Pilots are almost 100% immune, free to drop bombs whenever and wherever, farming kills supper easily. Even if you die to CAS, and manage to kill the plane with your useless SPAA (90% of SPAA’s under 8.0 are useless and a last resort), you’ve already lost a advanced position and you’re now are in a SPAA, for at least one respawn, and then the guy on the plane gets into a tank. It’s a lose lose situation for the ground player.
Not to talk about the constant spam of CAS at EVERY BR, except above 8.0 because of radar/HE-VT. Go to any match from 4.0-6.7, you’ll almost certainly have at least 5 planes in the air at the same time.
My solution is lowering the BR’s of every single spaa 1 whole lvl (8.0 → 7.0 and so on), adding some sort of commander guidance (Voice that tells you if you’re aiming properly), if you scout a plane its easier to shoot at it (Not quite as OP as in Arcade but something similar) or making planes cost at least 1000SP without ordinance.
This would ruin the game, not for cas but for ground targets. Some spaas are exceptional at anti-tank duty, imagine a 2.3 ostwind or a 7.7 gepard, would make playing tanks more painful and incentivize cas as all the spaa are trying to get ground kills
CAS is OP against defenceless tanks, however against SPAA or American tanks with .50 M2 machine guns their effectiveness has been significantly hampered due to the OP nature of SPAA, which is of course that you’re immune to CAS. CAS cannot attack an SPAA unless the SPAA is hard focusing tanks - which they do and is half of the reason that CAS is so complained about. CAS is not overpowered, it’s just that there’s such an asymmetrical power balance between CAS/SPAA/Tanks: SPAA > Aircraft > Tanks > SPAA and thus is a loop of death doom and dispair
hmm, SPAA is pretty OP in my experience. Versus air, I think you could argue one way or the other…certain SPAA at certain BR are really crushing CAS… mostly in that 8.0-10.0 range. But from somewhere around 5.0 and up all that machine gun AA is just abusing the small CQC oriented maps. Even if you survive as a heavy you are missing your tracks and gun, all for the low price of 70 sp. I think you can spawn three of them if you never get a kill. I would encourage everyone to play CAS, it is indeed a part of the game, and is at least 75% of the fun the game has to offer.
skill issue. and not just that, but i think the issue is a systemic skill issue
i play a lot of spaa, and a lot of planes, and i almost never observe anyone who knows what theyre doing with spaa. they always fire from way too far away, allowing me to just avoid them, then later i kill them with my plane because they will always get bored/distracted and start driving around, or start trying to capture points and get killed by a tank
i think the problem is that everyone sucks at spaa because nobody actually wants to play it. they always bring it out after they die and dont have enough spawn points for anything else, or after they get killed by a plane and want revenge, which means they arent getting the prep time to position themselves before the planes show up, and you definitely arent ever going to get good at spaa if the only time you use it is a rage-induced reaction to getting bombed. to succeed at spaa you have to dilligently sit and stare at the sky and wait patiently for something to show up, and then for it to get in a spot where you can surely hit it. spaa is war thunder’s equivalent of dreaded guard duty in militarys
plus, many maps dont actually have any safe spaces for spaa, you cant do spaa if youre constantly fighting for your life. when i want to play spaa i often just leave matches when i get some maps
it also has to be noted that until radar, spaa in war thunder doesnt have any of the aiming assists like rangefinders or whatever that they had in real life
They should put in place a new tech within the APS of ground vehicles telling you wether or not you’re locked on by a jet / heli / ground vehicle.
And if you are an that a missile is in bound, you should be able to get a warning, so you could smoke. Or even an automatic smoke launch from the APS system.
The tanks with LWR are able to get a warning when laser guided munitions are targeting them.
As for other munitions, i dont think any tanks have a way to detect them since the targeting is passive.
Most people are fairly clueless about using a spaa.
They start blasting the second they see a dot in the distance, hitting absolutely nothing besides clouds and a poor seagul and are only giving away their position.
The “spray and pray” method rarely works, but people are so afraid of other spaas might hit them first, so all caution is thrown out the window.
One of the reasons why my winrate has been so high as Germany 7.0 is purely because the Allies keep jumping in CAS and wasting all their spawn points because SPAA blows them out the sky with ease. With few exceptions, each BR is covered with SPAA that can more than cover ground forces. The only reason why CAS is so prevalent is because people refuse to use SPAA (inb4 BUTT BUTT WAHHH I WANNA USE TANK WAHH).