The overpowered annoying unfair plane and tank enemy AI in Assault Ground Arcade and possible solutions

Game Discussion Arcade Battle
96

Apparently new nuisances have been added. For about two weeks or so new planes are sometimes just spawning right next to those already there (if not taken care of) instead of coming in from a standard direction, and this weekend I’ve been twice tag-teamed by bot planes: the first missed me or did only splash damage, and a few seconds later the second blew me up.

In the general the aim ability of bot planes on the Japan and Mozdok maps seems to be lower than before, but anything shooting Tiny Tim or dropping bombs still comes in sniper quality. Oh, and in the two top BR brackets trying to hit the jets with MG fire is a near-total waste of time. I barely get “Hit” in the display, let alone anything useful.

97

That could always happen

98

These days I barely touch this ‘Fish in a barrel’ Assault mode. Tired of these Star Trek style decloaking AI spawns that start shooting with surgical precision while driving at full speed over rocks and hills from 1+ km. It’s funny when you get into a position outside of the square and the new spawned AI ignores players in front of them, shoots over them to hit me 1.2+ km away while (once again) at full speed and going over rocks and hills. How about all these fricken waves of heavy tanks when many players still grind Parts and don’t have a proper shell to even damage them? Waves of heavy tanks in the desert going at full speed over sand dunes especially baffles me. gg, gaijin
There were so many matches I would die something like 10 times from planes. You are busy fighting enemies in the front while being shot in the back from 2 other directions. It’s just dumb.

How about the hidden spots and ravines at the corners of the square that AIs go to to bleed tickets? They can be disabled, with a broken gun, broken tracks and 2 crew left, but they still blead tickets at full speed.

Funny how we cannot fire our cannons and shoot machine guns in a different direction at the incoming planes at the same time, but AI can do this.

Also funny is that when you respawn, you are a sitting duck and you ALWAYS spawn with the back turned to the enemy… like clockwork. By the time you run around to shoot, your tracks get disabled or you just die… over and over again. Stupid…

No matter how many planes you shoot down, they will just respawn and keep coming. Some matches I shot down 12+ planes, but it did not make any difference. AI CAS is just plainly gaijin delete button: you die, now you die and now you die. This game has stopped making any sense years and years ago.

99

Well, the planes have a maximum of 22 for an entire match, 2 per wave. Exception is Sinai, in the BR brackets I’m playing there it’s 1 plane per wave except the last, that one gets 2. I don’t really understand why so many players are ignoring them. Giving uncontested air superiority gift-wrapped to the enemy is beyond stupid, but it happens all the time. Also, having rocket-slinging bots blow up players, or setting them on fire/destroy engines/disable tracks with cannon fire, I don’t see why they put up with that. Worst are possibly the idiots flying in a fighter or ground attack aircraft, doing a couple loops over the base, then ram their planes into the ground instead of shooting down bots. Also, getting destroyed by bots leads to…

…the respawn problem which is bad, depending on how far a wave has progressed and where the spawns are I sometimes wait because I don’t want to pop up in full view of 15+ enemy tanks with enough firepower to turn me into a sieve. My negative record for quickest death after respawn is 2 seconds, once in Ardennes and once in Sinai.

One thing that tends to get me is that pretty much every enemy tank in Assault matches can shoot through the mantlets of my Tiger 1s and Panthers from any distance in pretty much any spot, that includes bot Tigers and Panthers at Mozdok. It’s odd how I can’t return the favour unless over very short distances of maybe 80 metres or less. For me it’s easier to penetrate the mantlet of a Tiger II (P) than that of a Panther D or Tiger H.

100

This mode is so bad that I would unironically rather play PvP to get Parts and FPE. It needs a full comprehensive rework, especially with the lack of cover and surrounded on all sides gameplay.

101

Would it be safe to say that once again the assault arcade modes will not be improved or updated in any regards with this upcoming update?

@Smin1080p_WT @Necronomica

102

Why was i tagged in this?
(Game Masters are volunteers and have no behind the scenes information of any kind except chat- and name- related bans)

103

I actually dont know how you got attached, i only added smin lol… not sure if it was from looking at another post as i had two posts open on my phone, sry about that.

