Solving GFAB CAS issues WITHOUT removing planes

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.

It’s about getting the bomber when other players have points to go in as interceptors. If you limit it to one plane per game and someone can’t do anything because of interceptors spawning right on his tail, it’ll be even more annoying.

If you only get one plane per game, I was assuming enemies could no longer spawn right behind you.

IF for some reason they continue to allow that, at the very least the bombers should spawn at a much higher altitude. That way for fighter to intercept they must climb, giving bombers a chance to drop ordinance.

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There was a time two years back when every week or two for around a year there was a new thread in discussion about arcade on the CAS…

Big part of the player base are people who are mainly playing planes and I guess gaijin is most experienced in catering to their needs and wants because the game started out with planes.

Also big part of the player base are grinding whenever they can, so they will use the bombers to score additional points.

Also about the guy that you mentioned - how did he get the first streak to go into the plane though? I know there’s a luck factor in getting the reward points to use the planes again, but it’s rare to keep doing the same thing. And to get “free” points, it takes most of the match while being around the fight.

If this is with current setup, it’ll be even more annoying to people. Right now to do a clean bombing run you probably need to score quick 3 kills early on before anyone else can jump on the interceptor. But when you do, it’s a lot easier to score. Imagine what happens if every air mission is like this.

For me this would make the game unplayable, it would turn the GFAB into a CAS fest because every bombing run would be unobstructed unless SPAA takes care of it. And at the same time if you get a bomber with poor loadout, it’s penalizing in comparison to everyone else getting some good loadout.

The GFRB/Naval approach is the correct one. There’s no reason to do it differently in a hacky RNG way like it is now. In naval it would make more sense if the game was coastal vessels only, because if you take a look at the dynamic of the naval battle, once planes are out, people stop spawning in coastal vessels and that’s it. That’s why naval feels like a bad example to follow, but it’s as if everyone started pulling out a maus with twin AI-controlled/AutoAimed SPAA turrets on top of it’s turret, and this is not happening in the ground battles.

There’s a ton of things that could have been done better in the game, but suggestion threads for gameplay improvements are barely moving forward - just some filler stuff is being pushed through to devs.

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I am not surprised as it is an obvious issue with the game.

No streak is needed in GAB. All one has to do is spawn and wait for the plane marker to highlight then they can jump into a plane. A plane in this game-type is a free life so if you get shot down you do not have to worry about losing a re-spawn. This makes it appealing to those who like bombing ground forces and still have lives left to spawn more planes if they get shot down.

The ability to use a plane only lasts for about 30 seconds (?) to a minute, but there are points above the map that you can fly to and immediately spawn in another plane. This is how that guy was able to stay in the air for most of the match.

This allows a person to continually be in the air, able to bomb spawns with impunity, and continue to do so throughout the match.

I honestly do not know if one can actually grind planes in GAB as you do not know what kind of plane you are going to spawn in, only that it will be a fighter or a bomber, depending on what type of plane you choose to get into. I know that the few times I have spawned a plane I had no idea what kind of plane it was until I was in it, only that it was a fighter or a bomber.

I get it, but there are many, many players who came into the game due to the ground battle aspect, as I did.

I played COD and COD 4 for years, becoming very, very, very good at it, but got back into sim racing and got bored with the game. Sim racing can be a grind due to testing set ups for the major events such as the Daytona 24, Bathurst 12 and Sebring, which come one after the other. I turned to this game to get a break from the sim racing grind and wanted to fight in tanks. It seemed like fun.

it still is but the planes take away from any ground strategy you may try to develop because if you do get a superior position and use that position to hold a cap or take away from the enemies main thrust to a cap, one plane can ruin that strategy. Another problem is that the AA in my levels is very iffy at best. I have more success using my coaxial or commander’s MG and baiting the plane into a head on so I can shoot it with my main gun, than any luck I have had with AA.

The problem is that then distracts from the ground game and even opens you up to being pushed.

I like the game but I play it for the tanks, not the planes.

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I think the solution is call ground RB what it is, combined battles.

Two improvements I think are absolutely necessary:

  • All manually aimed SPAA should be balanced around their anti-tank capabilities.
  • Fighters without ground attack weapons should be spawnable from the start of the match.

