Targeting pods do need more than 30km of range
2 Likes
Just want to say I’m a huge fan of this mode. Its SEAD-centric gameplay mechanics make small kills on tanks and trucks insanely rewarding. I could fly a F/A-18 around, kill an ITO or 2S6, and have the time of my life even if I only got one or two tank kills. There’s a really strong player time investment happening here, where if I work hard to survive, by either playing chicken with anti-air or notching, I can get a kill or two and open a hole in the front line for my teammates while I fly back to rearm and repeat the process. There’s a lot of replayability there too, as it makes you think to yourself as you’re landing, “I wonder if the French ARMATs can do that better” or “I wonder if I can accomplish that better if I used a HOSBO bomb instead”.
However, I feel there are minor issues that ruin this gameplay loop. Those being the way Anti-Air intercepts oncoming munitions, and the way AA Radar works in the game mode.
My first complaint is that Anti-Air, specifically the mid-map Anti-Air, is far too accurate in sniping your bombs out of the sky. I completely understand and think it’s actually healthy for the mode that the AA will shoot down your HARMs or other guided munitions. You shouldn’t be able to pop up, drop your TV or IR-guided bombs/rockets, and get 10 kills while you fly away. This tips the scales in favor of the player, as they aren’t RISKING anything for that reward of killing a Pantsir or Tunguska. If I popped my F-16 up from a hill, fired all my HARMs at each of the air defenses around a structure, killing every one of them, it takes away the joy of working hard to achieve those kills.
However, in the mode’s current state, after risking getting killed by the Buks or SAMP/Ts, all of your bombs and rockets you risked your butt to get off get instantly sniped by ITOs and Tunguskas blitzing down roads. I understand if a fair few of my bombs get destroyed; that preserves the risk/reward assessment, but when ALL of my munitions are getting destroyed, that tips the scales of this investment in favor of the game creating an overly unfair situation that ruins the general experience of playing CAS/SEAD in this mode.
What I feel is a healthier approach is making it so SPECIFICALLY mid-map anti-air has a 50/50 chance or lower of taking down your bombs and rockets when you fire them. Let’s say if I take a F/A-18C out, get close enough to fire my HARMS at an actively tracking Pantsir, fire them while I dodge his missiles, and instead of all of them getting intercepted, maybe one or two of the missiles I fired can make it through and destroy the target, and I can reap the rewards by killing the targets around him. Not only is this good for the missiles buses like the Hornet, but also good for aircraft like the Mirage who can only carry two missiles that can be easily intercepted by a Tunguska with a fraction of HIS 8 missiles.
This “total destruction” of your salvo of rockets should only apply to farther back anti-air systems where the required risk to get that reward of taking out the Buk or SAMP/T is far greater. I should be coordinating with my team to take out a Buk/SAMP/T battery, not a single mid-map Pantsir or Tunguska that will respawn in 5 minutes anyway.
My second and final point of contention is how radars work in this mode. Let’s say that, thanks to a friend flying over that area a couple of minutes ago, I know there’s an ITO at a certain position away from my F-16. I go to that location to lock the searching radar of the ITOs, knowing where they are, only to not be able to lock them until they’ve already fired at me or at the other munitions I’ve dropped near them. This also happens with Tunguskas, whereas I can be flying my Mirage out with my two ARMATS (and a small dream of them actually surviving being intercepted), I can have a visual ID of the Tunguska, my cursor over him with the ARMATS selected, and not have them pick up the SRC radar from the 2S6.
This falls back into my risk/reward discussion in the first part of this talk. My munitions should be detecting these vehicles. They SHOULD be sniffing the SRC or tracking radars, but instead the AI has decided that not only can he SEE me WITHOUT his radar, but he can actively decide to pop up and surprise me by turning his radar off and on to throw off my non-IOG guiding ARMATS (which, by the way, I think had them IRL? Same for the early Kh-31Ps?)
