Nuclear Escalation - Development update from BVV_d

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
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First of all, thank you for this amazing game mode, and thank you for being so transparent with the development.

I think you made a good decision keeping it asymmetry. A major selling point of the game is that it’s somewhat realistic, we’re not just flying “skins” of aircraft.

These are good changes, however I think one should be careful nerfing this stuff too much. Over time, players will learn and get better at the game mode, and dealing with these threats - and I’m afraid if they’re nerfed too much it’ll become menial.

I think something that would greatly help keep the pressure off the players, is to actually model the earths curvature, obviously I don’t expect you to actually curve the ground of the map, but rather make it impossible for radars to track targets that would be below the ‘curve’.

At 100km distance, due to the curve, the ground has ‘dipped’ 784 meters, at 50km it’s 200 meters, at 20km it’s 30 meters. Pretty substantial. I think this would also enable a fun gameplay element too in people ‘sneaking up’ on targets.

Good.

Sounds good, however please don’t lower the mission length further. I really like having a long lasting mission, your contributions feel more impactful and it’s nicer when joining halfway through a match.

For me, creating new locations would be awesome. Keep the large scale (240x240km), however maybe add a cool element like a mountain range, or deep valleys stretching through the map?

This is awesome, however please add this to Console too! Currently on PS5, you can’t add aiming points through the map. The map is also in desperate need of a QOL upgrade on Console, zooming in and slewing around is slow and clunky, you don’t have time to deal with aiming points when flying around at all.

Please keep up the good work! The transparency and updates have been amazing lately, don’t let all the complaining bog you down.

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65

So AGM-88C/A should cheaper than Kh-31PD? Bearing in mind the what 20+ year gap

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I had to log in so I could leave a feedback.
First things first thanks for amazing mode, you know it’s current state and it’s good to know the people out there care what players says.

Helicopter addition would be massive upgrade in lower br’s, those 60-70 that was mentioned to be added later. Current helicopter state with lmur and all the other fire and forget weaponry wouldn’t be fun to use. My dream to have ah-56 passing by flooding enemy conwoys with fire while phantom dogfights mig-21. That’s the best br range that I really want to see in EC like that

Btw can you guys fix air sim reward system to something like grb sim?

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One of the things I find a bit disappointing is how we have this huge 260km map, but then the entirety of the match is placed inside a 120km square in the middle. I’d really like to see the entire map used.

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yes adding the naval units was the first step i hope now they add something in the mountains as well

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I agree. Everything feels very grouped up and packed. Would be more interesting if the targets and airfields were spread out more, in different locations on the map, not as uniform.

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Fighting the AA is currently very frustrating. It is just not fun to have systems that should not be capable of even detecting munitions consistently destroying anything and everything that is fired their way

Another big issue with this gamemode is that it relies too much on SHORAD instead of medium and long range AA.

It would be so much more fun to actively evade medium and long range SAM while ensuring it continues to track you so the missile doesn’t lose track of the radar.

There’s nothing that screams teamwork more than having your teammate make a SAM site fire at them while you go in closer and fire your ARMs at them, using terrain to sneak up undetected, only popping up for a few seconds then going back down while your missile is homing in on the enemy tracking radar that is illuminating your friendly

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Not only that, but saturation attacks don’t work either as they reload in seconds compared to the hours it takes in real life. (Not saying it should take hours in-game, but at least like a few minutes at the bare minimum)

It should be possible to overwhelm even the most advanced SAM’s, when currently it just is not because they have theoretically infinite ammo to fire.

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Bring back older ARMs to lower tier planes, such as su-17m2 and su-22m4, a-7, a-6, Mirage, french Jaguar and so on.
Older narrow band ARMs arent most effective, but they can make some planes actually worth bringing in GRB.

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do more separate please. maybe you should try to limit the br difference to ±0.3. It is no fun at all to play a 13.7 jet to fight 14.7 enemy. Also Call Back the PL12.

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So far I haven’t been once in a situation where I needed to notch its missiles, you just turn cold and they don’t kill you.

It’s a pretty sad state to be honest.

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Definetly the best BR brackets for this gamemode its from 9.7 to 12.7

At lower BRs your armaments are so close distance used, you will get easily shot down by the AI aimbot (literally AI its so powerful they can one shot you with the .50 cal of a mbt). And in higher BRs its just an ARH missile festival taht deletes all the fun from the gameplay.

Also I think that when they go back to the original bracket, they replace the op BUK with a spaa more similar(ish) to the HAWKS, like the 2K12 kub (SA-6), which have almost similar range, ammo quantity, speed and guidance.

imagen

Also bring back nuclear bombers with its huge nukes and add new ones for each nations, that was one of the key objectives a player persued and encourage to play the gamemode. Also airfields should die from one 30kt nuke considering how hard its to deliver it.

