I’m no master of code, but I propose a balance change for bombers with the introduction of the Tu-95 Bear and the B-52 ‘Big ugly fat “fellow”’ to give AI gunners specifically (not human commanded radar controlled turrets) a higher accuracy and range than in current live server gameplay.
The proposed buff is a shot accuracy of 8%, which doesn’t sound high until you get into guns, rate of fire, and amount of guns. 8% hit rate for rounds is roughly 20 out of 250 fired rounds, with multiple turrets or guns per turret, this adds up quickly. However, given this would be the maxed out crew, it seems realistic, while the lower value could set at 4% to represent untrained or lower skill crews.
Given these values, I’d also like you to know this is in the range of 750 meters to 1500 meters, where their accuracy vastly lowers at further ranges, so we don’t accidentally have the old school gunners that were a reincarnation of the terminator.
However you also have to take in for account of literally changing your nose direction will throw off rounds that would have hit if you were flying straight.
While this would be great, it’ll never get implemented as it directly goes against the deathmatch meta and makes bombers not a free kill, which fighter players will bitch and moan about.
I feel like manual gunners aren’t terrible though. I love using my gunners to snipe cocky fighter pilots.
A player doesn’t mind being killed by another as long as it’s due to their opponent’s skill and effort. Merit always feels fair. But do you really think there won’t be even more bitterness and complaints when what kills you is an automated AI, and the reward goes to a player who did nothing? You can tweak the numbers–make the AI more or less accurate–but you can never balance the perception of unfairness that such a system creates, nor the satisfaction of securing the kill yourself. The best move is simply to scrap the AI and give players all the tools to control the turrets on their own
I hope you’re joking if you think turret gunnery is easier than using forward-mounted guns. The ballistics are completely different and totally counter-intuitive because of the extreme deflection angles involved.
Turreted aircraft already have the ability to manually control the guns. What “tools” would you add to help them do better?
Asking players of bombers to do the work that 3-8 crew normally would do seems a bit much. There’s a reason 4 engine bombers have such a crappy spawn-to-air-kill ratio.
And how would it work for two-engine bombers with only 1 or 2 turrets that rely more on maneuvering than the bigger bombers? You no longer want that 1 turret defending from attacks from behind to function independently of the player? Planes like BF110-G, Me 410, P61, etc…
The problem is that there is no middle ground between blind ai gunners and aimbot mode. The only decent compromise i could see is to make it so that if the player starts firing at an enemy in gunner view but then switches over to pilot view, the ai gunner continues firing with aiming skills that get better over time. So the attacker is on a timer, and the bomber player has to survive long enough until the either the attacker gives up or the ai gets sharp enough to hit.
There are a lot of ways to encourage manual gunnery and improve its effectiveness. The biggest one is fixing the trajectory divergence; right now, half your firepower is just wasted because of it. Another example: add enemy auto-tracking so that when you switch to gunner view, the turret is already pointing at the enemy.
What unavoidable bomber task needs that much attention and can’t be done from the gunner view already? Aside from the bombing moment itself, which literally takes a few seconds. You can still maneuver with just using the keyboard. You don’t need pinpoint accuracy since you’re not using forward guns, so rolling and pitching is enough to basic evasion and reposition.
Also, it would help to have a way to pull the camera further back in gunner view so you can actually see what your plane is doing.
Instead of relying on auto AI gunners or abusing gunners that can fire during high G turns or upside down, we change the system to just manually aim at the target and the AI gunner open fire themself.
This fixes the convergance issues by boosting the accuracy of AI gunners depending how well you aim from a central point of view and also could stop gunners from firing when they shouldn’t really be doing it.
I think on the B-29, one or two target positions controls and aims the guns so that they all would hit a target at a specific range and deflection.
At the same time you could have two gunners fire on completely different planes, instead of all guns merely focusing on one aircraft with the current manual aiming.
Right, now it’s very gamified how you can track an aircraft and the gunners will magically follow the lead of an aircraft, when they shouldn’t even be able to see it.
The point is it can be done. It’s not impossible or even that hard. Unlike a fighter, you don’t need a long dogfight. Most kills should happen within a few enemy overshoots thanks to free-moving turrets, so you just need to dodge enough to keep the enemy near you.
