Another thing is that graphics settings have an incredible impact.
I recently found why my FPS was so bad (Geforce Experience overlay) so I went and upped a lot of settings.
Suddenly, dark maps environments make spotting significantly harder due to the higher illumination quality and shadows.
In air sim, if it’s a “dusk” match that lasts a few hours you basically get night battles (well, twilight) and it becomes impossible to see any planes below you with my settings - perfect for CASing/bombing.
Ironically, I had far less issues with my worse graphics settings as the planes kind of popped against the dark ground much better
In ARB, the “impossible to see” is offset by markers but… it’s a bit hard to predict/aim/etc if all you see is a red dot rather than the wings and all that.
I already wrote it somewhere, how the night battles were in the game, so it wasn’t pitch black, but a full moon was simulated in the game.
So visibility was fairly good, ground searchlights and AAA missile tracers were well visible, but marker display was limited…
As for the jets, the positive would be that players would learn more to understand the use of afterburners, not like before, when the game quite painlessly allows you to use afterburners, regardless of the temperature of the engines, for the entire duration of the battle …
And of course with jets, without a system for flying in all weathers, some jets would not be very usable…
And it would be an advantage for the bombers, because they have the best conditions nowadays, especially at night…
Even at full moon, people hated it and adjusted post fx to make it a little easier to see tagets.
And since the game engine changed to 2020, the night has gotten even darker.
You have your opinion, I have mine and we definitely disagree… I will always push clouds and night battles because they were fun for me… One of the main reasons they shut them down was the constant crying of players for anything that was somehow more difficult, but there were and are a lot of players who criticized this decision …
It was still better than nuclear sun, those were the only battles where I really needed the PostFix setting to switch … night of day …
Well, if you’re doing well in the game…
Imho the fellow player simply underestimates the additional efforts of playing at night and with heavy clouds and ground fog - at least if you want to play a shooter and not a “get shot”.
So if gaijin increases the difficulty to turn around matches like playing 1 vs 4 just based on the fact that clouds or darkness kills your situational awareness they follow a certain pattern of intended RNG. Whilst with clear weather you might be able to set up 4 individual 1 vs 1s - with heavy clouds you run mostly in 1 vs 2-4s…
Imho the game play is already heavily influenced by RNG and gaijin is doing their best to eliminate actual skill as decisive factor. Similar to their 16 vs 16 policy and MM settings - they are optimized to please rather new players…
As written somewhere else - i learned that weather condition settings are affecting all 3 main types (Air, Ground; Naval) as the effects are the same. So the rather negative game play effects in Air RB might be a result of a hidden CAS nerf for the fellow Ground RB players suffering from CAS…
Last, but not least - “bad weather” is imho also connected to your server selection and when you are playing. So if you play early morning in Europe on the US server you have way less troubles with heavy clouds - even if this is just my observation and might be confirmation bias…
… I was interested in this debate and I would say that the problem is that the air games in WT are mixed with different types of aircraft, for many types of air combat…
Just speculative…
_it would be good if CAS aircraft and other aircraft adapted for low altitude combat were placed purely in tank battles…
_ the others would remain in air battles and the type of targets on the maps could be adjusted for them, for fighter-bombers, and other bombers…
As for night battles and clouds, in tank battles, if I remember correctly, there are already parachute flares, they actually burn for about 3 minutes depending on the type. And in air battles there are a lot of AI planes that could drop the same flares, for fighter-bombers, planes flying at higher altitudes, they would have to use radar…
Of course long-range missiles type 54 Phoenix and others…
I think that for many planes on a small area of the map in the game (12 vs 12 planes on the map of the size of the actually used airspace - e.g. Golan Heights = 85 km) the missiles should be reduced, the missile sheet of individual planes could be of a similar type e.g. 1-2x Phoennix or Sparrow and 2x Sidewinder…
And since there are no strategic bombers in the game, it could be set up that MM should try to match each team with 3-4 fighter bombers, which would have a bomb load and 2x Sidewinder-like missiles, for self-defense…
The maps are still of the tactical type, where it is mostly a battle at low altitudes in a small area… So long-range missiles for difficult-to-maneuver targets ( strategic bombers ) do not have much justification when Gaijin asserts that the main game element will be the skills of the pilot-player …
If the combat game area were extended over the entire area of the game map, usually it is about 180x180 km, then logically all restrictions would be abolished.
