Gunners on aircraft are not accurate enough to deter attackers unless you take manual control.
They are also extremely restrictive about when they fire causing dead zones to be more pronounced rather than beginning to fire as the plane approaches the cone of fire. This hurts lead.
Read the comment I replied to for that.
Gunners are more than accurate enough, with max level + expert being able to engage at 1.5km for some aircraft, and in my experience past 2km in some others.
Which aircraft are you referring to?
Don’t think he’s referring to any specifically it seems more like he doesn’t want to learn how to lead his shots in the gunner position.
I personally don’t, that’s why I let my gunners do it xD
If you refer to manual gunnery, yes correct. But the range has nothing to do with crew level or expert/ace - it simply depends on the defensive gun.
If you refer to ai gunners - please provide a replay as evidence. And read post #1 and #2 (both deal with effective ai gunner ranges) before you reply.
That’s what I was saying. Some bombers fire out past 2km (Me-264 / IL-28) while other bombers / planes with turrets (IL-2M, Ki-102, so on) usually hold off till a lot closer when they fire.
Refer what to AI gunners?
Imho this is a misunderstanding. An ai gunner means obviously that the defensive guns are not controlled by the player. So as the whole thread is dealing with ai gunners your reply was not precise enough.
As you obviously mentioned player controlled defensive gunnery there is no need to go further into this.
What are you even talking about?
I’m talking AI controlled gunner.
There is a max limit for AI’s range when they begin firing. I don’t know what plane or jet has a 1.5km limit.
Agreed most heartedly.
Tail gunners are completely useless. The only way a tail gunner shoots down a plane, it’s because you have taken it over yourself. I do fly bombers and heavy fighters and I honestly can’t remember the last time a gunner shot down an enemy plane. I fly as if I don’t have any gunners.
Wait, where do I get the free RP? You can have the SL.
I explicitly asked you:
The 2 linked posts:
#1) ai gunner ranges of 0.21 km based on data in wt
#2) effective ai gunner ranges of 0.6-0.8 km based on replay analysis
as a reply to this claim:
So as you claimed ai gunner ranges of 1.5-2 km i asked for a replay as evidence.
So if the overall tenor of this thread is that current ranges and accuracy is not sufficient - and you come with such claims there are just 2 conclusions:
In both cases it makes for me no sense to continue.
Thx for understanding!
Bring it back.
And this is a bad thing how?
War Thunder players choosing to “solve” a problem by being toxic and teamkilling anyone who doesn’t play the way they like it, I’m really so sympathetic to players who ruined fun by forcing everyone else into a 1v1 duellist meta by nerfing all alternatives.
I could say this about fighter players. They have the upper hand even if we assumed Gaijin we sensible and put gunners as aimbots at 700m or so. Bombers essentially have 0 tools to dictate any fights most of the time. Many downsides which deserve compensation in the form of functioning (able to defend meaningfully against ranges where accurate fire can be expected from enemies targetting the bomber) gunners without having to switch to manual.
The purpose of the game, per the developers, is it’s a museum. You don’t have to look far to see developers make comments like “If you find realism unbalanced, that’s your problem.”
You are again pretending this game exists to cater to 1v1 duellists and not other people.
Automating is bad and “good gameplay” consists of as many pointless tasks as possible? You make a slippery slope out of automating the game and reducing punitive burdens on the player. Fighters don’t have to micromanage their individual guns.
Gaijin put death-stars in the game, they should at least work realistically with their gunners opening up at practical ranges, instead of just sitting there and waiting to die.
Who exactly would want to experience, in the current meta, playing planes like Tu-4 or other bombers which entirely rely on defensive armament to do anything? It’s unbearably boring since you can’t even manually aim your guns, as you well know.
Criticising that someone isn’t experienced in a particular gameplay style, when they’re arguing that style needs to be buffed, their inexperience can be seen as evidence that supports them not refutes them.
Your entire contribution to this discussion is about how the game should cater to your view on how it is, but you turn around and complain somebody else is arguing it should also cater to them, but that you moralise it as you’re the chad hardcore high effort player and they’re the lazy whiner…
What’s even the problem with making flying-fortress planes viable? Don’t want to fight them? Use your superior 1v1 duellist skills to win or something, avoid them with your superior situational awareness, L337 5K1LL5 and cough cough incredibly superior flight performance cough and just win.
Bombers and planes which have turrets are mostly just packing barely useful dead weight, why can’t that be different?
Unfortunately, most of the time the thing that’s going wrong is spawning in a defensively oriented plane in the first place, like spawning in a subsonic CAS plane in current rank 8 Air RB. Gaijin set up, intentionally or not, those planes to just fail and have no meaningful purpose. Try playing an A-10 and trying to reach a base to bomb.
You just can’t avoid engagements. Lots of planes have no choice about when they are engaged, they shouldn’t have to suffer just because entitled 1v1 tryhards suddenly don’t want any challenge when it comes to the literal biggest and slowest targets you can find.
Heaven forbid a flying-fortress player have fun, that’s only for people who fly meta planes like P-39N-0 or whatever.
This was in sim, the bombers were toxic, by either mouse aiming or autogunning people down that had to use flight controls.
