The Fighter Privilege (And why it is bad design)

Currently there is an extreme bias in the game towards fighters, which are just the ultimate vehicle. There is nothing they can't kill, and there is nothing in the game that's better at killing fighters than other fighters. That completely destroys any kind of intransitive relationship between units, and places one single unit squarely at the top of the food chain. Whichever faction has the most fighters in the air controls the flow of battle, no exceptions.

Having control of the air means you can easily smack down enemy tanks and infantry with Liberators and Rocket Pods. They pretty much can't even make a move until their own faction has spawned enough fighters to clear an operational area for them.

The reason why I'm talking about Fighter Privilege is because this entire situation comes down to one single thing: Whoever is charge of designing the vehicles is completely putting aside good game balance to create a play experience for fighters entirely based on what they think using a fighter should feel like. You're fast, you're deadly, you're dominating slower air units, you're dominating slower ground units, you can escape from danger with breakneck maneuvers and only other pilot aces are a real match for you. That all sounds really fun, and hey, flying a fighter is pretty fun, the only problem is that it's fun that comes at everyone else's expense.

Basicaly there are two separate layers of bias in the current design of the game that add up to creating an absolute alpha unit that is the center of every effective action a faction can take at this point.

For one, there is an extreme bias towards air over ground. As long as the idea of air superiority is a major factor in the games design, air units will always be inherently stronger than ground units. We've seen what happens when ground units have the upper hand during Beta, and it wasn't pretty either, but simply saying that air units will have the upper hand basically creates top down gameplay. You need air superiority to really start moving ground power, and you need ground power to really start setting up infantry spawning, and you need infantry to actually capture anything. Of course every unit has its place in the chain, and without all of them you get nothing done, but knowing that you can't make an impact without someone in a higher tier unit enabling you to do so is frustrating for people who enjoy the infantry or ground vehicle game.

Secondly, there is an extreme bias towards fighters when it comes to air balancing. Fighters can defeat the other aircraft extremely easily, and when you combine that factor with the first one you end up with a game where it's not just a certain class of unit that's at the very top, but a specific unit that beats every other unit in the class as well. When you look at the balancing between Lightning Tank, MBT and Sunderer and then compare it to the Balancing between Fighter, Liberator and Galaxy it will very quickly become obvious to you that the ground game simply makes more sense. The small light tank is the fastest but the most fragile. It carries powerful but highly specialized weapons, so that if you want to use it against a wide range of targets you need to wolfpack. The MBT is the primary fighting vehicle, and can outshoot the Lightning in a straight up slugfest. The Sunderer is the utility and support unit, with the most armor and the most close range firepower, it's a deadly opponent if you get to close but you can take it out if you keep your distance.
This same idea doesn't apply to aircraft, because when it comes to aircraft the lightest and fastest vehicle also carries the most anti air firepower. The relationship between the ground vehicles simply makes more sense, because there is no single dominant unit. While an MBT may be the strongest in a stand up fight, it needs two people to get a firepower advantage over an upgraded Lightning, it can't catch a Lightning tank that doesn't stick around to get killed, and a wounded MBT can't get away from a Lightning that's giving chase so those two vehicles have a decent relationship in a fight. With air vehicles the fighter not only has the best chances in a fight, but also gets to run or give chase, so it's opponent doesn't get the benefit of the initiative to even the odds, nor is number of players at all accounted for.


Right now those two things added on top of each other simply make the fighter the most powerful unit in the game. Without fighters every lower tier of play doesn't get to move forward. That is special privilege that no single unit should have. Asymmetrical balance is difficult to achieve, but simply creating a top down approach where all lower tier units are only important because of some arbitrary requirement like "Infantry must touch the Terminal" to use them down the line for the final objective is ultimately not a satisfying approach. If fighters could capture territory all other units in the game would be meaningless, and that's where you realize that all the other units are only there to fill an arbitrary requirement for them, not because they actually have any power to shape the battlefield.

This top down balancing also amplifies the zerging and base trading going on in the game, because once one faction wins one of the higher tiers of play all the lower tiers become futile. The second anyone wins the air battle the tank battle becomes pointless and the second anyone wins the tank battle the infantry battle becomes pointless. If you're in one of those lower tiers and any tier above you caves you lose, no matter how good you were doing, so you really have no choice but to follow the regions where your faction is winning the high tier combat, and its relatively rare that you get a stalemate going in a higher tier which kicks down a little bit of deciding power to the lower tiers.

In order for all units to have a meaning at the highest tier of play there have to either be no hard counters at all, or every unit has to have one.

To be fair, that's a pretty realistic view on how combined arms warfare works. However, if you wanted to make it a game - as opposed to a simulation of how combined arms in a science fiction environment might work - then you could have something like:
Ground AA > Fighters > Bombers > Ground AA
Make fighters incredibly fragile with plenty of air-to-air firepower (i.e. glass cannon), while making bombers incredibly tough with hard hitting air-to-ground capabilities but with weak air-to-air defences of their own.