We’re talking about Air RB here, aren’t we? I only like flying planes, and I will only play SB with my VR headset (which has problems atm).
What do you mean the outcome of the match is dictated by RNG? What, if there are clouds, you automatically lose? That logic doesn’t hold up, because if you switch perspective to your enemy team, then they win because of clouds, making your claim invalid. No, the clouds do NOT change the outcome of battles. It only changes which tactics are effective in battle, meaning people that do not adapt, lose. If you put a little time into thinking things through, you can think of solutions to your cloud based problems, other than crying to the devs to hold your hands.
The effort is to climb above the clouds.
I don’t see how low cloud cover prevents you from flying just at the base of the cloud, peeking out gently to look for ground pounding enemies. You don’t need to dive hard on every single target to stay safe if you have clouds to cover up your name tag.
As for your claim that “nobody climbs that far up”, that’s also wrong. What do you think people will do when there are thick clouds? Just stay in them and do nothing? No, they will eventually come out to get something done. Some will go below, some will go above. Because to kill someone you need to physically come to someone.
You ever tried turning off your engine and opening your cockpit? Maybe finding an enemy this way could be fun. Give it a shot. There’s probably a good reason the devs made mapping opening the cockpit to a button a possibility.
Your plane absolutely does not want to turn, it bleeds energy very quickly and falls out of the air at low speeds. It also accelerate very badly.
On a map with sparse clouds, you can fly in a disciplined fashion maintaining altitude and diving down on people as they get distracted, isolate groups of enemies and energy trap them when it feels safe to do so.
With a thick cloud cover and the enemy team flying low, you’re forced to get below the cloud layer to be able to judge where they’re flying and their energy levels. You must give up a lot of position to be able to even think about aggressing the enemy.
A strict BnZ plane on a map where the highest flyable altitude is 1 km high and there’s like 700 meters of divable area is not going to work at all. Enemies can just pitch up into you and you’re dead. And as said, climbing over the clouds does not work as nobody else comes up there other than a few bombers.
As for your advice to open your cockpit and turn your engine off in sim:
It’s sim. Simulator. Immersion.
Turning off a single-engine fighter’s engines is a good way to die
Opening your canopy over 300-400 km/h is not going to be fun at all for your physical health
This isn't even a fast late-WW2 fighter or early jet (its never exceed speed is 410 km/h). I don't think she's going to be echolocating enemies.
You wrote all of that while still in a mindset that you’re not hidden in a cloud.
You can do the exact same in cloud heavy maps, but you must have much better team coordination for that.
If you’re at your top speed, 1km of alt can give you enough energy to work with while staying safe. Nobody will pitch into you if they don’t know where you are coming from.
Are you going to ignore my point about people eventually needing to come out of the clouds?
Never have I died from turning off engines at appropriate situations.
If you’re concerned about speed, adjust it. You can afford it since you’re hidden inside a cloud, and your enemies are twiddling their thumbs inside a cloud, instead of coming out of it to find someone to engage.
I mean, currently there is borg spotting (aka shared spotting) in the game, which means that even if you are inside of clouds and can’t see the enemy, the enemy can see you from dozens of miles in some cases.
This also works against the AI: if an enemy AI plane sees you, even if you are some distance away from enemy team, the enemy player will know your position.
If there are no clouds, you are still not spotting the enemy teammates, but you can see the enemy team as a few pixel dots, so if you get into a dogfight with someone, you will know in advance that the another enemy teammates will try to get a third party kill, so you can choose to continue the dogfight or run away from them.
Clouds covering the entire map in the current ARB encourages passive play and reduces the diversity of the fighter’s gameplay.
The spotting system is important in this game in any BR just like how bringing targeting pods with top tier jet was pretty insane back then.
The clouds as a balancing technique is bearable, but can we at least remove the thick fog that seems to surround 9/10 runways during “thunderstorms”??? I’m SO SICK of having to do a mock IFR approach, trying to decipher where on earth the runway is only to slam into it when the clouds part 30cm above the ground. Sure, clouds in the rest of the map can contribute another level of nuance and realism, but I can say for any sane minded individual that this “mechanic” of covering the runway in clouds only infuriates.
This changed with the current update - i had yesterday a match (1 vs 1 as last players) in which my opponent in a Spitfire farmed 5 Ai planes below the clouds without triggering a single marker (“borg spotting”) by them. I was in a 410 at 4 km alt and was just able to track him by the disappearance of the symbols of my ai planes on the mini map.
