I don’t play RB too much, but that was just to point out that this kind of problem already exists in RB.
Yes, because if it would solve the main problem with the planes, while bringing ground AB players to grind out plane trees, it would be a motivation for gaijin to add more planes to those nations that are missing out.
About the bomb reload in the air though - I would prefer it not be there anymore in the game and you would have to get back to plane spawning point at specific altitude at least to get bombs and rockets, because it would prevent indefinite climbing. But that’s the balance and maybe just option to have players hunting down bombers without time limit would prevent such situations before it would happen.
The point about RB is that the problem is similar - SPAAs in both GF AB and RB are not a deterrent against planes. But in naval somehow you start caring about your plane. I don’t know about 9 naval targets killing - balance in naval is tricky because it’s easy to kill multiple small boats, but not that easy to kill big vessels. It’s a similar problem of planes having same BRs for both ground and air battles in RB now that they are solving by splitting BRs between the modes. In ground modes it won’t be such big discrepancy between different tanks as it is in naval, so it should be easier to balance it out.
Not exactly though - having to get some significant amount of points to spawn the aircraft makes it so that some of the better players on the ground would have to leave their best tanks or get killed nad lose them before jumping into the plane and on top of that getting a second plane would not be as easy as in squadron battles. On top of that - again - naval and squadron battles have/had instant bomb fuse and reload in the air, which significantly affect your effectiveness. Imagine how many time would you be able to drop bombs with heavy or even medium bomber if you had to return over the airfield at specific altitude to reload, and how effective you would be with forced fuse.
You need to separate thinking about the plane spawn systems from specific modes, from the balancing gameplay mechanics that are added on top of them. BR offset of planes against ground vehicles in your lineup, forced bomb fuse delay, bombing aim reticle in 3rd person view, no reload in the air, turret-top machineguns working like AA guns on ships with a toggle - all that should be to our disposal to balance things out, but first step is making dying in aircraft penalised properly.
Basically what you want is to nerf planes to RB level, just short of making them disappear altogether, while I just want to use them to the best of their capacity, and ideally use them to help with the tank grind. For plane RP I can play air or, to some extent, naval. I actually like the current system, what with everyone starting on the same level.
It’s already bad enough that they made the ground marker disappear for fighters, though I guess that helps open top vehicles. It was fun strafing them…
I didn’t say that I want to nerf things to RB level and that all those should be implemented, just that there are a lot of mechanics that can be used to balance planes against ground. Planes are still a lot easier to fly in AB, so even if all those nerfing mechanics where to be implemented, it’d still be better than in RB.
Yes, but again - if plane will be yours, the removal of marker for fighters will not make sense anymore as this is just artificial attempt to force players into covering the bomber. Separate this being now in the game from potential spawn system implementation, markers may or may not be implemented.
Air mission is flawed and is unfair to everyone involved. Because it can’t really be fair, it’s based on RNG, and since it has effect on the battle, because it has to, otherwise it’d be useless and unused, such RNG affects the outcome of the battle, for one team a good uninterrupted bombing run will decide the tide of battle, for another team in another match they’ll have consecutive bombing runs that are ineffective because of being intercepted all the time.
With your own plane and unlimited time it is at least clear that it’s your skill deciding how you try to go around enemies approaching you in the air, until we get to spawn camping problem, where taking away mid-air reload of ordnance would counter this issue and issue of climbing up on top of the combat zone.
Even if we discard the approach of being able to use our own plane, and having given a random one, an unlimited time that costs a lot is better than lots of short air missions with forced RNG deciding whether you’re effective or not.
I quite like the idea of using the Naval AB mechanic, it works well in Naval and CAS is not a problem in either coastal or bluewater because of it… that and the effectiveness of AA is better in Naval, in ground its a joke until you start getting up to SAMs.
SPAA needs massive improvement in the game between Ranks 1 to 5, since most are guns. It is bizarre to me that I can slap a bomber in the face with dual 40mm SPAA and they tank it like a Maus in a full down tier, yet when I play a bomber in Air AB, I get my planes wings and tail blown off by a ruddy 12.7mm.
In RB it’s a joke because most of the people can’t aim without lead indicator, so they don’t even try. In ground AB it’s because you can strafe without caring about anything. Also note that naval spawn system has a BR offset for the planes because vessels have a lot more guns. It could be the opposite offset for ground making it so that you’re allowed to take lower BR plane than your tank lineup BR.
