Happy to see that we are on the same page regarding most topics.
Even if i do not share your view on airfield destruction as win mechanic - as with some fantasy you can see bases and airfields as viable resources for aircraft in order to keep fighting and their destruction forces enemies to retreat - we both like to see Air RB getting out of the current state; this counts way more than deviating opinions about the “right way”.
Have a good one!
Indeed, man. Our ideas are quite complimentary - I could see airbase destruction making a comeback (and frankly be totally separate from bombing supply bases) if it was not tied to auto-ending the round anymore. And if it wasn’t tied to auto-win, its HP could be cut by at least 80%.
Hell, I’d even go so far as to have Combined Ground-style terrain deformation on airfields from bombs, and planes crashing on said craters being kills awarded to whoever made said craters.
There are so many interesting things that can be done to expand CAS and Bombing usefulness once room is made to fit in those new things. That is what my proposed removal of all the autowin crap is meant to be - break the chokehold of fighter mains on the mode without allowing a different chokehold to begin in its place.
Honestly, the sim EC airfield mechanic would be perfect in Air RB. Damage modules to slow rearming and repair, destroy them to prevent its use, and with the shorter match length of Air RB there wouldn’t be enough time for them to regenerate back to full. Bombers could meaningfully disrupt the enemy team by hitting the fuel tanks on the airfield, could hit storage to prevent re-arming, and it’d force the other team to change up their gameplay. Bomb mass requirements and module repair times would have to be mixed up a bit but I can’t imagine it’d be too hard to implement.
Would also like to see airfields have a sizeable ticket value to them. If they’re hard to destroy then they should yield good rewards both to the player and to the team, even if I don’t think it should be a win condition.
Sim EC modular airfields would be a good step to take, but even there they are far too tanky. I would greatly reduce the HP of the modules, and make the structures visible from bomber altitude. Right now you can’t clearly see where given modules are, let alone how destroyed they are, from altitudes required to be “safe” from flak. Perhaps the buildings on airfields need a total makeover so they can be seen easily whether they are destroyed or not.
Each module should be worth significant ticket amounts, I agree.
Another game, another ticket loss after the AI looked at each other too hard and tanked over a thousand tickets in two minutes. The tickets ran out mid dogfight. A few games later, a ticket win 12 minutes into the match where I had two guys energy trapped.
I’m really sick of this. It feels like half of my losses are the game deciding to play itself. Hell, my long match wins usually are. It’d be awesome if the game let me fight the last players in the last 10-15 minutes of the game both for my wins and losses, even if I get my teeth kicked to the back of my throat I’m still getting the fun of… yknow, interacting with other players in a PvP environment? It’s not fair to the losing team, whether I’m part of it or not.
Cases like this are precisely how even the most diehard fighter mains would benefit from removing the possibility for any single objective to auto-end games by itself.
Then, in situations like this, fighter mains would be able to finish their dogfights under far more circumstances than presently. I don’t like “gremlin script” AI any more than you do, but I also have to ask - did your team bother shooting down all the enemy AI attackers? Those things play a significant role in ticket burn rate.
That is true - the ai planes may have benefits for pilots with stock planes to get some points, but it fundamentally altered the game play & necessary strategies for tight & long lasting matches.
Especially on rather old maps the mix of ai planes and unbalanced ground units (one side tanks, other side pillboxes) forces you to give up positioning just to avoid irrecoverable ticket disadvantages - like in case if you are unable to destroy medium tanks like on Sicily.
But even on newer maps like Rocky Pillars ai planes “surprises” you with very fast ticket drops during a fight and the match result was degraded to a random event.
Imho these ai planes have to be deleted from the game - some years ago we just had them on the old Berlin map and on Pacific maps.
Honestly I didn’t really mind the AI planes much even on older maps. Objective diversity is honestly fine provided the rest of the objectives are calibrated accordingly. The only reason they don’t fit well on some maps is precisely as you state. And yet Gaijin’s map “adjustments” have only resulted in making maps little more than palette swaps.
Unbalanced ground units only matter because of all the ordinance nerfs, the blame for which lies squarely at tank mains refusing to adapt to the rules of the mode they play.
I fondly remember the days when a 1000lb bomb dropped on a pillbox-artillery cluster could reliably kill the Light Pillbox, both Artillery, AND the AAA emplacement. Or when carpet-bombing a tank column could reliably kill at least half of them.
If I could take an existing map style and have that be standard for all maps, it would be ones like Air Battle Hurtgen - Second Battle, France 1944, Moscow 1941, which have three main clusters of ground units spaced quite far apart and a similar enough mix of units on both teams - pillboxes, light targets, and tanks. At least for prop tiers those maps give room to breathe, where the typical hairball is impossible to smother all the ground units.
Fighters see no benefit from removing the auto ticket bleed when there are no enemy players left. They see a detriment.
Yes, but the ground units can still shoot at each other and there usually isn’t enough time at the start of the match to shoot down every AI attacker quickly, because doing so would put you at a huge disadvantage against fighters. Loathe them as I do, I’d also at least like for Gaijin to fix their AI so they stop slamming it into the ground when either team is low on tickets.
Would be nice if they just… shot stuff less. And spawned farther back, say, alongside the friendly attackers. All Gaijin has to do is slow down the frequency of their attacks, or even keep it how it is except disable their guns firing. Keeping the flight patterns but stopping them from impacting the tickets as much or at all. Sure there should be a benefit from destroying them, but getting more rewards, an immediate ticket decrease, and a cascading ticket advantage from destroying only a few units early on? I don’t like it.
Now that I think about it, it is a bit silly that large bombs have such little AoE damage.
The benefit is that since no singular objective can end the round on its own anymore, it is much more likely that a fighter main can finish whatever dogfights they are engaged in without the round ending prematurely from AI gremlin script.
I think the bright red enemy markers are more to blame here than anything. AI attackers trigger shared spotting BS for the entire team, which is partially why player attackers and bombers are so irrelevant in prop tiers.
I don’t really mind them that much, and they already do spawn further back than they used to where they spawned practically on top of the ground units almost as the game began.
If the general main idea of mine regarding having no single objective auto-end games was ever trialed, then a lot of these issues would become if nothing else less obnoxious due to a greater number of tickets in total to take down.
That being said, I would fully support returning the match timer to 60min now that the biggest offending event farming plane (Me-264) isn’t totally untouchable in orbit and then slowing down their burn rate.
But once again, changing damn near anything regarding ground units and bombing gets seen as “why bother?” to the devs since PvP auto-ends 99% of rounds. Do you not see how that objective is just…smothering the mode’s potential?
Tank mains are to blame for that one.
Or 1 SC 1800 drop on each of the 2 tank assembling areas was able to kill 12-13 medium tanks on Sicily…granting a mission score of 3.600 - 4.000 (300 per tank) in less than 4 minutes.
I used to see Arados pull that off especially fast back in the day.
Making nonfighters irrelevant really has bled all the flavor out of the game mode. Air-to-air is still fun, but just that on its own quickly goes stale.
The issue is extremely easy to define.
My jet, introduced in 1947, uses Air-to-Air missiles introduced in 1956, fighting jets released in 1985.
What?
Wrong topic man. If you bothered to actually read the original post you would plainly see it isn’t about any specific matchup, or matchups at all.
This is more of a compression issue you’re referring to. The OP is referring to game modes/missions.