Likewise with me on multiple occasions.
So that in effect, for players paying attention, there is no net nerf. For oblivious players, it is a steep nerf. For players willing to press Alt+1/2/3 (or whatever they bind different gun calibers to), it is a buff. CAS will become easy enough to kill provided you put in some actual effort to kill it. But no longer will it just die when you aren’t paying attention. By making the counters easily available and strong for those who learn it, the people complaining about the loss of their AI shield lose the excuse to complain, as every user who does adapt will then laugh the complainers out of the room. And this is just for ships without radar units on board - ones with radars will be hilariously easy to kill planes with. If you pick a ship that has bad AAA, that’s a weakness of that ship, which most of them do not have save for a handful of reserve DDs and a handful of early BCs/BBs.
Currently Naval CAS has essentially zero functional purpose, and the overwhelming shooting accuracy of AI-controlled gunners is one of the main things to blame for such. The vast majority of planes famous for sinking ships in many trees are literally incapable of surviving attacks when used as they would have been in reality due to the AI gunners existing. Sure, certain obscenely large bombs work, but most planes don’t even have those.
There’s also a pair of player titles specifically around torpedo-killing ships with aerial torpedoes - but for the vast majority of planes this is functionally impossible due to the existence of AI gunners.
I already know this - but when the really nasty 37-57mm AAA guns open up at 4km away, that makes the vast majority of aerial torpedoes unable to even reach their stated ranges to begin aiming to drop them. I know full well about their arming distances.
American torpedoes have only 3.6km range on the useful Mk.13/44 type. Japanese torpedoes have 2km range at most. Russia has just one prop torpedo plane with 4km range. German and Italian torpedoes have 3km range at most. Sweden has exactly one torpedo with hilarious range on one 1.0 bomber, but has no navy to use it with. Britain has one torpedo with 5.5km range but only a couple planes to actually use it with. In order to aim torpedoes properly you need to fly straight, level, and sometimes slower than your normal speeds - during which time the AI gunners will annihilate you.
I would remove AI gunners on all planes in the exact same manner, FYI. The mechanic itself is unbalanceable regardless of the platform.
And the problem with AI-controlled anything is that it is completely omniscient in its attention span. Unlike a player, you can do absolutely nothing to get the jump on it and kill it before it kills you save for “lob an obscenely large bomb only a dozen bombers in the entire game happen to carry.”
The AI ships all operate as if they are in Arcade Mode regardless of what mode they’re actually in. This applies to AI-controlled planes, tanks, boats, and ships.
I see AI-controlled gunners on anything, be it a bomber/attacker/heavy fighter, a boat, a ship, airfield AAA, or anything else as fundamentally unbalanceable. Bombers in Air modes already had this problem years ago and ran into its inability to be truly balanced, to where Gaijin just said “well fuck it” and rendered AI gunners so pathetically weak that players have no choice but to manually aim them. I would simply make that official for all vehicle types.
It is beyond silly that the plane types which are the vast majority of anti-ship planes - single-engine torpedo/dive-bombers such as the Helldiver, Skyraider, or others - are currently near-incapable of killing ships without also dying in the process. And AI-controlled gunners are the main culprit because they cannot be distracted nor surprised, unlike actual human player hands can. It takes away agency from the player who is trying to get the drop on someone else and protects the idiot who isn’t paying attention - that is wrong.