In my comments about the plight of attackers and bombers, I frankly lump in any fighter daring to bring non-A2A-ordinance under the umbrella of “attacker.” Same with the single-engine naval bombers and light bombers which abuse their airspawns to hunt planes - they’re also “attackers,” just meant to sink ships.
Anything not a meta fighter is functionally irrelevant due to the objectives being zero-sum. I see matches auto-ending via TDM, auto-ending via airfield destruction (still a thing in reserve BR maps), and solely ending via CAS-derived ticket bleed as equally wrong. Such a setup discourages any thought of teamwork between plane classes, despite many of them being designed with that very teamwork in mind.
Unless the objectives change, there is no point to doing anything else. This house’s foundation was poured wrong and needs to be rebuilt.
No point brainstorming about it until the zero-sum objective setup is dealt with first. To even begin thinking about what to do with bombers, they need to be important and required to win games first.
I do not think the oldschool airbase-destruction objective is good game design, either. It still exists in low tier maps for Air RB, and its just as stupid now as it was then, if not moreso thanks to German incendiary bombs.
But going out on a limb, assuming the objective structure is properly overhauled so no single objective is capable of auto-ending rounds on its own, probably I could imagine adding targets for bombers which have practical impact on the match flow.
The way Gaijin decided to implement Realistic mode in regards to the control scheme, adding things that a fighter jock might consider “skill” are not practical. Things like ranging turret guns, calibrating your bombsight, controlling one gunner position only from first-person and swapping between them as needed, etc - all that is much more at home in Simulator mode.
Bombers will never be “skillful” in the definition of a fighter dick-measuring contest. War Thunder was not built to be just a PvP dogfight dick-measuring contest - if it were, then attackers and bombers would not be player-controllable all. If they were meant to just guide match flow where dogfights happen, they could do that just as well if they were AI-controlled only.
The battle activity system is supposed to punish people who do that with greatly reduced rewards.
And if someone does that sort of cheeky strategy and manages to pull a victory out of the jaws of apparent defeat, that would be funny. It would be your choice to land and leave, with all appropriate consequences. If you left a player alive who could potentially do that, that’s on you.
Now airfield AAA should be severely neutered so people can’t hide on runways, IMHO. Which means that unless they climb to orbit in something un-catchable up high like a P-47, you would always be able to do something about such a potential player.
What I think is that debates on which plane type should be “most important” are infantile dick-measuring contests no matter the exact circumstances.
Hence why I propose only allowing each objective to bleed 50% of the ticket bar. Only when each objective literally CAN’T win games on its own can the addition of better objectives for attackers and bombers actually take place with a real chance of success.
