Solving GFAB CAS issues WITHOUT removing planes

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.

  1. Maps are way to small. And the constant same spawn locations are eyeroll boring.
  2. planes suicide killing takes away from the cat and mouse fun of ground combat.
  3. in many matches there are simply too many planes.
  4. way to many high yield bombers
  5. planes spawning behind enemy lines is nonsense
  6. enemy planes spawning behind friendly planes is also nonsense

CHANGES NEEDED:

  1. Planes count as ingame deaths
  2. add 1 or 2 more spawns inkeeping with plane deaths
  3. get rid of high yield bombers GAB
  4. fighter deaths count as .5 deaths
  5. light tanks/armored cars/ SPAA count as .5 deaths
  6. get rid of capture points and use a type of map control. Map area control of sorts
  7. relax on the one shot kills. Allow some room for “luck”
  8. make mord structures “destroyable”
  9. bring in more weather obstacles / and night day scenarios
  10. add an airport spawn point with actual fixed AA guns
  11. Infantry and motorized/ mechanized infantry squads would be awesome, but wishful thinking.

Thoughts?

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Agreed, planes should spawn on their side of the battlefield.

No, means that they would never be used. I would just take out 2-3 more tanks and instead use that to get more kills + win the match.

Somewhat agree, though I do not want my bombers only having 50 or 100lb bombs. Ideally loadouts just need a heavy lookover.

But like.
Why.
This is unnecessary, just give LTs some buffs.

Eh, no. As another game mode though, sure.

Integral to how WT works and inconsistency is bad, so no.

Agreed.

No point, given how AB aircraft work.

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Finally constructive comment. Thanks
This is the kind of back and forth needed.
Now if Gaijin could get onboard lol

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.

At the very least:

  • lost planes, lose tickets;
  • no spawns from behind;
  • like the idea of interceptors from the front;
  • re-balance load-outs, no 28X500lbs or 16 hellfires / PARS3, etc;
  • re-balance helicopters, the same Tiger is a full BR lower in AB then RB;
  • rework flares and lock-on range on helicopters;
  • CAS can still do stuff after kill message and reward;

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.

Require the player to cap a zone first or get intelligence awards as an additional thing before spawning any sort of aircraft.

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.

Still waiting for a chance seems we need to wait another 10 years hard for them to make the game better, a serious disappointment.

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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.

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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.

2 Likes

The suggestions passed seem to avoid anything expensive or risky to implement to keep the status quo. This is indeed counterproductive…

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.

That teleporting sounds like desync.

man I love it when CAS spawn’s in right behind are ground spawn

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Not sure what you mean by the bolded part.

I hopped on this site today and saw this thread.

“Hey! People have started a thread about GAB CAS! Great!”

Then after reading a few posts I noted the date of when the thread started. I started playing in March (?) and the problems are the same, if not worse since I started.

All concerns are legitimate and problematic to the game as it makes for a broken game, IMO.

The problem lies not only with the issues mentioned but the fact that there are many players who only play to CAS. I ran into one of those players a few nights ago. He came into the server and spawned a plane as quickly as he could. He had no ground kills when he spawned a plane and he probably sat in spawn until he could spawn a plane.

He only came to my attention because he bombed our spawn with a Welly, taking out five of us that had just spawned.

That got my attention and I kept an eye on him. His feet did not touch the ground, so to speak. Every one of his ground kills was from bombing spawns.

I challenged his behavior and he said he only came in to pad his stats by bombing spawns and I should not give him grief about it. I was a cry-baby troll.

I mentioned his attitude toward the other players was more of a troll seeing as his sole desire was to ruin the game for others by bombing them in their spawn. He did not have to fear losing a life or spawn in a plane, all he had to do was wait for the queue to open up and jump in another plane.

That is the attitude of most of those who use CAS in GAB. They are incapable of getting that kill on the ground, thus they use that free life to get kills they otherwise cannot get.