I honestly doubt he would respond anyways… just a shame to see these modes fading away little by little with each update…

104

So… I’ve been playing Assault trying to upgrade my Panzer IV /70 (V), which has been idle in my garage for a long time.
It’s an exorcise in futility.

Bots are one-shotting my spg consistently, and my gun SAME AS ON PANTHER, can barely scratch any of the bots.

So my spg is BR 5.3, and it’s unlucky to get lumped in the 5.3-6.3 grouping. On the Maginot line what do I see coming… Lorraine 40t. What are they… BR 7.7? What the heck???
How am I supposed to be effective against those? My rank III spg vs rank V? That’s nuts.

(as an aside, when did they raise the BR of the Panzer IV/70? Always thought it was 4.7…

105

Assaults work like regular arcade battles. The highest BR vehicle in your line up is what bracket you play. So you must have something that is jumping you to the next tier up.
Learn to find where the cover is on the maps and you won’t get shot so much and don’t be the closest player to them. The bots will all aim at the closest or a flanking player.

106

First a quick note: 4.7 is the Jagdpanzer IV with the L/48 gun from the Panzer IV H, at least for the time I’ve been playing (16 months) the Guderian duck has been in the next bracket.

Don’t get me wrong, I just went to check whether the Lorraine 40 really is 7.7. You’re right, it is, and I have to admit that I don’t understand that. In the Assault lineup of bot tanks for Maginot and the BR 5.3-6.3 bracket it’s supposed to be the second from the bottom. Instead we have…

AMX-13 (light): 6.7
Lorraine 40 (medium): 7.7
AMX M4 (heavy): 6.7
ARL-44 (very heavy): 5.3

The corresponding lineup for Mozdok is…

Waffenträger: 5.7
Panther D: 5.7
Tiger I H: 5.7
Tiger II (P): 6.7

Kursk:

PT-76B: 5.3
T-34-85: 5.7
IS-1: 5.7
IS-2: 6.3 or 6.7 for the 1944 model (I think the latter is the one used).

Ardennes:

M41A1: 6.3
M4A3: 5.7
M26: 6.7
T26E1-E1: 6.7

When it comes to BR, the bot lineup on Maginot is very strange. If I had to guess, the 7.7 BR for the Lorraine 40 is due to the 100 mm gun and the post-war development date. (Funny enough, only two prototypes were ever made, same as the Narval bomber which keeps digging holes all over the base.) I don’t see the Lorraine that close to the level of a Leopard 1 with 8.0, though. Then again, I’m not making the decisions here.

Also, from my own experience (this is the bracket I play the most because I do like my Tiger 1 and Panther preset), the Lorraine 40 is a fairly easy kill from almost any direction, including the front. I always shoot 39 ammo, no trouble at all other than the ubiquitous swatting aside of my rounds with their gun barrels made from ultra-hardium, but all the French tanks do that. Frontal penetration is only a problem with the AMX M4 and ARL-44, if they’re not coming downhill at a steep angle, any shot to the upper front plate is a waste of time.

107

I completely agree with you and I therefore suggest that we also do a poll to see who would welcome this and it could come to the game in a new update, because PVE ground battles are really missing and it’s sad :(

108

I understand how the brackets work.

The Panzer IV/70 IS the highest tank currently in that garage. For assault, it happens to fall into the 5.3 - 6.3 range. So it’s the lowest possible BR within the range.

My main issue is that on Maginot map for assault in the 5.3-6.3 range, one of the waves of bots is the Lorraine 40t which happens to be BR 7.7. For vehicles at the lower end of the range that is a huge mis-match … 7.0 vs 5.3. (online wiki shows 7.7 but I think that is wrong)

109

Regarding the Lorraine 40t…

It might have weak armor for the BR, and on paper the panzer IV should be able to kill it easily, but fighting bots in assault is vastly different than fighting on paper for a number of reasons.

