What are tech trees for airplanes used for?

I’m making this topic because the more time passes, the less sense air tech trees make in high ranks.

A few years ago, the point of having different nations was to have unique vehicles, different styles of gameplay… But today that’s no longer useful. In the top tier, the trees no longer look like anything and we end up with countries like Italy which have an F-16, a Mig-29 and a Grippen …

In addition, this leads to a problem in terms of how to play because in the end we find the same planes on each side of the battlefield, which leads to laughable situations, especially in simulator mode, where we no longer know who is with and who is against us on the battlefield

I can understand that there are nations for which they lack vehicles but is it really worth it to add other vehicles or sub-trees ?

There are only 3 trees left which are not “polluted” by vehicles from other countries (USA and USSR for obvious reasons and France). While some countries only have a few vehicles from others (England, China, Sweden) and the rest of the nations are just copy pasted (Japan, Italy, Israel).

So I ask the questions:
Is a country with no unique vehicles useful to the game ?
Should we really add vehicles from other nations to complete a tree (Hungarian tree for Italy) ?

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What rhymes with inland?

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England isn’t a nation in the game.

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My mistake, I had forgotten to addittion of the Finnish tree
(I correct it)

Everyone wants to forget the finnish tree

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Are you being pedantic because it’s Britain or what?

England is absolutely in the game.

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Imho you mix here some things up.

First - the rather low choice of fighters is a result of the cold war I in combination with exploding development cost, leaving just the US and USSR as leading powers of their blocks left. The 2 exceptions France and Sweden were politically motivated.

Second - As long as wt is based on fantasy team set-ups it doesn’t matter which nation has which aircraft - if they would add countries like Luxembourg and offer 2 top tier premium jets, players would buy them too.

Third - i agree from a holistic pov if gaijin would offer these clusters:

  1. WW 2 - without nonsense nations like Sweden, Israel and China)
  2. Cold War I - Nato vs WP plus local stuff like Israel vs neighbours and India & Pakistan
  3. Cold War II - US/Nato vs the World

So without creating such clusters your questions are pointless as the game has lost all of it’s attempts to look some how realistic. I mean you have the same nonsense in props - you find Me 109s in 6 TTs representing 8 nations…

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you forgot the German tree too

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What do you propose?

Britain for example. Leave them with 11.3s to fight 12.7s until we get Typhoon? Or is Typhoon too much of a “C&P” because 3 nations will use Typhoons?

We did ask for unique aircraft, like the BAE EAP, but it got hard denied and so we got the Gripen Instead

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I just suggest waiting: not all nations are required to have high-rank vehicles all the time.

For the case of the UK, I would have suggested leaving the Tornado main top tier combat aircraft, at the Br it is currently in where it would have faced aircraft against which it is competitive. And then, once more modern planes come into the game, I would have added the Typhoon.

It is sad that the BAE EAP was refused because it would have added a unique aircraft (and not a copy and paste) and would have completed the English tree well.

You’ve given me PTSD with that statement

Remind me, for how many years did we have the Phantom and nothing else other than the Harrier

If you guessed 3 years, that’s right! (it was more like 4 but to give someone even a chance to defend the indefensible, we’ll call it 3)

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I think you are right on these two facts and that work on the distribution of nations in the teams is necessary for the game. The main game mode is still called “realistic” but has absolutely nothing to do with it. What you explain in your third point would already be a solution for a majority of the game’s problems.

In my opinion the main problem is the addition of subtrees in the game: having Taiwan’s planes in the game implies that China has Western planes while the Hungarian tree brings Russian planes to a country which has absolutely no nothing to do with these

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I understand the suffering caused by the lack of plane at the highest level of the game

But this is exactly the problem : players always want to have the most competitive plane for their country. If tomorrow we added a new, more powerful Russian or American plane, everyone would start complaining to get an equivalent or a better plane, a solution would then be found which would lead the Russian and American players to complain in turn and so on.

One of the solutions would be for me (be careful, sensitive soul: this will not please everyone) :
Accept that all nations cannot be equal in the game, that some countries have more budget than others and that it is therefore normal that their planes are better. The more the game advances in the future, the more these inequalities will be blatant, the US, the USSR and China being the only nations in the game having developed 5th gen aircraft, not all countries will be able to face them when they will be here and that is normal

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Except it never did.