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Glad to see some good feedback, hopefully the community and Gaijin can work together in good faith to make War Thunder as good as it can possibly be!

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BVVD, it’s great that you have been putting work into this mode and all, but things such as the OSA’s having 100% accurate SACLOS aiming from 10+ km is not going to be good for you, or this mode either. Another thing is that gatekeeping this to players with purely top tier aircraft will not end well for you, as the free aircraft in the April Fool’s event worked well, and many players congratulated Gaijjin for having done so; this needs to continue.

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From testing the ADATS of the test drive, even if you pre climb outside the radar range to above the radar horizon and fly over it the ai still spots you, it seems the ai doesn’t use the vehicle’s radar but it knows where all players are at at all time, and just targets you when you enter the weapon’s range, not the radar scan sector.

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Clearly you haven’t been playing the game mode if you start off by saying you don’t want to nerf air defenses. THAT is the biggest issue in the mode. Look at from this perspective, if air defenses were as effective as they are in this game mode, then there would be no air forces in the world. SAM’s should have a probability factor that they detect players and a separate smaller value for munitions. IDK if you model radar cross sections, but that would be a good first step and have the detection code as a function of cross section, decreasing as cross section decreases. Then, you need to add instability to SACLOS tracking; they are far too accurate. Then, you need to make the short range SPAA/SAM’s have their radar on. It makes no sense how they can detect you perfectly with their radars off.

No matter how you look at it, air defense in the mode is horribly over performing compared to any realistic measure. I would be fine with having them decently accurate, but a short reload time, really dude? Even if you and teammates drain a BUK of all it’s missiles, within 30s it is reloaded again. That is insanity.

A lot of the modes problems with air defense and balancing stem from the fact that the premise of the mode is flawed. You have created a map and mode and just stuck targets randomly about. This is the equivalent of trying to read a book and skipping the setting and character development. And thusly, we see cracks in the gamemode. Ask yourselves this, what is the premise of the conflict happening? Why are the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ fighting? Why here? What targets are there? Would the Commanders in the military actually decide on staking a battle here? See what I am getting at? You do not have a premise, a mission, a real target.

The community has given you plenty of concepts in the past of a gamemode should be done. A simple example would be an attack on a port. You have sea targets, clustered air defenses, factories, railyards, etc. Why is their an attack on the port? To secure it and prevent the enemies from receiving supplies. You could make the mission dynamic over the course of the battle, like you did many years ago. Have a carrier fleet off in the distance with lot’s of AA defense. Red team has to do considerable damage to the fleet to dissuade the sea deployed forces in a pincer move with their ground units. Or if the ground units take too heavy losses, the sea assault is called off, or maybe even relocated further back. Do you understand the vision I am painting here? THIS is what players want and enjoy. Something with a purpose, difficulty baked into the concept, not from overperforming mechanics.

My recommendation is to take a look at Ace Combat missions. While the game is arcade-y, their dev team put thought behind map design, battle layout, targets, etc. You need to replicate that here.

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80

So you have acknowledged that long rang AA is an issue but refused to address its core issues? The reload nerf is a nothing burger since attacks on SAM sights are often spread out over minutes and there are only 4 planes that can carry more than 12 munitions to reliably overwhelm a SAM sight. Furthermore there is no effective means of coordinating your attacks with your teammates do to the lack of a proper voice chat system that lets you communicate with your entire team so “teamwork” is out of the question as you cant expect all players to be playing with friends on discord. Red SAM sights are now slightly easier to kill but blue air defense got a net buff not a nerf. The main issue however was never about whether SAMs were too hard to kill, the issue was that they have immense range and can shoot you down while you are trying to land at your own airfield and to add insult to injury no player could dispose of a SAM sight on their own. Again most players are not actively in a squad and playing with friends. All you had to do was move the SAM sights back a little bit so that you could fly over the middle of the map without issue which would both allow for more of and encourage pvp and pve game play.

You say you play your game but I fail to find any evidence that you actually understand it or its players. This deeply saddens me as war thunder has been my favorite game for 6 years and its not fun watching something you care about so much hurt itself like this. I hope this game mode gets to continue to be worked on not just its self but for the game state as a whole.

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Tactical nukes wouldn’t work, it would just be Washingtons, TU-4s, and B-29s for bombers

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Because we do not have ECM or coordinate targeting for GPS munitions in this game (coordinate =/= the mark in the map, its not that accurate and you still need visual so the target appears on map).

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Rare Gaijin W?

Let’s see how it turns out in live battles

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