I believe that correcting the AI, so they have more consistent behavior, would be ideal for fixing this and uplifting that risk/reward interaction I’ve been harping on about. I understand if my missiles are just too FRENCH to smell the Tunguska; I’d just like to know that beforehand (jokes aside, I do find this happens with HARMS and other missiles as well, leaving it an anti-air issue and not something entirely with the missiles).
There’s a lot more smaller things I could talk about, but generally my point still stands that this mode is AMAZING. I LOVED the first April Fools’ event for the exact risk/reward gameplay loop I talked about here, and I hope it gets expanded upon and iterated more going into the future.
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Not gonna lie
The boss engaging with the community is nice and i wish he would do it more often
Like a question and answer session every once of a while. After all when the players and the dev team soeak with eachother its a lot easier imo to find conclusions
Something that - yet again - sadly seems to not be considered at all, is the Sim community.
I have to admit I have not tried out the game mode yet, but read a lot about it and watched videos etc., and will try it out as soon as I get the time to really dig into it.
So, basically what I see is that it contains a lot of ideas and elements that the Sim community has now for literally years tried to suggest and push for.
Air Sim, specifically Sim EC has been stagnating for a long time now, new additions to the mode have been rare, and if there were changes, they often have not been well thought through. Maps and objectives are very limited, bugs and shortcomings on the other hand are many, and a lot of features that have been added to the game and work well in AB and RB, can only be used in very limited ways in Sim, or not at all, because they were not implemented in a way to be also used in cockpit-only view.
As a result, sim player numbers remain low, the fear that the mode will be given up completely is hovering over us constantly. The argument is often heard that the community is small, and because of this the motivation of Gaijin lacking to further develop the mode, or even maintain it at all…
I however see this as a vicious cycle: The number of players is low BECAUSE of the shortcomings and stagnations of the Sim EC game mode, development in turn seems not to be a priority BECAUSE player numbers are low…
Or that’s at least what the majority of sim pilots suspect…
Nuclear Escalation however would be perfectly suited for the Sim community! Objectives are more diverse, the game mode in general is more complex, the roles of the aircraft really DO play a role.
So, the big question I’d really appreciate could be answered, @Smin1080p_WT et al.: Is it considered to open this promising game mode also for the Sim community, even if simply in the form of a sub-mode with no markers and cockpit-only views, as Sim EC is?
3 Likes
Nuclear Escalation was never going to be for top ranks only in the first place.
Not sure why anyone would think it would.
Also, starting with earlier times… they wouldn’t find bugs nearly as quickly, and it’d take longer to develop overall.
Whooo boy… Maybe after all the balance questions are answered in the programming.
You should carve out some time to try the event, Schindibee, cause you’ll be able to see first hand that even in air RB controls & awareness, the game mode has what some could describe as “artificial difficulty” for lack of a better term.
I have an answer for this one.
The last time proof was supplied, it was below 30km.
I don’t know if Gaijin found proof, but I don’t know of any players with proof at this time.
1 Like
This is actually a great post.
It communicates everything in the works and taking in the good constructive criticism.
All of this is such good news and I really hope this improves the game for the future adding more variety and fun in the game.
Dear BVVD and Dev Team,
Thank you so much for taking risks and investing valuable resources in trying to bring something fresh for the players. I understand that you guys could very well be losing potential profit by investing in Nuclear Escalation, but it means a lot to us that you’re taking these risks to try and give the player’s something new. It also means a lot to us that you guys are communicating more with the players and playing your own game because, truthfully, it often felt like you guys clearly don’t. Hopefully, these kinds of practices will continue in the future and help bring the dev and players’ perspective closer since, admittedly, the War Thunder community wants a lot of different, and often conflicting, things.
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Damn good news to be honest! I really like this mode but there are some issues. (What is absolutely normal cause it’s a new mode)
Because of the imbalance, maybe it would be enough to adjust the amount of players, for example give the blue team 2 or 4 more players. This would even be realistic I think.
But I think I wouldn’t want both teams to have the same kind of AI vehicles. This would make it a little bit boring. Adjusting the amount of them could be enough.