I play SB and I was stuck fighting Mig29s and F16s and then Mig29SMT and F16Cs where I was totally DOA for most of the year. I literally couldn’t play top tier… At all.

To leave a nation, completely DOA for an entire year is just stupid.

And quite frankly. Our last top tier jet was added in 2019.

At the end of the day. South Africa is an official nation. It Is Britain Sub-TT. After waiting an entire year for something… Anything 12+ to be added. It was a welcome relief. And now you wanted us to wait the entirety of 2024 for the Typhoon. So our TT goes tornado F3 at 11.3 to Typhoon at 13.3 and for us to simply not have any 12s?

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Since the last changes of Br there is a simulation Br (11.0 - 11.7) where the tornado faces planes much less powerful than it.
The problem here is not the plane in question but rather the balancing of the game

It’s not fun, but it would bring more logic to the game.

I know it’s not easy to hear but from my point of view it would be the best thing

It is not because a country exists that we must add all its planes to it and especially not in just any tree. Otherwise why not add an Indian Mig-29 or Mirage 2000 to the English tree knowing that the T-90S and the Jaguar are already there.

I would just like to add that Britain is an acceptable case because it is only one plane and it fills a gap in this tree. However, the Taiwan planes in the Chinese tree are of no use because there are planes of the same level designed by China

Because India is not an official sub TT.

But no thanks. There are 10 playable nations in game. Not 2. All 10 nations should be playable. Full stop. If they are not, they need to add something. It was BS getting nothing for an entire year that was competitive.

I’m sorry you don’t like the fact that nations export vehicles, but that is accurate to IRL.

Unless you are proposing that they no longer add exported vehicles…at which point. You need to delete most of the nations from the game.

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Agreed - this whole concept of trees and nations is imho totally outdated.

If you try to look on this from a holistic pov - gaijin creates gaps with adding new shiny stuff to nations A and C - so nation B and D ask for a gap filler - which will then create gaps for nation A and C, this gap has to be closed…an infinite loop.

And this loop gets even more complicated with those subtrees, which in their majority were just added to close gaps which gaijin created upfront.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with healthy patriotism and the concept of nations and subtrees.

But if you follow the fellow Ground RB players, you might agree that they have also massive gaps at certain BRs - and the only logical conclusion would be to add multi-nation line ups for them (ofc only when they fit to their respective block) - bundled with these already mentioned eras WW 2 and Cold War I & II.

But such a solution would kill business opportunities for gaijin - so it looks rather unrealistic.

Fully agree to the first sentence - the other 2 are imho not precise enough.

From a holistic pov you can beat quantity with quality to a certain degree and imho you should replace planes with weapon system as at the end of the day the overall package is decisive and not the aircraft/airframe…

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It’s not that far from what I think. From my point of view, the Israeli aerial tree has no use in the game. Only the Kfir are original planes (and even then because they are designed from Mirage V airframes) and the only additions/modifications of the planes are their missiles and their air-to-ground payload in the case of the Kurnass

I know this but this is not the problem I am pointing out: for me the problem is the addition of too many sub-trees to nations for the sole purpose of completing Br and without thinking about the logic of the nation. For example you can try to find the links between Italy and Hungary but I can already tell you that there are few, if any. Adding the Hungarian subtree has no point other than pretending to add something to the game (no Hungarian designed planes have been added to the game, they are only copied and pasted from the USSR + a Grippen)

Unfortunately the whole problem is there

I am not sufficiently experienced and knowledgeable about land vehicles to be able to say anything on the subject.
However, I don’t know any players or have seen any discussion that asked for the addition of another nation to complete a ground tech tree.

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I follow their exchanges for several years - they are quite similar regarding trees and subtrees and i see frequently heated debates about allocations of minor nations / subtrees. You might remember the debates about the Swiss Hunter (squad vehicle) - in that kind of way but much more complicated…

Just 2 examples i remembered ad-hoc:

Link 1
Link 2

But this was imho off-topic from me. Sry for that.

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