I know this is going to be niche because its Air Sim, but bombers in SB need a QOL change for all none bomber planes.
Currently all fighters fly from the cockpit, as you would expect. This cripples visibility and vastly complicates the process of shooting anything as you have to line it all in from 1st person within the cockpit. Its highly challenging to say the least with various dials and such obscuring your view and often the entire bottom 180 degree of the screen entirely obscured. So to track things below your horizon, you have to constantly adjust your flight trajectory to check its position, and firing at a turning target often means not even seeing the thing you’re firing at because to lead it you need it to be below your horizon.
Much to my surprise then when I tried a bomber for the first time. While the pilot still flies from the first person, a challenge no doubt in such a large plane. But the gunners when switch to use the same 3rd person from above view enjoyed in air realistic and arcade, and all gunners track the mouse so you don’t have to switch between gunners. All complete with tracking circles. This means that once on a good heading with a stable flight, any bomber player can switch to any gunners position and enjoy absolutely unrestricted visibility and the benefits of an off centre camera to provide perspective to help correct shots.
It is little wonder bombers in SB are absolutely god like and often enjoy the highest kill counts, with significant numbers of players often just spamming bombing runs on airbases that do not affect the game in any way but do get them score. Once they’ve got off the ground, they are effectively in Air Realistic while everyone trying to shoot them down struggles on in Simulator mode.
This is a simple fix. Implement bomber interior gunner views so bomber gunners have to contend with the foibles of sim battles like the rest of us. Complete with limited visibly and difficulty tracking tracer fire. This would substantially level the playing field and hopefully reduce the spam of bombers which contribute nothing to the game.
Well anything with a single gunners position already has this change implemented.
The issue I see is that a lot of bombers have turrets with overlapping fields of fire and limiting them to using a single turret within that area would be an over correction. If we get an increase in the distance the AI will open fire, if inaccurate more so as a deterrent from lingering too close I can see the option of taking manual control of single turrets being viable.
Really?..I think you’ll find you’re wrong on that one.
Personally I enjoy flying bombers and very rarely manually operate the gunner positions, I’m usually flying too low for anything other than a quick look around anyway.
Honestly… well, I can see positives and negatives on it. Personally I get annoyed with the “Outside of field of fire” message with the current view when it looks like I should be just fine and able to fire. Having a turret view would make it quite clear when you can and can’t fire.
I’m trying to think of just how it’d be playing it in a multi-position aircraft and if it’d be fun or not with swapping gunner positions, reacquiring the target, finding it’s just out of view, trying to get another position (while it’s bobbing back and forth) …
Eh. Call me undecided. Might be fun. Might be annoying.
Personally, I’d rather have any gunner control restricted purely to AI gunners in sim, the huge advantage in fire accuracy you get using mouse aim compared to any fighter in sim is very large and cant be overstated - restricting it to AI gunners only places the relative accuracy much more in line with the potential accuracy of typical sim players which is way fairer and more true to the nature of the game mode. It’s always just comically cringe to see bombers fly around with trim slaughtering the enemy team in third person mouse aim during a Simulator match - anyone who fly’s in the 288 bracket knows this situation all too well.
Though I wouldn’t be opposed to allowing the view from gunner’s seats or even third person for now to simulate the much-increased situational awareness of bombers, we could also potentially allocate targets to the gunners similar to naval auxiliary gun AI targeting controls from this view - just no mouse aim shooting.
That would be a cool idea if all of the bombers didn’t have multiple firing positions to control at the same time. Limiting them to one at a time would completely unmanageable to use and the point of most of the layouts is to have overlapping fire. Having ai gunners do all the control is cool, but who gets the advantage then? The gunners have to be accurate enough to defend the plane, but not accurate enough to instantly kill every plane that comes near. That isn’t any better, that just takes the control away from the bomber pilots and makes it random chance, plus it will always favor one side over the other.
I wholeheartedly agree! But I would even go a step further. Make flying a bomber realistic, at least in Sim, by allowing only auto gunners to shoot at enemy planes. In real life, the pilot did also man all the guns on the bomber. He relied upon the gunners assigned to the bomber while he stayed in the pilot’s seat. Eliminate pilot gunning on bombers unless that was an option on a particular aircraft. If you’re going to do sim, do sim. Take away silly mouse gunning and maybe bombers would be forced to take fighter escorts with them, creating much more realistic combat scenarios and making Sim much more fun.
