Assault is a great mode for one thing; once per day taking part to an assault battle gives you a booster. The longer you hold the better the booster you got is.
However nothing is more frustrating than loading in a Tank Assault Battle and getting a map like Mozdok. You see in this gamemode you are facing waves of bots who can instantly aim at you with precision and kill you especially in top tier.
So you need cover and you need it on all sides because the waves come from 3 opposite directions. no cover equals instant death and respawning during a wave means instant death too because you usually respawn out of cover and cannot reach it without dying. So when you get a map like Mozdok with little to no cover on your point, no matter what you do you’ll have a very, very small reward and you won’t have fun.
Gaijin this gamemode can be improved very easily, so please do it. Give us cover, remove big open maps or put cover on the homepoint. You also could give us multiple respawn points or diminush the accuracy of bots.
In any case please do something. The gamemode is not pleasant as it is
Opinions vary, from my experience (I made it to rank 98 pretty much only with playing Ground Assault) Mozdok is together with Kursk and Japan the better half of the six available (below BR 8.0) maps.
Ardennes, Maginot, and Sinai are a lot worse, Fulda too in some ways. When it comes to Mozdok, goofy as it sounds it’s just a matter of doing it right.
- Any assault map without fast AA is masochism: get blown up by a plane, respawn in full view of at least one tank group.
- Standing in or near the reload circle is suicide.
- No place inside the base is completely safe.
Yes, Ground Assault could be easily improved. Map filter would be nice, because my absolute refusal to play Sinai in the shape it is now costs me nine minutes every time it comes up, which is more than other maps. The whole map rotation mechanism needs work. For each time I get Kursk, I have 8 to 10 Sinai and Maginot - often enough I don’t want to play Maginot either, due to my favourite BR having bot planes dropping two 500-kilo bombs and the base looking like the moon after a while. Respawning in a bomb crater? No thanks. Ardennes is similar, thanks to the idiotic idea of having the bot planes in BR 5.3-6.3 fire half-ton anti-ship rockets (Tiny Tim, also used by the bots in the higher brackets) at ground targets.
For Mozdok this means do not linger in the base at all. Respawn, get out, try to find a less exposed spot. That of course depends on the bot spawns, a bad selection can royally screw the group.
Gaijin has jacked up the AI, including spawned numbers. It was sometime in February, if I’m not mistaken. Notice that in Assault ground you cannot see the amount of spawned AI enemies like you can still see in Assault ground. Often now it’s just an ocean of red and they are more spread out, so you end up being killed faster (less spots to hide). Bots will ignore enemies in front of them and snipe you from across the map, if you are exposed. AI spawns always put you in a crossfire. One moment you are safe, next moment you get shot in the back.
I also have noticed that they have decreased number of these yellow marked resupply boxes and now they are more out in the sticks. It’s much harder to get them and often you end up being shot in your back from new wave while you are speeding to your hiding spot. At top BR I very often end up with no ready rack ammo and it takes forever to just load one shell. Repair also takes forever, even like 35 seconds. A game could be over before you repair. Waste of time and income. I often end up j-ing out and respawning. It’s quicker than trying to go for some resupply crates (depends from the map).
Also, the AI enemies are more aggressive and faster. They all have aced crews. How about them guns being able to shoot in 2 different directions at the same time? Main gun shoots forward while a machine gun shoots in the other direction at an incoming plane. My tank can’t do that.
Bots will snipe you from more than 1 km away while going full speed over rough terrain and while flying over some rock outcroppings. How about them killing you while you see their turret being turned away from you by like 20+ degrees?
The changes are always ‘sekrit.’ Nothing is constant in this game, except persistent suck.
The bigger problem with the yellow icons are the muppets who bring a PvP loadout to a PvE match and keep snarfing up every icon they see. Their “reasoning” is to avoid being shot in the ammo storage - which means that they have never thought about how the bots could possibly work. They’re controlled by the same server which handles the player tanks and their loadout. I’ve been shot in the last 4 of 87 rounds of a Panzer IV H because the bots “know” how much ammo I have and where it is.
Also, bots hitting players through forests. That one isn’t hard to understand, given that players stop to think for a moment. Bots aren’t people, they don’t use eyes for seeing. My guess is that they have a very fine-grid coordinate system for everything in, say, map square C5. To keep things simple, I’m working on the base of four object types: player vehicles, run-over (trees with brown bark, thinner trees, bushes), destroyable (some buildings, trees with greyish bark), impenetrable (rocks, hills), on a coordinate system of at least 10.000 per side of a map square, quite possibly 10 or 100 times as many. Any object of the first three types will be disregarded as non-obstacle when firing at a target. This is a possible explanation why bots can shoot through windows or narrow gaps between buildings while driving past, or why they can shoot without stopping the turret rotation.
If a player used such a mechanism, it would be an instant ban because it requires to aim at a target that is behind an opaque object and fire in the 2/100 of a second it becomes visible. It’s usually called an aimbot, but then again, that’s what the Assault bots are. Admittedly Gaijin added some fuzziness to the whole thing, or the bots would hit with every shot.