A second post with some gameplay observations that as best as ive seen, have only grown more prominent post bastion. The addition of bastions seems to have increased the general presence of aircraft, especially liberators. In my honest opinion, liberators crewed be half competent players outside of peak times are near indestructible. Their health pool, damage output and speed combined with turbo boost can make them a real menace. Heres my issue, flak is nothing more than a deterrent to those things. Hell, a skyguard, the premium in anti air, does nothing to a liberator. If you have two skyguards you end up with a coin toss as to if the liberator can kill one of them before escaping or if they die instead. Anti air is an odd one to balance since a liberator off peak can dominate fights but during peak times there is often more than enough enemy G2A presence to ruin a liberator on sight. Increasing the damage output of flak would remove air play from peak time gameplay. Heres my suggestion : We have two types of anti air, direct fire such as rockets, walkers, even basilisks. And we have Flak, the skyguard, bursters, rangers. IMO at the point you are taking the slower firing, lower velocity less versatile anti air option it needs to have an impact, that being said ive already covered why they shouldnt do any more damage than they do. Flak should shake a plane being hit by it, these weapons are purpose built for anti air and explode, with force, in proximity to enemy aircraft. Flak should shake the screen of the crew, not deal additional damage but make return fire just that little bit harder to achieve. The implant Battle Hardened would reduce this effect and potentially this also leaves room for a new cert line that reduces shake and potentially even increases the angles that liberator weapons can fire at. This poses an choice between Gunner Stabilisation and Composite Armor as well as the choice between ranger and walker. What do you think? And yes for the record i do also run liberator crews, im not just some salty ground bound chump who died a few times to a liberator...
This is a losing battle. I once proposed changes for all aircraft, giving them extra weapons and choices between AA, AV and AI loadouts so that each aircraft had a unique way to perform in the air and the ESF wasnt doing all the things anymore. The response of the pilots was "you died to air, just relax and respawn". They tried to make it seem as if I was nerfing aircraft by giving them more varied tools. Why? Because I tried to touch their gameplay and not make ESF the main aircraft anymore. More on the topic: I've always thought the "cant operate near large battles" was a myth. I do fly near them sometimes and operate in them, and it is a matter of context if you succeed or not. Most players will fly from one predictable direction, alone, then be surprised that after a few runs someone has pulled G2A and is trying to stop them. This happens faster in larger battles as there's more people. And since they fly alone from a predictable angle any G2A will focus them easily. Aircraft have the option to simply move to a fight where people arent carrying G2A and dont have the numbers to spare against them so these pilots never bothered to learn any advanced A2G tactics. This gives rise to the myth that it is impossible to fly at busy fights. As for idea's to solve G2A fire I think that adding a screenshake would be a nice start. I would focus on making sure that effective(!) non-deterrent G2A is always present at any fight. For example the HEAT canon of MBT's and Lightnings could be repurposed to an anti-aircraft role by increasing the elevation range and reducing damage against ESF so it doesnt OHK them. That would cement the HEAT canon's purpose as AAA gun that has trouble dealing with nimble ESF but can deal great damage against larger aircraft. It could even get a small flak detonation range (say 1m) so shots that move just over or under the aircraft hit and you can modify the flak damage specifically to aircraft without having to rebalance its damage output against infantry and tanks. Similar things could be done with the Viper. And a Viper mark II could be introduced with high velocity rounds but little AOE as well as a skillful G2A weapon. Key here is that these weapons are also useful in general combat and be present before an aircraft arrives. I would prefer doing away with current flak and lock-ons entirely. We could use flak-rounds with smaller flak detonation ranges and lock-ons that are less point-and-click with limitations and more "guide the missile to the target". Deterrence style weapons arent suited for this game, no matter the outcome being a success or failure they are always frustrating for somebody.
Air is complicated in that its KIND OF optional right now except that bastions exist. Libs are a higher crew MBT that's slightly more versatile, slightly more vulnerable and way more mobile. Libs probably need reduced hp, but I'm not sure of that yet. They are tougher than I would expect for sure though. ESFs are wierd because if you're great at flying you're unkillable, and if you're great at aiming you can technically do enough damage to kill anything (meaning if you're great at both you're a small god), but if you're only ok at both, you die very quickly and can't do meaningful damage to anything other then esfs. If you're bad at both you do nothing, die, get told to get good. Deadly ESF pilots really are very good at what they do. That hasn't always been true, but it seems to be the case these days. Maybe just leave them where they are and let the ace pilots have fun. The shortest version is, if you deter the aircraft, you beat it. It doesn't feel that way because you don't get nearly as much exp as if you killed it or if you were actually fighting other footsoldiers. Note that the aircraft repairing isn't really a problem here. You deter the aircraft, its gone for a couple minutes while it repairs. You kill a footsoldier. You can be in combat with that same footsoldier in under 30 seconds. You've probably done more damage to the enemy war effort deterring the aircraft than killing the footsoldier. If we make no mechanical changes and increase the exp for g2a damage, that might solve the problem. You're not wasting time deterring air then (and you never were, strategically, because undeterred air is quite powerful) but you're also not missing out on certs for doing it. I'm not sure how much that increase should be, but my from-the-hip guess is, if you do enough damage to liberators to have taken down a liberator, the total exp you got over the course of doing that should probably equal the amount you would get for a lib kill. Apply similarly for other aircraft kill/damage exp. Maybe it needs to be higher, maybe lower, I haven't studied the game incentives well enough yet to give confident speculation there.
Side note on the topic of making AA deterrence feel better, i feel like if assists or vehicle kills with flak weapons (skyguard, burster, turrets and rangers) should count as kills for both XP and the directives for those weapons. Aint no one getting 1160 kills with each burster arm or a skyguard without a stupid amount more work put into them than any other weapon in the game...
try getting 1160 kills with a lock on launcher. It's ridiculous the directives haven't been update to accommodate for nerfs. I have never in all my 7+ years of play seen an AA aurax.
Ah right, I actually don't pay attention to directives too much, but yeah 100% agree. They exist and if we stick to a repair meta for air, it should definitely based on damage and not kills for infantry and possibly ground vehicle weapons.
