After these changes with “buffed rewards”… the rewards are still about the same, AKA piss poor. The meta now is farming ground for sure, and I ended up even dropping the nuke with the T95M after focusing fully on ground farming with the su-25.
All I got was about 3500SL per minute with premium…
ngl
if you think the NT rewards are bad, then you should look into air sim rewards
Regarding Nuclear thunder of course.
For context, pretty much all of the time I’ve put into the event so far has been ground pounding, I have almost no interest in the center furball
Recently gaijin upped the score for killing ground targets, thinking this would be enough to make players spread out and actually do SEAD. From my experience I have seen more ground pounders in my matches, but the majority of players are still just doing the center dogfight.
This is because as it stands, doing SEAD is simply not fun. For me, it is the veggies that I have to force myself through before I’m allowed to attack some convoys for about 2 minutes (after I RTB, rearm and fly back out) before the SAMs respawn. In any other air game I’ve played, including the game this mode is based off, SEAD is my favorite thing to do.
As it stands, the only way to effectively do SEAD in War Thunder is to missile bait and use your ARMs after the SAM has fired. I’ve seen claims that this is “realistic”, and while its kind of sort of partially true, it is also just so wrong.
SAM operators are not stupid, if they see an ARM headed towards them, the realistic behavior is to drop lock and intercept the ARM, or just turn their radar off to avoid it. That being said, here are some some reasons I think the current SEAD gameplay is not fun
Too many SAM sites - SAMs should be MUCH more concentrated, and there should be fewer, but more difficult sites to attack
Currently there is an absolutely unreasonable amount of individual units. This is an issue because it drastically limits your options for attack. It also results in frustrating moments where you get smacked by random convoy SAMs that just happened to drive over a hill smack you from a random angle. It also means that players are less likely to coordinate as there are so many different “sites” to attack at any one point. In my opinion, SAMs should be MUCH more concentrated, so they are more predictable for the player, and may result in teamwork as there are fewer, but more difficult sites to attack[/color]. SAMs should also not be allowed in convoys at all. Convoys should be gun based platforms only to prevent random, frustrating deaths.
SAM aggressiveness and accuracy. SAMs are insanely aggressive and will fire on anything that moves, and dodging missiles IS extremely FUN but has to be reasonably possible.
This was an issue earlier on in Nuclear Options development, where their long range SAMs would immediately fire on you the moment you popped out of cover, and it lead to a frustrating experience of being constantly spammed by locks even if those missiles had no chance of killing you. This was changed and it is much better now, with SAMs only engaging at higher PKs. The same problem exists in Nuclear Thunder where SAMs are insanely aggressive and will fire on anything that moves, including air to air missiles, even at max range with tiny probabilities of kill. This is unrealistic and unfun behavior. It is also near impossible to defeat these missiles once locked, aside from putting a physical barrier between you and missile. Dodging missiles IS extremely FUN, and gives the player a good dopamine hit. But it has to be reasonably possible. Currently it is unfair and frustrating
Player count is too high or objective concentration is too small. Once players start spreading, SEAD will become extremely difficult due to constant interception.
Currently not a big issue due to everyone clumping in the middle, but once (if) players start spreading out, it will make Ground Pounding and SEADing extremely difficult, as chance of meeting an enemy player will be extremely high. You can say “but your teammates will help you”. This fails to account for the fact players do not care about their lives and will divebomb easy kills even if they know they will die to another to enemy. We see this behavior in Air RB already. Making the objective area wider or making the player count smaller will give more breathing room for SEAD and ground pounders to operate and have FUN.
Player tags. Player tags cause massive clumping issues.
This is a similar problem to number 3, but i think player tags on causes massive clumping issues. With player tags on, the range at which players will see and fight each other is around 15km or so. So players fly around with these massive “contact” bubbles and it causes massive clumping as more players are drawn to the swarm. With player tags off, these “contact” bubbles are more like 5-10Kms and give the map more breathing room as players spread out a bit more to find each other, and arent drawn to the big shiny player tags in the middle.
This would be one REALLY good thing to test before the event ends. See if player behavior changes without player tags. If you wanted you could keep player symbols visible on map, so things like search radars are still useful, but this is up to Devs
Even if we solve all these problems, the gameplay loop of actually doing SEAD and hunting SAMs is just not fun or rewarding, so here are some suggestions for fun SEAD gameplay loops which could be reasonably implemented into War Thunder.