Because of the rewards, I would suggest to massively increase them FOR NOW. Just to get more players to play this mode and get more opinions and results. After that it could get changed again. But I think it would be great for this mode to get good rewards especially since this mode requires more time (and that’s a good thing in my opinion!) I think the normal RB matches are way too short. But of course we need short game modes too.
So a reduction in the number of SAM sites isnt being considered? If you want players to use teamwork to defeat sam sites then they need to be worth attacking. Right now, overlapping SAM coverage makes it nearly impossible to get close to the SAMs and destroying them from far away is out of the question. I cant fire ARMs at them from high altitude or the sames will shoot me down and i cant fire ARMs from low altitude because they det intercepted by Pantsirs or ITOs. There just needs to be a reduction in the number of air defences, and possibly players, across the map or a much larger map is required.
There’s also the issue of munition interception. In the April version AAs wouldnt intercept any bombs, only missiles. Now they intercept absolutely everything and they seem to never miss. It seems like saturation attacks arent even effective since multiple SAM sites and convoy SPAAs with attack your salvo together.
And the reward is to low, before and rn we only get air arcade RP and SL reward despite we playing a air RB mode.
So fix the reward first then spek other problem
People still enjoying the struggle of the event if the reward is higher than now.
make the reward RP and SL 1:1 to air RB
No adjust nothing
Just 1:1 to air RB.
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Please let us play. We are in downtier. We want to enjoy it too
Ok, all of these additions sound extremely cool in concept and I hope to see them added.
Personally, I’d increase the reload time of every SAM. Perhaps to about 5 minutes (the buk irl takes 13-15 minutes) however the argument could be made that each SAM could have a reload based the size of missile it fires. For examples the buk has a fairly large missile so to reload one tube would take longer, whereas an Sam with a smaller tube would take less time to reload. Either way, 20 or 30 seconds to reload EVERY tube of a SAM is still way too short in my opinion.
Anyway, this update has gotten me excited in the mode once again and I look forward to seeing these changes and updates implemented.
Developing new maps for Escalation is a great idea. Being able to play ships and also helicopters is also gonna be great, it depends on how you can guys implement it but with this we can probably finally have combined arms warefare.
so still no tank only mode… i love that air players get what they want while ground suffers
I pray that you actually fix all the current issues and bugs that are now in the gamemode and implement all of your plans listed above (besides mirror matches, this will be the one thing that will most likely ruin it) because it would be the single best thing ever, just, please, implement it with care
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“The Reds’ anti-radiation missiles make it easier to penetrate the Blues’ air defences”. So you recognize that RED have better SEAD missiles but instead of giving BLUE side modern SEAD weapons you just put in MORE AA as a fix. This was not the fix that was needed!
And the SL/RP rewards are a joke!
2 Likes
If the SP for ARMs increase, can we also increase the SP for later, more modern AA systems? It is not fair for gun-only SPAAs to have same SP as something that has ESA radars, gun and missile system, yes I’m talking about Pantsirs and other modern AAs.
I love that they plan on adding lower tiers for Nuclear Escalation but only the 60’s-70’s? An early Cold War era version of this mode with late props and early jets and the B-29 as the nuke carrier would be amazing. Please consider extending the BR range even further, this mode has so much potential.
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Blindly adding CAS spawn points in Ground RB will not improve the gameplay experience at all. Instead, encouraging all types of players to participate in air combat is the only way to balance CAS. (In other words, you should only be eligible for CAS if you win the air superiority battle.) This would also help boost the sales of various premium packs.
Some might ask, ‘Why not just play Air RB?’ My answer is: CAS in Air RB is basically just PvE; there is absolutely no real air-to-ground interaction. If I get destroyed by an aircraft, I want to find a way to get revenge in the air, not just grind in the mud playing some so-called ‘tank FPS’.
This mode is everything ive ever wanted in sim quite frankly. I understand why they run the playtest in RB (since its a play test, they’re testing out balance and gameplay, and as such need the largest sample size possible).
I truly hope they port the mode to sim as well eventually. They could even just run a handful of sim rooms for this event specifically per server during playtests, just to see how it plays for sim players as well. They’d likely get quite focused and valuable feedback imo.
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