Also I think that on top of that, having a toggle for turret top guns to fire at approaching aircraft automatically similarly to how it works with naval vessels would do miracles because then it’d be harder for the planes to approach, and in most cases you’re visible on the map and marked anyway, so you’d toggle it off when you want to sneak around.
The thing with not being able to destroy something - that’s another problem here that the game is rigged against you doing the tasks in timely manner, and it’s just that against planes you don’t have a repeatable scenario to be 100% you’re cheated by the game, so it’s even more rampant. It won’t change until we play with our own planes.
Ive been playing a while. Im into playing random vehicles
I like assisting teamates.
GAB. Plane suicide and an over abundance of planes screams that Gaijin is at a crossroads.
Maps are way to small. And the constant same spawn locations are eyeroll boring.
planes suicide killing takes away from the cat and mouse fun of ground combat.
in many matches there are simply too many planes.
way to many high yield bombers
planes spawning behind enemy lines is nonsense
enemy planes spawning behind friendly planes is also nonsense
CHANGES NEEDED:
Planes count as ingame deaths
add 1 or 2 more spawns inkeeping with plane deaths
get rid of high yield bombers GAB
fighter deaths count as .5 deaths
light tanks/armored cars/ SPAA count as .5 deaths
get rid of capture points and use a type of map control. Map area control of sorts
relax on the one shot kills. Allow some room for “luck”
make mord structures “destroyable”
bring in more weather obstacles / and night day scenarios
add an airport spawn point with actual fixed AA guns
Infantry and motorized/ mechanized infantry squads would be awesome, but wishful thinking.
Planes need to be your own for unlimited time like in RB if this were to happen. Nobody will risk using planes if they have limited time and enemies spawning right on top of you when you take out the bomber for a bombing run. Penalising players in randomised and time-constrained scenario is a no-go and will effectively make people not use the planes at all. In RB it’s at least fair that if you see someone from far away in fighter plane, you can try to run away or evade etc. In AB you don’t have time or often even chance to do that.
I tried suggesting that since we have exception to the rule where dying in plane isn’t penalised, then maybe if this plane is killing you in a vehicle, you shouldn’t be penalised for that. The idea was that for the amount of damage you’ve taken from the ground vehicles in proportion to the damage from the bombs/rockets/plane cannons, you’d get a time cooldown for when you can bring back that vehicle as long as it was actually killed by the plane or crippled by the plane and killed off after that. But the suggestion was removed by the mods because for them it created a situation where deaths are not counted equally which is funny since you’re not penalised for crashing your plane.
Getting rid of them is a bid overkill, but a system where spawn point locations and capture point location are randomised would make it not so repeatable.
If we’d have our own planes to use for unlimited time, then I’d like the airfields to be close with just a requirement to pass over them at low altitude for repair and reload, but take away in-air reload of bombs and guns in AB. and make it so that enemy planes get definitely shot down once they get close to your airfield so it’s actually safe to do that thing. It would mean that if you want to camp up high, you better conserve your ammo. If you try to play aircraft in RB and run back to reload, you’ll see that it takes time to do that and it would balance out the guys that use bombers all the time and get back to their tanks.
I really don’t find CAS to be much of an issue in GAB. The limited time people have in planes basically means that they function as a “killstreak reward”. Players get a short-term burst of power from the aircraft and then they’re forced back into their tanks. In GAB, CAS does not decide the outcome of the match, ground vehicle gameplay does.
Making them into a spawn will introduce all of the problems from GRB into GAB, which is a bad idea to say the least.
With it working as currently where the RNG can rig the odds of you doing anything because you have limited time to do anything before you get shot at in a bomber, it’s not acceptable to penalise player for this. And it would be really hard to implement something that figures out if it’s player’s fault for crashing into the ground when he’s also being shot at which affects flight mechanics when damaged. Take a look at all the situations where game is counting your damage plane as a kill despite you being able to still fly, which gets really cool to try and land such heavily damaged plane at airfield, but game’s already counting it as not possible to control and forces you to bail out. There’s no correct solution for fairly penalising players for using planes other than making the conditions fair which means the same setup as in ground RB or naval AB where plane is your normal vehicle to play until you get killed.
Ground RB has proper setup for this which makes some equipment increase the point cost significantly for the plane. Good example is that you can rush the point and cap it on 3.7 and be able to jump into XA-38, but you cannot do this with armor piercing rounds in its 75mm gun, but you need to kill something and do some assist on top of that to get enough points to effectively use the gun, at which point it means you probably have to pick a vehicle that can survive some combat a bit and maybe it’s not worth bailing out right away. It would make a lot of sense to be able to pick out a heavy bomber with some semi-useless loadout in contrast to how unmaneuverable it is and need a lot of points to actually take out a loudout that makes sense to use that thing, because it means either you have cover to be able to go drop bombs and get back safely, or you’re going to waste that big amount of points in attempt to change the tide of battle while knowing you will loose the plane after that.