How good of a shot should the AI gunners be? Obviously based on crew levels, but would a maxed (lv75 crew aced) be able to defend the plane with deadly accurate fire every time or would the bomber still become heavily damaged in a firefight? Because one way is going to be fun for bombers, the other will be fun for interceptors. Also, you can’t really force bombers to take escorts because it is all dependent on other players, and they may not want to fly alongside a bomber hoping that a plane is en route to intercept.
Very good points, all. I believe you hit the nail on the head when you said someone is going to have fun and someone is not. Go into any Sim battle and the highest scores and most planes shot down are by bombers. When you have one player in the third person controlling every gun on a bomber, how is that fun for fighters? How is that even qualify as “simulation?” I know of no instance of that ever happening in real life. Anything that is pure fantasy has no part in Sim battles. That only makes sense.
So when it comes to simulation, none of Warthunder’s vehicles, aircraft, boats, or ships could really be considered simulation. The closest could be single engine fighters, but only if you always use manual engine control with all available systems active (radiator, prop pitch, mixture, ect). If not then you aren’t quite simulating anything correctly. Also, using any controls other than dedicated flight controls (yoke, stick, rudder pedals for planes) shouldn’t be possible. No keyboard and mouse because it doesn’t have enough options for axes, and a game controller (Xbox, PS) may have enough axes to work properly, but that isn’t quite real aircraft controls though.
Seeing that most of vehicles and aircraft in this game require multiple crewmembers to function under normal corrections, some compromises must be made. For tanks, it is the ability to control multiple crewmembers at once. The same is true for bombers. If you wanted true sim, a bomber wouldn’t even be able to drop bombs as the bombardier is a different position in the plane. That wouldn’t make much sense as bombers would be very useless. Bombers need to have player control for the gunners, or a comparable ai to handle it. The fun part about this is, people can fly fighters and bombers with the mouse. Just because anyone else chooses to use flight sim equipment (I personally use a yoke, throttle set, and rudders) doesn’t mean that anyone else has to do that. The Sim game mode in Warthunder is not an actual simulator, not by a long shot. It is a video game made for fun, so don’t take things quite so seriously because the game is tailored for everyone to have fun without spending hundreds of dollars on equipment to do so. This is one of those compromises that need to be made for multi-crew aircraft to be in the game.
War Thunder is a “video game for fun,” but there is no reason why Sim mode has to be accessible to those who are not properly equipped to handle a true simulation. That’s what the Arcade and Realistic modes are for. Many of us came from Flight Simulator or X-Plane where operation of prop pitch, oil and water coolers, mixture and actual trim controls are required. Simulation means just that. Simulating the actual experience of aerial combat. If that level of play is too difficult for a an individual then they need to learn as the rest of us did or invest in the proper hardware required for flight simulation. War Thunder is the closest thing to aerial combat simulation currently available. It should not be dumbed down just so console gamers can play in modes for which they are not equipped.
No reason? Warthunder is a free game, so perhaps people of lower economic stature would play it. Perhaps that player wants to experience sim on the FREE game that they found and all they have is a keyboard and mouse or a controller. That sounds like a perfectly good reason to me. Making your game accessible to people is usually the best option when you don’t charge every player. You just sound pompous about this. You aren’t the only player that wants to enjoy a sim experience and luckily Warthunder is an accessible sim platform and players don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars to enjoy it.
It’s not pompous at all. Sim is a level of play that should be worked up to. Earned, if you will. It is also a level of play that should require the meager investment of a basic HOTAS joystick which can be had for under $40. Most of the console gamers I see in Sim are playing with premium planes that cost well over that much. For those who are unable to afford even the smallest investment there are still Arcade and Realistic levels on Army, Air and Navy categories.
The simple problem is that too many younger people expect way too much for free. They know that people like you will always enable their lack of understanding about how life works. Sim comes with a number of expectations in terms of capabilities, the ability to adequately manage the flight qualities built into each aircraft, and to meet the requirements of Sim play. For console gamers, those requirements are effectively waived, allowing them to participate in Sim battles using Realistic and even Arcade controls and flight characteristics. As I had mentioned in another post, I have played War Thunder on my son’s Xbox and Sim on that platform is not even close to what PC players experience. The planes perform at Arcade level, and amounts to giving console players an unfair advantage over those dedicated to operating actual joysticks, throttle quadrants and rudder pedals. That is what Sim should be: an arena where players who are committed to playing with as much authenticity as possible can do so without having their experience polluted by console gamers. Period. If you don’t like it, deal with it. I am entitled to my opinion just as you are. Feel free to look up my squadron on Thunderskill.com. It’s VFA54. Look up our squadron ranking in Sim battles and you will understand why I take this seriously.
