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