There aren’t too many reasons for different nations considering it doesn’t barely factor into matchmaking any more. The big one is because if all vehicles were in the same “tree” you could make some insane GRB lineups, and a lot of stuff just wouldn’t ever be picked anymore because you’d always have access to the most meta choices in the whole game. Also doing away with separate nations would significantly shorten the grind, which is of course out of the question.
Still, imo having a “unique” vehicle just doesn’t mean much when its likely to show up on both teams at the same time anyway. It matters for sim but sim’s REDFOR and BLUFOR are jacked up anyway because of the shared trees (and admittedly, the copypastes.)
Honestly, I don’t mind it so much, Air RB would definitely not be improved by putting all the NATO planes on one side and all the Sukhois on the other. I hate to say it but the lower tiers wouldn’t either. I remember when 60% of games I would play with the A6M3 were Japan vs USA only. The USA teams just couldn’t hack it. Sometimes it would be Japan vs Russia and/or China and that was usually pretty onesided too. I sucked (well, sucked worse) at the game back then but still managed a 65% winrate just because I was playing Japanese props.
In that context, putting some of the more iconic vehicles that everyone is likely to enjoy (F-16, MiG-21) into as many trees as possible is a good thing for the player base I’d say. The teams are random anyway, so if I can get 2-3 of my favorite iconic planes from just one tree then that’s a nice relief from the grind. I would be supportive of removing the trees entirely EXCEPT that it messes with GRB lineup building by making tons of vehicles totally superfluous.
For sim I would hope they could just manually set what planes are available to each team. There’s no reason that West Germany and East Germany should be forced to fight together in a sim context.
As long as I’ve played the game (played a bit in 2017, but mostly from late 2019-2021 and 2023 to now) it hasn’t really had much historical flavor in RB. And there’s just too many planes to really make it work anyway. Personally I don’t see much difference between Japanese Zeroes fighting alongside Bf 109s against the USN and British over Spain from the total free-for-all we have now.
And as I said before, a lot of historical matchups just don’t suit the playerbase. The more technical planes will usually lose to the simpler-to-use planes in the hands of the average players. Nothing is worse than losing your entire team and being forced into an unwinnable scenario before you even get a chance to fight, and I believe returning to historical matchups would just make that more common.
The slop-ness is there, I agree, but it comes from the fact that Air RB is not the best designed gamemode, and it has never really evolved. No amount of unique planes or constructed teams could change the fact that every battle is climbing\flying left and then a single decisive furball in the middle of the map 80% of the time. Especially in the Jet tiers.
“If you want a certain vehicle, just hope that it shows up in as an event/squadron vehicle and hope that you have the time to grind it over 2 weeks/wait 3 months minimum, or fork over $50!”
Would actually be much better if we didn’t need to research the same vehicle (at least complete copypaste) multiple times, like you research M4A4 in Chinese TT and automatically grind it in French and Italian trees (to balance this you will still have to buy each for SL separately as well as all previous vehicles in respective lines; wouldn’t be applied for premiums of course).
You’re poking the lion with a short stick, it’s more an symbolic rather than logical, Algeria in reality has nothing to offer to War Thunder but adding it to France is no realistic since its major supplier is Russia and China.
in 2017 the game was almost purely allies v axis in rank 1-4
My name is accurate, it doesn’t mean I enjoy all things that exist ever
What? How does this make sense?
I do? It means you can form plans of attack based on what your team is flying and what their team is flying.
Besides, the game often WAS ONLY realistic battles with games such as ONLY GERMANY vs ONLY RUSSIA or ONLY USA/UK versus ONLY japan. It TRIED to make THEMATIC battles back then.
It is better than some people do not get to fly what they wish without grinding/paying than it is for the game to be ruined by rampant copypasta, oh wait it already was.
Players: Jesus, Gaijin is copypasting so many vehicles to other tech trees
Also players: Please add F-18 and SU-30 into other tech trees…
Right now only Japan and (maybe) China are in need of “new” top tier jet, which I hope will come later this year, and I hope addition of top tier vehicles stops here for a while so a proper work can be done for air modes which are in dire need of rework.
I feel there’s too much aberration to make anything remotely historical anymore, even among props. Sweden+Finland in the same tree can’t fit neatly into Axis or Allies, and Israel is entirely postwar but with planes as low as 3.3. Not to mention there are so many popular planes that have no actual combat record like the He 100 or XP-50.
I personally think you should either commit to being historical (The right planes in the right place at the right time) or don’t try at all. There are plenty of other games out there that paint a decent picture of what air combat in WWII was like. There aren’t many games out there with the sheer variety of planes WT has, so I think they were right to lean into emphasizing that.
Firstly, forming any kind of strategy among your team is a pipe dream in this game. I defer to your experience and maybe back in the day, there was actually a possibility of consistent teamplay among randoms in RB, but if so it’s LONG gone. But if you mean just developing a personal strategy against the planes you’re facing, you still can/have to do that in the game, and arguably there’s more strategic variety to consider in that case because you could be up against far more different combinations of planes.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the one nation vs one nation games in theory, but in practice they don’t seem to work all that well because some factions are very poorly suited to the matchup due to various factors. Also in my experience especially lately, these kinds of games always end up with really small lobbies and very unbalanced plane setups (e.g 4 b7a2s and 2 zeroes vs 5 american fighters and 1 bomber.) At any rate, these matchups are still in the game. Maybe they could add some way to toggle your matchmaker to prefer such games.
Personal strategy… flying a p51 into what you know will be all japanese planes for instance gives you solid basis for bnz rather than the current game which is you try to bnz an a6m and get jumped by the same plane you’re flying
only on small scale, not large scale like before
its literally just more moment to moment but less overal strategy, you cant form planes that go farther than 30 seconds
Because you can see the flags on the scoreboard, you can get somewhat of a picture of what you’re going to be up against. If you can’t see all the enemies but know that there are unspotted German planes on the enemy team, you oughta slow your roll and not try to bounce the zeroes that are flying low. Unless your plane is more suited to low altitude fighting, and then you may as well go try and kill them early and potentially drag down some of the enemy fighters at alt, leaving the high-alt fight to more suited planes on your team (again though, massive massive gamble relying on teammates in any situation.)
I think in specific country to country matchups, there is actually less personal strategy to be had. If you’re in American plane against only Japanese, you know what to do, and there’s never a reason to vary up your strategy if you KNOW you’re faster than every plane on the enemy team before you even make contact. If you’re going up against America in a Bf109, you can feel assured that your climbrate is unlikely to be rivaled. It becomes a lot more flowchart-y, I guess.