much (I have multiple SPAAs in most of my lineups), but I 100% agree it can be better. I usually make a TL;DR for long posts like this, but I feel like you guys should read all of this as I worked hard to properly describe each problem and its solution.
I hope you all enjoy your day. ofekk213 out.
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Hm, all I can say is that they were certainly not AKF players, but players actively engaging ground targets and trying to be defensive while at it. I didn’t get all of them or with my first missile, of course, and some were very good. The missiles behaved well all the time, with to be expected difficulties farther out in high-G situations and aggressively jinking targets…
Business as usual, really.
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This is a nonsense.
Why?
Well, as i see it, you can have no air battles without long range SAM, since mankind developed them.
See? I can make the exact same argument for Air.
So can naval battles. And ground battles.
There have been tank and naval battles without aircraft taking part of it, so your “argument” is already taken apart.
You can also not rely on the nonsense argument, of “historical accuracy”, nor on “realism”.
By those themselves prove, that i should be able to use a Patriot in Air.
But let’s just ignore that a bit.
This game, is barely realistic, and historically accurate!
There are countless of examples for this. Let me list just a few:
Tanks can be repaired from the inside in 20s while taking fire, and the tank itself shooting back.
Modules, that take hours to repair/swap takes just a few seconds, without a spare module and parts.
Strumtiger having 40s reload instead of like 5 minutes.
Barely alive (aka red) crew members still doing their jobs, while in reality they would be dead.
Crew members casually taking a headshot from a 7.92mm MG and surviving.
You can double the HP of crew members, while you can’t do anything like that in real life (obviously)
Some tanks should just randomly blow up, and stuff like that (just watch Spookston’s videos abut this)
For historical accuracy:
MM is not historically accurate. For this part i will list only this one, because it is the most destructive by far.
With historical MM, depending on how you implement it, you would fight with a Panzer II against a KV-1, ooooor, in some implementations, against an IS-7, or IS-4!
Another great example is the H39. You know, that crap frensh tank that is useless against even interwar tanks… With this, depending on implementation, would fight against Centurions, and early T-54s, or even against things, like Abrams.
So you can go so far with this realism BS until it starts to make gameplay bad.
You are already cherrypicking when it comes to evidence, and when i prove, that it can be applied to Air too, you just repeat yourself, and say “Nu-uh”.
Wars (and in general, life) is extremely rarely fair. But it does not mean that a game should be unfair too.
Yes, you can win against the British army while you are using only spears against their gun armed soldiers, but it is the exception, not the norm. Battle of Isandlwana - Wikipedia
You can look at a game, like Battlefield 1, where on the battlefield, both teams had access to the same number of tanks, while in reality, how many tanks did germany have? 20odd A7Vs, and some captured ones. How many tanks did the allies have? Thousands.