They were ABusing it and they knew it.
We aren’t talkinf AB or RB were you can easily mouse aim the bomber back from 1km, we are talking about fighters with effective ranges of 300-500m having to deal with gunners tuned for enemies firing at 1km.
It was a slaughter. Stopping abusers isn’t a bad thing.
I should just paraphrase Uncle J Wick here and say “skill isssue” and go on about how I can easily nail planes at 1.2km
But in reality I don’t really have anything to say about sim. I don’t really play it and it’s been so neglected it seems pointless for me to say anything about it now.
I wish it wasn’t neglected and it practically existed outside of being used to farm RP by runway farming, but that’s sort of just how it is. It’s terribly sad that it is this way.
Outside of sim. That was then and this is now. Now we have Tu-4 getting shot down by heatseeking air-to-air missiles. We have stuff like F2G-1 or other planes with enough ammunition to just spray down bombers outside the range they can do anything. Surely there has to be a way for turret-dependent planes to exist other than just free RP pinata for whoever chooses to kill them.
Apparently they were just playing the game using what’s available to them, this isn’t absuing an exploit or something not intended, this was playing the game in a way people didn’t like so they resorted to teamkilling which is even more extremely unsportsmanlike than merely playing a way others don’t like.
Surely you can see that nowadays, killing bombers is just an “exploit” by your standards, since they’re almost hopeless unable to do something about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/1bvsjet/new_ground_rb_meta_just_dropped/
Here’s an actual exploit though.
Despite i share your view on most of your points, some things need clarifications:
I pretend nothing - wt is outside Sim a plain shooter.
From a holistic way gaijin tries to create the illusion that bomber game play in the classic sense (=PvE) would be a viable option in a PvP dominated environment.
In addition they do everything in their power to weaken bomber game play and declare whilst introducing the (s)kill bonus that “the ultimate goal of playing wt is to kill other players” - i am too lazy to look up the exact wording.
The key to a successful bomber game play was always to choose the right route to target and to avoid enemy contact. And if caught by fighters to keep them as long as possible inside their gun range, but outside of the gun range of incoming enemies.
That gaijin allows up to 7 interceptor spawns per team (not sure if there is a limit at all) vs 4 incoming bombers just proves their attitude towards bomber players. I mean what can 3 Pe-8s and me in a B7A2 do vs 4 XP-50s, 1 P-61 and 2 VB 10s?
And even if you would have cloud cover - do you really believe that the way too low setting of contrails was an accident? 5.400 meters on a medium temperature map is a joke, even the 6.400 meters on some pacific maps are way too low.
This is all hand-holding for the average point and click fighter rookie to avoid being undetected as a bomber pilot. The bug report about too low contrail altitudes is acknowledges for a year now - nothing happened.
No offense - but no clear minded bomber pilot flies out stuff above BR 4.7 in Air RB. Even legends like fmt3 with >900 days bomber game time plays around 4.0.
I was so stupid to spade the BR 5.7 Tu-2S-59 added to the Italian TT.
Why? Because you have almost zero chance to survive and you have almost zero game impact - you might kill a base or two for 300-600 tickets - the same effect has a plain fighter killing a single ai plane and 5 ground units.
And the fellow player you are referring to has his most sorties (49) in planes with turrets in an A-20 G (an attacker) at rank 2.
It is not about my view on how things are - my contribution is simply to remind people that there is no free lunch.
The bomber pilot is and was always the weakest part in a team, but before May 2020 (introduction of respawning bases) he had the chance to win battles - either by killing the airfield or killing ground like tanks / pillboxes in order to win by tickets.
I fought and flew B-29s (with ~ 75k SL repair cost) when they were at BR 6.3 - and i flew all bombers except the Tu-4 on my old account and managed to fly more than 5.000 Air RB battles in the nerfed 5.7 version of the Ju 288 - not to grind, just for fun.
But i stopped playing wt shortly after May 2020 for a while because bombing respawning bases was pointless - Gaijin deleted the win condition “airfield kill” as a result of their inability to manage bomber BRs and base health at the same time.
As gaijin rejected to transfer my planes from my old MS account to this new one i started from zero again, so my overall game experience is way higher than you see at this account. But i would not even fly a Ju 288 for free as there is above 4.3 not a single bomber able to create fun and contribute to the effort of your team to win a match.
And regarding my experience feedback:
If somebody plays 3 hours bombers in Air RB and has about 35 matches in real bombers he has simply not the necessary experience or credibility to claim changes for bombers if he has not proven his willingness to learn basic things like aerial gunnery or tactics to make his plane effective.
Imho you scratch the main issue here - but just on the surface.
When was the last time you saw a B-17 flown properly? So flying a detour and coming in with top speed above 7km? And making use of the turbo-superchargers allowing them to to extend the time a fighter needs to get in his gun range whilst peppering them from 2.5 km with AP-i bullets?
I see this in 1or 2% of the matches.
And this is the core problem of wt - too many people think that base bombing in props is easy - it is not. It requires above BR 3.0 actually more than the average “point and click” fighter pilots needs to score.