At the end of the day, though, air would still probably reign supreme. Even if you went with the paper-scissors-stone formula above, you'll just have bombers flying with fighter escorts hammering **** from above. Rarely do armies worry about ground superiority more than air superiority and there's a good reason for that.

Me and a friend both use AA maxes and coordinate fire to surprise kill fighters in 2 seconds of fire right before they launch their rocket pods, the only thing that we cant destroy like that are liberators at max height. It is kinda cruddy that you need 2 people to do this, but it is a ton of fun clearing the skies like that.

It all boils down to rocket pods being a bit OTT. Thats all, reduce rocket pods effectiveness and you will dissuade a lot of the weekend pilots who are only doing it because everyone says its so good. Or just wait a while and most of those weekend pilots will get bored and realise that it isn't as easy that everyone is claiming and will stop anyway, but you will still have a situation where a skilled ESF pilot can nuke heavy armour which isn't good.

Personally I'd go with a smaller magazine and lower total ammo on rocket pods coupled with a significant drop in the AOE damage and lowering the direct hit damage slightly so it takes at least 2-3 passes to kill a MBT.

http://operationbarbarossa.net/Myth-Busters/Mythbusters4.html

When 2 equally advanced armies meet, the high altitude AA role is performed by interceptors, but the low altitude is a no fly zone for anyone but a select few planes that were armored against machine gun fire.
Read the above article, enjoy.

It would be lots of fun to have this simulated in PS 2- with any low and slow aircraft getting spanked in just a few seconds by AA MAXs and Skyguards, while low and fast planes would need to attack quickly and run, doing only limited damage.

The high altitude Libs? They'd either take multiple Skyguards firing for quite some time, or ESF interceptors to take out.

Then losing the air battle doesn't instantly mean losing the ground battle- it would only mean the ground has some more obstacles to deal with if it is to hold position, and attacking becomes very hard.

As for infantry vs tanks- if friendly infantry wins against hostile infantry in game currently, the enemy tanks can't simply push forward when the defenders are competent.

Yesterday I blew up a Lightning and 2 Prowlers before I ran out of missiles, because they attacked alone without proper infantry support. I had to run across an open field to get behind them.

Minutes later my Vanguard got swamped by infantry, even though I had a repairman-gunner with me.

MAXs work good, they're infantry and they cost only half as much as ESFs, so it's OK that they need to work in pairs.

The Skyguard, a 200 resource unit, should be able to deal with fighters alone if it gets some tactical advantage.

And finally, rock-paper-scissors sucks. If the plane sees an AA unit, the plane should be able to kill it, even though the AA unit is the counter.
That's how it works in reality, it's also more fun that way when player tactics and skills determine who wins, and not the "role" of their vehicle.

What really gets me is that a galaxy with all four guns being manned is absolutely useless against esf's unless you ram them. The walkers were nerfed to the point where they are worse than the basalisks they come with. 5 people in a vehicle with 4 guns should be able to defend itself at least, if not be able to destroy single manned fighters.

Short version: If rocketpods aren't nerfed than half the players are going to be flying around in ESFs by next month and the groundwar is going to become a comical sideshow. And in 2 months time 90% of the players are going to be flying around in ESFs wondering where all the ground targets went.

Rockets are fine IMHO, the challenge should be to live long enough to deliver them, making ESFs high risk- high reward vehicles.

There already are lower risk, lower reward vehicles such as MBTs and Libs in PS 2.

No they're not

I'm waiting for the "ESFs can kill with three rockets!" claim.

Why do the 2 developers of the only 2 MMOFPS that exist feel that players who fly are entitled to camp ground units at their spawn point, but ground units aren't entitled to camp air at their spawn point?

I don't think the problem is ESFs, though hovering in the air a mile away and sniping at vehicles or turrets is pretty obnoxious. The problem is Liberators. The only real counter to Liberators is ESFs. Rocket pods are annoying, but the vehicle is still quite soft and you can even damage them with your assault rifle or pistol. But Liberators counter everything that isn't an ESF.

Liberators just aren't any fun to fight against, and that's a pretty important part of a game. Ground combat has a complex system of mechanics where different vehicles and classes synergise in different ways and always give you options. Liberators sit outside (or above, if you prefer) the whole paradigm. They dominate everything else and the battles are only fun if the ESFs of each side are keeping the Liberators from having any strong impact.