Trust me, I didn’t need to know about your squadron to know your a Sim tryhard. This isn’t an esports title, and quite frankly I’m not impressed nor do I care how seriously you take Sim in this game. This game isn’t made for absolute realism and historical accuracy, it is made to be enjoyed. Sim doesn’t come with any expectations other than being able to play without using pointer aim. Of course using a full flight sim is going to be disadvantaged, you kind of need to know how to fly a plane to an extent. The skill ceiling for using flight sim equipment is much higher.
On Warthunder, people can enjoy sim with keyboard and mouse, controllers, or flight sim equipment. That is what Warthunder’s Sim IS, so you deal with it. But the best part is we come back to you being pompous again. You don’t give a damn about anyone else but yourself and your squadron buddies. You can take sim as seriously as you want, but you shouldn’t expect anyone else to WANT to take it that seriously. You are part of the minority that is really serious about it. The game shouldn’t bow down to people like you who want to push everyone out of the game. I just keep rereading your post and laughing because you are comparing a free video game’s Sim to the lack of understanding of how life works. Are you a pilot in real life? An aircraft engineer? Do you work in the aviation field? What causes you to think mixture control and prop pitch matters to most of the players in this game? I could bet that most people don’t care if their plane has a radial engine, and inline engine, or a turboprop and how they need to manage it. They just want to fly historic planes and shoot down other historic planes. Whether that be in arcade, realistic or sim.
I love how you say that there is an actual difference on console as there is on pc. Pc can do the same exact thing with a controller and console players can use a keyboard and mouse and flight sim equipment. This isn’t the 90s, technology has surpassed the “consoles and pc are different” age. All a console is these days is a PC with a different OS.
Did you know that you can use M+KB and controllers in those games too?
Gatekeeping sim to only those with special equipment would kill the mode even faster than Gaijin already is. Unless you really like fighting against 1-2 people in a match.
My opinion,
Step 1
The third person viewpoint of the bomber should be removed as soon as possible, and the only viewpoint that can be used should be the aft-most gun turret viewpoint.
Step 2
If there are multiple gunners, each gunner’s point of view should be available so that the viewer can switch between them.
I would prefer that the above be updated in phases.
I think that having the view from the foremost top/bottom turret would be better in most cases. It would allow for a wider view and allow accurate fire of more turrets at once without switching views. Having the foremost turrets would help a ton with overall view while also elimiating the 3rd person view. Then maybe a forward turret view on a few planes, but the fore turrets would probably still be plenty for that too. Having a view from each gun wouldn’t be very good as cycling between them would be impossible as planes can zoom into and out of arcs of fire very quickly.
The Experience is exactly the same and your not at any disadvantage to console players! Simulation battles are no different from Console to PC Flight characteristics and Physics are exactly the same. Gaijin and moderators need to confirm this to avoid the spread of miss information!
I’m original a PC player came from il-2 have played a lot of SB with Hotas+Pedals before taking 4 year break. Console’s probably more at a disadvantage especially PS5 Series S/X when comes to graphics, the settings are locked on the highest setting’s there’s No ULQ exploits Mods or Hacks. If your on controller you will be at massive disadvantage to any Hotas, VR or M&K user it’s much harder to fly, aim, spot and track. PC Player using VR, Hotas or M&K shouldn’t be losing to Console player using a controller.
Personally Stats can be very misleading a lot ways to manipulate and pad if that’s your thing. My Stats for example are much better on PC to my console accounts it wouldn’t look like the same player although I’m much better at the game. One thing i noticed when i came back there’s a lot of seal clubbers made starting over a very painful experience compared to starting in 2014 . SB is always one-sided one teams full of newbies afk players or bots and other clubbers stat padders and boosters.
Enlisted another Gaijin game has just introduced 1st person control gunnery on bombers and attackers it works and is much more balanced and fair. I hope Gaijin implements 1st person gunnery to Warthunder SB.