i wish the nuke jets did not default to min fuel.
The F-4S already dominates the game mode in the lower bracket so giving everyone the F-4J would probably tip the scales much more in favour of the US side
2 Likes
please i beg of you to keep this gamemode as permanent event. its so much fun!
1 Like
This is mostly taken from a topic I created earlier about my current issues with the event, when I wasn’t aware you should apparently write them here. Hope this doesn’t violate the rules.
Note: I only know the full details for the lower US bracket, so things might be slightly different for the russian side or the higher brackets, but the underlying issue still persists.
How Nuclear Thunder does not reward playing the objective and incentivizes freeloading
To drop the big nuke (the one from all the promo material), 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 is not enough. 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 2 flanking runs along the shorelines to the sites from the coast airfield. Then, back to a fighter, farm more players and hopefully 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 lose 250 SP for the small nuke.
-
Doing the 2 runs themselves gives you only about 700 points in total, so around 500 gained, while taking up a lot of time to get to the target and back.
-
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 further away coast 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 (apparently a bug).
This means: It is time and points consuming, inefficient, and unrewarding, thankless thing to do. It is however the only ground objective that you have to clear, which someone has to be dumb enough to do.
Dumb enough because if anybody else is trying for the big nuke (like at minimum 2 other guys) they can meanwhile just easily farm an excess of 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, while you get nothing. It is a zero sum game that is stacked against playing the objective.
I would really appreciate some changes to address this, because investing ~40 minutes to do the correct thing and then getting no reward in return because of the design is not particularly enjoyable.
Some surface level ideas:
-
- Rebalance the SP rewards, for example:
Increase for ground targets destroyed with nukes.
Increase for destruction of the S-300 / Patriot sites.
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.
This would soften up the zero sum game mentioned before.
2 Likes
Is anyone even getting a match, it seems lower bracket russia, higher bracket us. Can we please revert that change?
I think the nuclear blast radius is too small in regards to damaging aircraft, I had a nuke dropped .1 km in front of me and I survived 😅
Perhaps if it’s limited to 2 AIM-7F, to match the Mig-23
But why would you go high :) ?
I had 27 kills with the F-4S yesterday. If you know how to make it work you can easily carry the team and unlock the B-52 before even reaching 3rd escalation level
1 Like
Can’t drop the big nuke anymore LOL people just camp airfields now
Lvl 3 comes up and boom they are already waiting for you to spawn
that would probably be better. Though the F-4E gets 4 AIM-9Ls in this game mode which is also pretty strong
1 Like
Look man, belittling people’s stats or activity is childish. Much better to focus on the discussion about nuclear thunder.
4 Likes
Still zero news about AI AA nerf, so sick of hugging ground just to get killed by impossible missiles anyway
5 Likes
Guess what, mig 23 mld can do same thing
Just tossed those nukes.
Ignorie him, he brings nothing of value to the conversation anyway
It can but with the way the mig 23 radar works it’s a little more difficult. And HMD really helps
I got matches, it was back to back what’s the issue?
Maybe, but still, something needs to change on us side