  1. The Lorraine armor is quite sloped, so in assault battles there are a disproportionate amount of riccochets.
  2. The Lorraine is fairly quick and the bots can shoot accurately on the run, so good luck tracking in a casemate tank.
  3. Casemate spgs that are not fleet of foot have a hard time getting in flank shots - especially when enemy is coming from 3 diff directions, and often from higher ground
  4. There are at least 10 bots in each group. The spg without a turret has to expose itself to return fire in order to attempt a kill. Since the bots rarely miss, even if you manage to kill 1 Lorraine you could easily have multiple bots returning fire - they have god-mode-on ability to acquire and fire in a split second.
  5. Even if you manage to get a favourable angle for your armor the Lorraine is likely to punch through. It can do 82mm at 60 deg. The Panzer IV can’t resist that. One of the main benefits of the panzer IV/70 at 5.3 is it’s ability to shrug off a decent amount of shells. That is nullified by the 7.7 Lorraine. (In-game it appears to be 7.0…)
  6. The Lorraine has a reload of 4 seconds with it’s autoloader. That’s a LOT of shells coming at the defenders from each group. Killing one bot just attracts multiple shots from the remaining bots.

So Lorraine might not seem that much of a threat because of it’s relatively weak armor. But there are so many of them each wave, and they fire so quickly, and can pen almost anything in the 5.3-6.3 range that it really is a mismatch.

Overall I’ve found the “revised” assault to be way too frustrating. Time spent there is just a long boring grind where you die, and then do a suicide spawn in front of a wave of tanks that will kill you again in 3-5 seconds.

Gaijin has jumped the shark with assault IMO.

110

I know all that, since Assault is pretty much all I have played for the past 16 months. My total PvP time with everything is below 40 hours, but I’m rank 93 and my six tank crews are all on 143 - all in Assault mode. Admittedly I don’t play stiffies (that’s what I call the casemate tank destroyers and assault guns) because I have no interest in them, but I have seen enough of them in action to know that having to aim with the entire vehicle adds an extra level of difficulty. I’m also well aware of the bloody magic shots the bots keep doing, be that one-shot kills across the entire map, or punching 15 holes in one tank without it blowing up or the fourth crew member dying. Not to mention the Annie Oakley shots through windows or very narrow gaps.

For the duck it’s even worse, since one of the main advantages the real one had, the low firing height, doesn’t help much in Assault because the maps have next to no positions where this would help, and it’s too low to shoot from behind earthworks.

You’re not alone, though. Anything in this bracket will have a hole when hit by the L40t, especially with a bot doing the aiming. You’re also right in stating that Assault is complete crap at the moment. I haven’t won a match in 8 days now, before Hornet’s Sting a negative streak might last six rounds. This also means that in 8 days I managed to collect about 300 crew XP over six crews, which is ridiculous.

Honestly, the only recommendation I could give is not to play Maginot in this BR. I began to avoid it because I hate being bombed, and I hate respawning in a bomb crater, and I hate slalom-ing around bomb craters to get anywhere. I’m down to four out of six maps, and those aren’t fun because of the desync/latency issue which doesn’t even seem to be constant.

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111

BR is calculated and changes based upon performance stats from human players. Pretty much all of the heavy tanks in all map tiers are “out” of the player BR bracket. 5.7 & 6.0 Tigers in 4.0-5.0 Mozdok and Japan etc. They are there to provide a challenge and to learn how to defeat heavy tanks (weak points, flank shots, etc.).

Then stop playing it and stop wasting everyone’s time whining about it?

112

When I first got into the game I played assault arcade fairly regularly until I learned not to keep spending SL on diminishing returns against waves of tanks with higher BR’s (and capabilities) than mine, combined with map locations that weren’t all that favorable to defense. I stopped playing assault and haven’t looked back. If you’re into it then more power to you and best of luck…assault arcade, as it stands, is something I’ll never play again.

113

Assault is like impossible to win now, ticket bleed too quick, bot has become a sweat that play WT 24/7
Half my team got wipe out by one single bot(there are other bots too so we didnt focus on it)
absolute insane

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114

No one is forcing you to read or respond to my posts. Get bent.

115

I play assault to mod stock tanks up to a certain point before going P vs P.

Up until the last change or so, assault was hard, and even if you didn’t win, you were still able to accrue RPs toward modules.

But now it’s impossible to win, and trying to score enough points to research a module is just way too frustrating. Will certainly be playing it less and less.

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