I refuse to believe that they have completely given up on top tier balance (which is foolish of me I know).
I will hold on to the hopium/copium that the reason they haven’t further played around with getting US winrates up is because they were working on a new vehicle.
(And I know what some people are thinking, but the sad excuse of a cas aircraft that is the A-10C wasn’t such an attempt)
While Helicopters in Sim Air would be good there would need to be some major changes for the mode. Like new targets, heli bases, and most importantly in my opinion the base AA needs to have a longer range otherwise you could just get 1 Ka-50 sat out of the range of the AA but well within range for its Vikhirs which would leave an airfield completely unusable.
Also actually spotting helicopters will be a challenge with how inconsistent the rendering is in Sim. Even with a radar they will be flying too low for non-PD radars to see them and they will often be too slow for PD radars to see.
You can’t hit them with a IR missile unless they don’t have IRCM or MAWS to know when a missile is fired. You also can’t hit them with a radar missile unless the conditions are perfect.
Your only real way to kill one would be to use your guns but then you need to get close to one which leaves you open to be shot by their auto tracking turret if it has one.
But overall I think that with some changes Helicopters in Sim Air could absolutely work. But then again we are talking about Sim and we all know how much Gaijin likes to ignore/make the mode worse.
In general, higher tier ships with higher tier heli’s, really deserve some. Especially when there are subs. Would be sick to have an anti submarine warfare heli onboard and go sub hunting.
The 3TD isn’t very good. It is worse in most aspects than the Leopard 2A5/2A6 and at least the CR2E and Black Night still have some other redeeming features.
I’d say just chuck them in there first and see what happens.
Adding stuff todo on their list will make it less likely they come at all.
If they are in and just spawn at regular airfields then they can later see what needs improvement and how to spend their minimal SIM development time to improve it.
Spawn killing can also be done in aircraft with mavericks/JDAMS/etc and they reach the enemy airfield in 5 minutes or less rather than 10-20 minutes.
Personally I’d use them for ground battles and convoys (if they are close). Even from the airfield those are doable flight times. Prob like 20-30km on a smaller map, 30-40km on a larger map.
That’s true but I think that’s a little less cancerous than a Ka-50 or AH-64 launching a dozen ATGMs and completely closing off the airfield until they run out.
But yeah I’d love to see them playable in the mode at some point. Although I wouldn’t like to fly anything with rockets only to attack ground units. The SPAA is broken OP for aircraft I’d imaging having to get within the 3Km exclusion zone around them would just be instant death