The planes are a problem to balance because they are not idiot-proof to use. This causes a lot of people trying to use them to lower down their stats. First the helicopters should be made in a way that you can easily shoot with them, then let’s get back to a discussion of points required to take out advanced ordnance - it’s already the same thing in ground RB where you can start with early helis, but in most of them except for some soviet ones, you can’t pick out a good guided missile from the start.
So exactly the same approach as GFRB and naval - a spawn point system and treat it as normal spawned unit and not a limited-time power up.
Yeah, until it actually does. The new “reward” system makes it so that I sometimes can do 3 bombing runs in a row. I think this works like this: if you make more than enough kills for the heavy bomber while playing the objective, there’s higher chance you’ll get the 3 air mission points after surviving your initial flight. And if you manage to make 3 kills or more with bombs and survive, or something similar, it also has high chance of you getting those 3 points for another air mission. I’ve had many matches where if I was the first one to pick out a bomber thanks to be being able to do like 4-5 early kills with VFW (I do 3 kills and kill one or two more during the count down to air mission), I do a bombing run that is successful and I get another one, and if in another one I also kill a lot, I get the third one. These things happen.
And also this means I’m denying the opposite team the opportunity to use the bomber. And not only that, but playing in a squad you are able to know when the current air mission finishes to be ready to have higher chance of taking the bomber for yourself and denying it the opposite team. While playing in squads of 3 or 4 we often do this that there’s always someone from our team doing the bombing run.
The problem of planes in RB is that there’s no lead indicator and you have to spend a lot of time playing SPAA to actually start doing something. This means a lot of people don’t bother, so if you want to play tank, there’s high chance that SPAAs start popping out only after a lot of people are pounded with bombs out of their spawn points so they are forced to take out the SPAA. Give players both in SPAAs and in planes the lead indicator that’s in AB, and it’ll be a completely different dynamic in those battles. The problems don’t translate 1:1 from GFAB exactly because of the fact that the conditions in those modes are different.
It may work against campers, but it makes the conditions complicated to show how these work. Look at how they are unable to make an indicator that easily shows how much more points you need to be able to get nuke. And now you want to add something the the base requirement - they definitely won’t go for it.
And while it sounds interesting, this might mean that now you are penalising the players that play SPGs and don’t charge the objective, so it’s another point against going this route.
If this somehow gets implemented it would need to come with another change as well
Enemy fighters no longer spawn immediately BEHIND the bomber.
I have crappy luck with this - when I get a bomber, enemy fighter spawns right behind me and no matter what I do, I’m shot down before I have a chance to drop bombs. BUT, when I get a fighter it’s 1.3 km away and the enemy bomber is about to drop bombs.
Really what they need to do is allow max of ONE plane per person. Once you earn it, it stays available until used. Use it wisely.
I agree completely. So many times I’ve hopped into a bomber, there’s a fighter right behind me. I can barely drop a single bomb - let alone dropped anywhere near an enemy vehicle - without being immediately shot down. CAS in WT is an absolute joke.
Try doing this after you have completed all the tasks or when you don’t do tasks for the season for some time. It’ll start getting better :)
But yeah, the RNG with plane spawn location comes from the fact that in limited time for the whole encounter, there’s always going to be a loser so supposedly the RNG is supposed to shuffle this somehow.
About one plane per person - interesting idea, I don’t think I’ve seen this one. But if you do it with current system, it’s going to penalise the players that get unlucky to use the plane when others do and they’ll have others on their tails. It’s just better to implement the system from naval / ground RB.
With that said, I do believe that all planes and open top vehicles/boats should have some kind of suppression mechanic implemented so when you’re being shot at, it affects the crew that would be able to shoot back and your visibility, so chasing bombers right on their tails and strafing SPAAs wouldn’t be that easy.
I’ve had two matches with my squad mates where they would cover my back and tell me I’m clear to bomb when I was already lawnmowing with my props because fighters split me in half, just to see my bomber fly over the battlefield straight when I got back to my tank. I was stupid to not capture this, but I have a video of similar situation where my bomber stopped in the air in spawn location, while I could see SPAAs shoot at something flying over the combat zone, only to see the bomber teleport to the other side of the map after the time limit. I do believe there is a possibility to have multiple outcomes in a single air mission because of those three situations.