That is also the reason why i am so tired to see threads like “please shorten base respawn time” or like here “please buff ai gunners” - the overwhelming majority of these claims come from tankers or grinders on selfish tours to earn SL/XP for their next tank or their next jet.
Bombing is reduced to an almost useless tool to grind. If i view replays of friends addicted to high/top tier jets - i see lobbies full with fighters with max bomb/rocket loadouts…
Hope this clarifies some things.
This isn’t changed with the increase of tailgunner efficacy, it just provides some cover for planes with tail guns and turrets.
All of this just agrees to say bombing is pointless in Air RB and continues to be pointless. If it’s pointless then there is no harm in gunner efficacy being increased. Nothing is changed. They still can’t win the game.
The important clarification is here:
Because you are speaking from descriptive not prescriptive stance.
Me and Vamilad are prescribing how we think the game should be.
I suppose we all broadly agree that the gunner AI is underperforming
I am that.
I want CAS planes and I enjoy 4th generation jet fighters. Prop gameplay and early jets don’t interest me.
Death-star gameplay does, however, but since it’s not practical then I just use bombers to grind all the trees.
I think if we want to bemoan lack of teamwork then we need to discuss the incentive structures.
I think this is the core point.
Gaijin sets up a game which rewards only killing blows in essence. Zero-sum game - Wikipedia
Gaijin should seek to create a Win–win game - Wikipedia where ALL behaviour which broadly and holistically contributes to victory is rewarded.
There can be free lunch since this is a video game and the only scarcity is completely artificial.
To recap.
Bombers are obviously crippled and I think we all agree they shouldn’t be.
There may be better ways to play bombers, proper ways, but they’re not worth it with all the aforementiond handicapping.
At least all I and Vamilad ask is that playing planes with turrets, even with experted max level crew, doesn’t seem like you’re just a target drone for fighters to mindlessly click on.
Manual gunnery with turrets is just so crippled with all the parralax and other issues fighter players don’t have to deal with, but I think there’s no good reason that the AI gunners shouldn’t be at least capable of downing planes at distances of a few km if they get very lucky.
Fighters should be scared to engage well defended bombers instead of simply see all bombers as free lunch.
This was together with this quote:
at least an honest message why you request changes. I appreciate that.
For me it boils down to 2 different kind of goals which might have a similar approach (strengthen bomber game play with specific improvements) but fundamentally different intentions:
vs
From my perspective there is nothing wrong with both views.
But imho it is not about what intentions or which goals we might have whilst playing Air RB - it is about what the overwhelming majority of incoming fresh new players wants to have when downloading the game and get trapped within the hamster wheel of the eternal grind.
In order to satisfy the needs of this player base looking for a plain shooter and a suitable grinding tool gaijin created this kind of symbiotic game play in which one part tries to farm SL & RP with actually useless tasks like base bombing (=PvE) whilst the other part tries to farm these PvE players by killing them (=PvP).
By setting the wrong incentives (via SL and RP rewards) you have depending on your plane similar SL rewards for a base kill and a player kill, whilst RP rewards are on average 2-3 times higher for a base kill. In addition almost all bombers make a net profit even if they got immediately got shot down after the drop.
So gaijin manages to create a win-win situation, the tanker on a grinding run in a bomber vs the tanker in a grinding run in a fighter. The necessary skill set in a bomber is reduced to pressing space bar, and in a fighter to point and click with a mouse.
In addition to the total absence of any kind of useful tutorials gaijin added stuff like brain dead map design or 16 vs 16 lobbies which are purely aimed to accelerate PvE and PvE interactions in order to further lower the skill floor to participate and to shorten matches. The sooner you are back in the queue, the more you might see the need for buying premium stuff.
So if you try to take a step back - the game looks like how the overwhelming majority wants it to be - a plain shooter with a strong grinding component.
Therefore my intentions (enjoying the here and now) and your intentions (accelerating grind to get somewhere else) to strengthen bomber game play are totally irrelevant for gaijin.
If they would increase the difficulty to shot down a bomber there would be an outcry from point and click fighter pilots and they would extend the average match duration. Both are not desired goals for gaijin.
By nerfing bombers with various open and hidden “adjustments” and placing them at BRs at which there is no realistic chance for the average player to contribute and to survive (=BR 4.7 and higher) the strategy of gaijin is clear: They are just there to push the number of playable aircraft and to be food for other tankers in fighters.
Finally:
So you might see that i have no hostile intentions towards other players which do not share my passion to fly at WW2 BR ranges.
All i ask you to do is trying to take a step back and look at the whole picture:
If you think about this as a whole package you might agree that your or my view or intentions and/or requests to strengthen bomber game play in Air RB are futile - gaijin won’t change anything within their approach to treat bombers as they would weaken their business scheme:
Dragging masses of minors with access to credit cards into a PG12 f2p game with shiny top tier vehicles which need either a hell of time or money to get them. The set-up of Ground and Air modes (outside SIM) is optimized to have dependencies in order to earn money - plain simple.
Have a good one!
“gunners should be able to hit planes flying in a straight line behind you”
“gunners should be able to kill planes near your bomber”
How do you extrapolate the second sentence from the first?