sooo um air counters air?

Luckily you dont have to get in a plane because thereare enough people in your faction who will

Those who argue that joining an Outfit is the cure-all are mistaken. What do you think many of the most successful air zergers belong to? Once you get past that, between equally skilled people it is clear that the rocketpodders benefit from certain realities:

- knowledge of where enemy infantry respawns
- ability to fire into/onto said respawns
- little to no actual cover for their targets outside Biolabs

Some of the above will be mitigated perhaps by Patch 2 - we shall see.

But it is silly to see some people post what basically comes down to "lern2play!" You have some very skilled players, including PS1 vets, posting issues with air balance.

And now they will make some changes - seems like the "lern2play!" types were wrong.

Seems somebody is new to the modern world of anti air systems.
Meet the CIWS for starters.

burster maxes have absolutely no problem shutting down enemies in an airspace...completely. i've done it solo in small scale engagements. i've done it with 3 other maxes in large scale engagements. that alone negates the OP's message. and, if you wish that there would be more anti-air than bursters and air-to-air, they've already announced that skyguards and shoulder fired rockets are getting love in the next patch.

yet another thread that's a waste of space.

Question to the OP and other players on the forum, specific to

I never consider myself "forced" into anything - because if situation changes and I don't adapt, I get rocket-farmed, Lib-farmed, HE-farmed, and basically bringing knife to a Dalton fight. I am more than willing to switching to a different role to be more effective, but it appears that some players prefer to stick with a single play style regardless what the game throws at them.

I am not "forced on foot" when a BioLab is cleared of air and ground and the interior battle begins. When enemy AA is thick but they lack sufficient ESF / Libs to obliterate our tanks, I see an opportunity to roll HE Lightning and HE Prowler to clean up infantries (not "Forced Into a Tank"). When infantry combat gets iffy and I need some odds in my favor, I roll MAX (especially when I am NC - dual Hacksaws) to clean rooms (not "Forced Into A MAX"). And when enemy ESFs start to show up, I jump into my ESF to start some air combat. In fact these types of moments are when I appreciate PS2 the most - flexibility.

To others, this flexibility is seen as "unbalancing" as long as vehicles can out-gun and out-live infantries (especially when killing infantries with ease). I would agree with them IF the game prevents players from getting an equal footing (read: Reaver), but IF a player decides to wield a rocket launcher and go toe to toe with an ESF, it is a matter of choice.

Look at that smexy phalanx cannon.

Realism is only used in their arguments if it's to their benefit, but as soon as realism is against them (lock on missiles for example) they will immediately shout that it's not 'fun' for them and to 'easy' and 'skill less'
But it's realistic right?

If this game was realistic we wouldn't have WW2 flak defence but long range Radar (or what ever it is these days) guided AA missiles and giant Gatling guns with computer tracking capable of shooting a missile or bomb out of the sky.

You know how the US would deal with that? a plane that is invisible to the tracking system and a missile fired from a long ways away. What you are seeing there is the last line of defense. If the fighters that were sent to intercept failed then this would be the last hope. Its called a CLOSE in weapons system for a reason. They have to be close...Modern aircraft wont get close. I keep saying it...AIR wins and no matter what you come up with to stop it they will counter with a way to beat it. Rule the skies and you win, period.

You just hit the nail on the head for 90% of the whining that goes on in these forums. People are too stubborn to adapt and that's simply all there is to it.

That long range missile would be killed by that thing easily, those kind of guns are designed specially for destroying Missiles and Bombs in flight.

This is very true - the very few times I died while playing this week are due to 2x Bursters covering an area AND without shooting at everything on approach. They would hold their fire until I slow down enough and light up the sky afterwards - there was no way to get out of that - I was flaming before I could reach AB.

from the wiki...
Limitations of gun systems

• Short range: The maximum effective range of 20-mm gun systems is about 4500 m; systems with lighter projectiles have even shorter range. The expected real-world kill-distance of an incoming anti-ship missile is about 500 m or less, [3] still close enough to possibly cause damage on the ship's sensor or communication arrays, or exposed personnel. This also makes the timeframe for interception relatively short; for supersonic missiles moving at 1500 m/s it is approximately one-third of a second.
• Limited kill probability: even if the missile is hit and damaged, it may not be enough to destroy it or change its course enough to prevent it or fragments of it from hitting its intended target, particularly as the interception distance is short. This is especially true if the gun fires kinetic-energy-only projectiles.
• Guns can only fire at one target at a time; switching targets may take up to one second for training the gun.
• A gun must predict the target's course and aim at the predicted position. Modern anti-ship missiles make intentional erratic moves before impact, reducing the probability of being hit by unguided projectiles.

Adapt into what? More air?. Don't need to take the T out of planetside 2 thank you very much, I play world of warplanes already.

Currently infantry is ok vs the ESFs but are just asking to be killed by libs. A large enough ground force should be able to own a single liberator. Instead stock Libs have enough armor to take any ground fire not coming from a AA max (which is completely useless vs anything other than air while Air is an ace of all trades) and survive several direct G2A rockets. They also have the maneuverability to avoid a rocket with a halfway decent pilot and the speed to safely **** if their health drops below 1/4.