The problem is, I'm not sure there's any good way to balance them in their current state. The problem with both Liberators and rocket pods, I think, is that their weapons delivery is much too easy. If air units only have a limited time on target, and have actual restrictions (ie. can't turret in the air, in the case of ESFs, and can't aim freely and effortlessly at ground targets in the case of Liberators) then they can be balanced; but blanket nerfs or whatever might still leave them in a poor position. They have to make themselves pretty visible to do their job, after all, so changing the balance of AA against them would likely ruin them.

They need to have more trouble deploying their weapons than they do now, so that they are still powerful but not omnipotent death-gods. And it's the Liberators that are the real problem.

The Bofors could shoot a plane in a single pass.

I'll bet having such OP AA units caused all pilots to stop flying altogether.

Well, you actually had to have a direct hit, it doesn't have a proximity fuse which makes shooting AA much much much much much much much easier.

Have you never played a real military sim like Armed Assault 2?

The game uses real weapon systems and does a pretty good job of making them function just like real life, and air craft are about the weakest thing in the game when not supported by everything else. They might be able to cause a lot of damage to ground troops and armored infantry, but 1 soldier with a Stinger can take you out faster than you can say, "FLARES!!!"

Even worse are the AA tanks, specifically the Tunguska, which has a lock-on range of over 5000 meters. The only vehicle with a lock-on range even close to that are the jets, with an effective lock-on range of about 2500m.

I'd rather see this type of balance in PS2, where aircraft are actually smart to avoid AA weapons, instead of simply targeting them first and taking them out faster than the AA can even react. It takes more to kill a plane in PS2 using the weapons specifically made for their destruction, than it does for an aircraft to destroy the AA using item.

From what I've heard a tank can be destroyed using a .50 cal in ARMA 2 and the Russian tank fires gun launched missiles while reloading its gun, so PS 2 is better in realism in terms of tank combat. Much better.

SOE still has a few things to learn about planes though.

P.S. And the pilot won't be saying "FLARES!!!", it'll be more like "Oh, Sh...".

Neither of those are true.

Light arms do nothing to tanks (real tanks; there are some vehicles under the Tank category that are just smaller capacity APCs with big guns on them). There are vehicles with explosive round machine cannons, though, that CAN kill a tank, but it takes more than 1 50 round magazine to do so.

The tank launching missiles while reloading is somewhat possible; there are at least 2 tanks that have the normal HEAT cannon (the big tank gun) but also a TOW missile launcher. It takes a while to reload both, but you can fire one, switch to the other and fire that.

Besides, at least with the first thing, you can do that IRL. You *can* stop a tank a pistol IRL. It just requires incredible aim and luck to be able to get a round inside the little slit of a window and kill all the operators inside.

PS: I yell out flares all the time when gunning for someone in ARMA II. Because it's easier to yell "FLARES" than "LAUNCH THE COUNTER-MEASURES YOU TOOL!"

Liberators are not a problem. It really is only ESFs. Liberators are FAT, slow, difficult-to-maneuver targets in the air; both in theory and in practice, an angled/propped up MBT or AP lightning can return fire (if it's difficult to land hits due to distance, they're probably having trouble landing hits too lol). Often times, before the liberator's gunner can properly return fire due to the gun's position. The roles become slightly reversed as the liberator gets closer to being right above the targets, but that's when even infantry can start firing rockets.

ESFs on the other hand, can do exactly what you mentioned. Rocket pots are insanely accurate and fly very far, and that coupled with ESF maneuverability, 2 rocket pod spamming ESFs can dish out way more damage and are much harder to deal with than a 2man liberator.

I completely agree with OP. I fly my scythe 90% of the time and yes, rocketpods need to be removed.
I think they should either remove all A2G from the ESF or allow them to have guided or unguided bombs that are 1 maybe 4 shots before needing to reload at an air pad. but for sure i want rocket pods removed. the OP makes an excellent point and Ive seen the Vanu do it. One time we Vanu just massed air. we had very few tanks and some gals with troops and the rest was ESFs and a couple liberators and we just steam rolled the whole continent. if you got 1/2 with A2A and 1/2 with rocketpods and you got more ESFs then the other faction then you win and it needs to change.

Off topic i was really wanting that air frigate thing smedly posted to be real. It would have been like a Protoss Carrier from StarCraft

QFT!
ESFs is a one-man operated vehicle. hence it shouldn't be as or more rewarding/ powerful than a well coordinated liberator crew, where everyone has his/ her distinct role and only if you're actually working as a team you will succeed.

ESFs should deal little to no damage to ground armor but still keep the firepower to kill infantrymen with a reasonable amount of effort. their playground should be the air.

liberators should be the only air unit with the potential to dish out massive damage to enemy ground armor AND enemy aircraft at the same time, since it requires more than just one person to coordinate attacks and succeed to begin with. so as a "team-operated" vehicle so to say, and the fact that it's a bigger target which is nowhere near as fast and agile as a fighter, its power to eat/ dish out a massive amount of damage should be balanced/ justified i guess.