Preface: I can only speak for the lower bracket USA side, things might be different on the russian side (in terms of if the Patriot batteries are a strictly required target) or in the higher bracket (mainly relevant to point 3 since you can swap to a better fighter than the F4E, which might circumvent the spawn location issue)
To drop the big nuke you currently have to take out two locations of S-300: the one closest to the bomber spawn and the one in the middle. You have to kill those, just taking out the radars doesn’t do it. I’ve tried that already and my B-52 stayed alive for about 20 seconds.
The imo optimal solo strategy goes as follows: At the start of the game farm as many players as possible. The moment first stage is available, select the 5kt nuke and do two flanking runs on the sites from the shore airfield. Farm more players and drop the nuke from the bottom spawn.
The problem is, that this way you can only make the 2.500 SP by the moment the 3rd stage is reached if you get lucky.
Go try it out yourself, see if you can make it. You will probably be short 500-200 SP when stage 3 arrives, because:
- You have to lose 250 SP for the small nuke.
- Doing the 2 runs themselves gives you only about 700 points in total, so around 500 gained.
- Once you are finished with the two runs you have(!) to go to, and land at Airfield #1 or your spawn for the F4E without the nuke is locked to the shore airfield if you crash/ die / J out after repairing or rearming on the shore Airfield (#2?? I forgot the number), which loses you even more time.
In short: It is a time and points consuming, inefficient, but necessary activity. And if someone else is trying for the big nuke (like at minimum 2 other guys) they can meanwhile just easily farm an excess well beyond 2.5k SP in peace at maximum efficiency from Airfield #1, and then to add insult to injury, can only drop the nuke at the moment 3rd stage hits because of the work you put in.
I would really appreciate some changes to address this, because investing ~40 minutes to do the correct thing and then falling short because of the design is not particularly enjoyable.
Some ideas:
- Rebalance the SP rewards, for example:
An increase for ground targets destroyed with nukes / an increase for destruction of the S-300 and Patriot sites / a reduction for air kills.
The first require an investment, the second are literally the only relevant ground objective if you want to win, and the third are technically neither of those. - Have 3 main airfields at the back, so 3 people per team can drop a big nuke.