The reasoning for the above is as follows:

SPAA:
All manually aimed SPAAs in the game are worse at engaging planes than any fighter at the same BR. What I mean is that any Battle Rating 3.7 fighter will be better at engaging enemy planes than any 3.7 SPAA by a considerable margin. With the exception of vehicles like the Lvkv 2 and the AMX DCA40, all SPAA are inferior to any tank of a equivalent BR by a considerable margin. What I mean is that same BR 3.7 SPAA is worse in the anti tank role than Any non SPAA ground unit at the same BR.

What this means is that SPAA is severely compromised in the anti air role, and severely compromised in the anti tank role. This isn’t to say that skilled and practised players haven’t made SPAA work quite effectively, I’m just saying that they’re unfairly position in the BR in my opinion.

Allowing Fighters/Planes with no ground attack armaments to spawn at the Beginning of Ground Battles:
Ground RB currently offers a very unique version of Air RB that is an interesting halfway point between Realistic and Sim. There are no player markers so each plane needs to be visually identified, the lobbies for aircraft are smaller allowing for a slightly different dynamic when dogfighting. Ground Attack Planes and Bombers have meaningful and fun targets to engage on the ground. Heavy fighters and interceptors have a greater chance of being useful as the meta won’t purely be dominated by fighters.

Finally, by having planes spawn at the beginning of ground matches with SPAA that are decent threat to other ground vehicles, air defence becomes an active part of the game as opposed to reactive part of the game. The SPAA will have targets both in the air and on the ground from the beginning of the match making the vehicle more meaningful to play. That way you don’t end up in a situation where you spawn an SPAA and have no targets. Players are more likely to spawn SPAA at the start of a match rather than waiting until they die to CAS to begin the anti aircraft role.

Sir.

This is GAB, not GRB - very, very different system.

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I know how this works. But actually I tried if you can just stay idle and see if you will get any points for the plane and it takes a lot if you just stay out of fight. The fact that the guy didn’t have any kills in tank, doesn’t mean he didn’t participate in a fight, for example just bouncing the shots on his own.

Once again - tried staying idle and seeing how much time it takes for the game to give me single point for a fighter and it took most of the game time if I was far away from the fight.

“allows” is an overstatement. That’s RNG based on how successful you were in doing something and surviving the air mission in your plane. Sometimes I have air mission without any interceptors and I get +3 points after killing few guys with bombs and multiple times, so I can run 3 or even sometimes 4 bombing runs, sometimes I get interceptors on my time, kill the same amount and survive despite being shot at and I don’t get any points back. It’s not a reliable assumption that someone will just use it to be continuously in the air.

You’re not grinding/spading the plane, they are set with specific fixed setup. You can earn research points to unlock new planes iirc, or at least helicopters?

One thing is that this is their role to counter such situations, the other thing is that the air mission setup makes it so that you cannot really have players actively controlling the air continuously with their fighters to prevent bombing runs, and it’s just RNG deciding the air mission chances to succeed in bombing.

SPAA aiming is a facade in the game - it’s not skill, but RNG based on how spaded your vehicle and the crew is and the game will rng-out the chances depending on who’s death is more likely to extend the average player play time.

Planes should have ground AI SPAA targets that are a challenge to take out before they can get through to the ground combat zone.

I like that the planes are in the ground battles, it’s just implemented incorrectly, but at the same time, I would love to have public competitive matchmaking with the modes like the tournament 4v4s without planes. But it seems we won’t have that because it’s a risk that everyone would jump to that showing how many don’t want to play with aircraft.

No, the problem is not that SPAAs should be tank killers. They should be a deterrent against CAS, so there needs to be some mechanic that makes it so that you don’t want to strafe targets with AA guns. Doing things that correspond to what you have in naval would make sense - make all tanks with turret-top .50 cals and such have this switch to auto defend against aircraft. Imagine everyone on your side automatically shooting at strafing dude like in naval. Or you can switch it off when you want to be sneaky.

Why? You want less people playing tanks from the start? Also what defines “without ground attack weapons”? You can still strafe open tops. I do agree though that not requiring points to take part into interception or cover mission could change it for better.

Like I said many times, they are not a deterrent and the game is direct “bare-metal” implementation of balance between those units (SPAA and CAS) without taking into account human factor and actual strategy of use of those units.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I think you only take out spaa if you’re supposed to make those kind of kills and if you want to defend yourself when bombing run starts. I don’t really believe this would have effect if those planes can’t actually do CAS work.

Ah yes I see, don’t mind me then.