Saturation attacks. Probably the most common in other games. Involves putting as much munitions on target as fast as possible. The goal is to get as close as possible to the target to minimize the time the target has to intercept these weapons. This is a fun risk reward cycle, trying to sneak up and fire as fast as possible. Currently near impossible with how UNREALISTICALLY fast the SAMs acquire and fire on new targets.
Fear attack. SAM operators, upon seeing ARMs being fired, will turn their radars off, making them unable to effectively intercept targets. This is an extremely fun gameplay loop, where after a player fires their ARMs, they have a small amount of time to either hit targets (depots in WTs case) or hit the SAMs directly. This could be implemented into the game when a SAM knows it has been targeted by multiple ARMs, it will switch off for a small amount of time, and rely on a REALISTIC version of inaccurate SACLOS guidance with LONG acquisition times and poor accuracy. This would mean players can operate around this small window of relative safety to get bombs on target.
Pop up attacks: What it sounds like, if a target is on top of a hill, a player can sneak up behind cover, expose themselves for a very brief window to get bombs on target. Currently this is not possible due to the SAMs unrealistic engagement time, meaning the moment you expose yourself you are fired on. You can get a few moments of safety if the site is fully offline, but often they are activated by a random missile flying by so their radars are on and immediately wipe the floor with you. Yes I know this currently CAN be done, but its extremely hard to pull off and reliant on luck more than skill.
Happy to hear others thoughts, and if you think I am stupid. Id really like to see this game mode succeed so I hope a dev will read my feedback and take it into account
Arf…
For those who dont think its possible to get a strategic bomber now, here ya go:
I would’ve had it much sooner in the game, but a series of extremely unfortunate events almost made it not happen
Sincerely hope there are plans to lobotomize SPAA before this becomes a permanent mode. They’re FAR too powerful as is.
They really arent… They’re in a great place where they are threatening and punish mistakes, but are wholly manageable if you deal with them appropriately. Making them unable to fire on the move would be good though.
If you could put the ARM on your own load out the F15 and F16…you can already kill them with the slow aircraft that have them!
Now add a Flanker with the KH31!
Does that change the fact that they’re far too powerful?
Also they quite literally track THROUGH MOUNTAINS AND SOLID GROUND. They’re far too aggressive, there’s far too many of them, and dodging their missiles is nigh impossible especially because half the time you don’t get a radar warning from them because they’re tracking you optically which is just ridiculous from a gameplay standpoint.
Make sure to clean yourself up when you’re done making excuses for Gaijin’s balancing.
The only thing that needs to be changed on them is thst they can track you through the Ground and shooting on the move!
If you could put ARMs on the F-15 or F-16 it wouldn’t change anything because they’d get intercepted anyway.
The other thing that needs to be changed is how many of them there are, how aggressive they are, and the fact that they don’t need to have their radar on to track you with their BS aimbot!
I simply can’t use the tail mingun on the B-52 for some reason. I’ve changed all the gunnery controls and nothing works. However, I can use the gunners perfectly fine on the TU-95M without any problems. Does anyone have a miracle solution?
Initially, I thought it was a bug since the aircraft could only be tested in “test flight,” but I see that’s not the case.
ARE YOU WATCHING the videos people are posting…you’re Blind man!
I just realized if this becomes the permanent mode in its current state
The impressive loadout of the f18e gets reduced to
Agm65f
Agm65e
Agm62
And the apkws has a big maybe
The rest is just garbage that’s too slow and gets intercepted
And the rockets are to inaccurate on the f18e
They can miss a base in air RB if not close enough
I’m going off my own experience. Did BVV_d himself pay you off to shill for Gaijin’s abysmal balancing or something?
Yes? If they are easy to deal with consistently with some knowledge and a bit of practice, but punish mistakes, that means they are in a well balanced spot. They aren’t so strong you cant reliably kill them, they aren’t so weak you can just ignore them.
Oh, your experience of getting cooked! What about my experience of not? I guess that settles that XD
If they are easy to deal with consistently
I’m going to stop you right there because they aren’t. They don’t punish for mistakes, they punish you for existing. I’d say to stop being a Gaijin shill but they probably paid you pretty handsomely.