I'm not asking for the devs to replace lib armor with paper mache but making the current tactic of hovering and blowing the ground troops to kingdom come at a bit more of a risk for pilots and gunners would go long ways to satisfy the vast majority of non AA players.

Ideally for me there would be 2 certable variations of the lib. A long range, high damage, version that operates at high altitudes, requiring a lot of finesse and skill from the gunner to pull off. It has lighter armor than the current liberator but has the current liberators maneuverability and speed. The hard counter for this would be Air. The second type would have the current libs armor but less speed and maneuverability. This one would be good for low altitude strafing and bombing. Making the zehper and dalton cannons more suitable for the high altitude version (highly zoomed in stock setting maybe) and getting more chain guns for the lib gunner would balance the game out tremendously.

Except in my experience, that just isn't true.
I've seen entire zergs of upwards of 20 or 30 tanks, with what I can only guess would be 100ish infantry without a SINGLE anti-air, on ir best case scenario 1 or 2 burster MAX's.
The libs and rocketspam ESF's move in like a school of sharks in a feeding frenzy ignoring the puny AA fire and proceeding to nuke the entire site from orbit, leaving nothing but alot of rage in /chat yells.
Now if only 10 (and that's already overkill) or so of those 100 infantry pulled Anti Air there would be no ammount of air that would be able to even get near.

You see... Anti-Air scales badly in this game 1 AA MAX is ESF food 2 MAX's can become a problem for ESF's but not to libs. 3 or 4 MAX's it starts to become a real problem to get close enough to render distance to even shoot at them. Get 5 or more (for reduced TTK) decent MAX's up and you're set - there's no ammount of ESF's, libs or whatever the hell you wanna throw at them that will get through.
I have personally witnessed and been a part of 6 anti-air MAX's completely locking down an entire factions air power at their warpgate - they were literally powerless to do anything against us and had to get ground troops to get us to move.

I agree - I'm not telling people to cough up and leave - if all people have available is one burster max's then pull one burster max's! instead of 5 - you'll need to pull 10! It won't really be a problem when there's literally hundreds of folks running around like headless chicken.

Yep, cause fighter jets are now stealth by basic. Even if i were to disregard the fact that this is not the case, there are designs of doppler radars that are perfectly able to track stealth crafts.
Sorry man, but that is a tale that can be told and turned over and over again.
Also: Realism is not the answer. You make the argument of air superiority whilst confusing it with 1 plane dominating an entire base. Sorry man. Even in WW2, the bombing of a target that was protected by AA was only possible by sending 50 bombers at it, and hope that one of it actually reaches and bombs accurately.

I find it insulting that people who resort to realism in their arguments find it perfectly fine that guns deal no damage to a plane that is hovering stationary above them a mere 100-200m away. They dont find it funny either that rockets are so slow that pilots have literally 5-10 seconds to move away from the trajectory.

Excuse me, but your argument starting from its very base is one sided and fallacious. If you want to stick to realism, then find out what reality is first.

the main issue i find most of us have with pulling air to counter air is that flying has a huge learning curve and not rewarding enough to attempt to learn it. ez solution would be to bring back the lock on AA maxes from ps1. the idea isnt necessarily to gain a kill or to even land a single shot. if you can fire 6 lock on shots at your target forcing him to flee that is good enough. non of the shots need connect but that beeping telling him he needs to haul *** is pleanty enough. then we switch back to our infantry fighting with the air pleasantly dog fighting eachother well outside of the influence of infantry. flyboys get their dogfights infantry get to play a first person shooter everyone wins.

According to Cowboyhomer, there's no reason for any military to resources or money on anything that isn't a jet or plane IRL. It's not that the people who have shown examples of extreme air superiority have decided to fight against countries that clearly lack any technological or strategical advantage, it's that aircraft are like the IRL versions of gundams, and we only build tanks and give infantry weapons to make aircraft look better.

1) morons derailing the thread with real world arguments need to stop already
2) air (aka GODMODE) is an unmitigated disaster

currently air DOES farm certs with impunity
ground can provide spitwad-like pestering deterrence and get NOTHING for it as air just zooms away, repairs, and returns to farm a few hundred to a couple THOUSAND more certs in the next strafing run.

Meanwhile the AA Maxes and infantry defending the point for the last 20 minutes have NOTHING to show for it as they will eventually succomb to the air spam. Sum total EXP for ground forces defending --> 0

this is pathetically imbalanced.
...pathetically

nice idea
also, why do rocketpods kill everything and yet no other class has a weapon with such unmitigated destructive potential... probably because such weapons are imbalanced.

new rule... look at what the lead devs play with and play that class

My point all along has been that the air is where it should be amd that we should get more ways to combat it. I have also said on these forums that my rockets are not fast enough and dont hit near enough. I feel if they just fixed that then the infantry on the ground would feel alot better about their ability to handle air. One hovering plane should not rule the sky, That we can agree on.