Why so few Lightnings w/Skyguard ?

Try to buddy up. Two skyguards can handle a harasser, and liberators.

A

And the harasser has no weak spot that takes 140% extra damage.

Now why would a lone skyguard ever let an ESF live through the first encounter?

Afterburners plus erratic weaving by the ESF combined with the speed the turret can turn while predicting where you have to shoot for the flak to actually land a hit.

Works only if ESF is far. ESF has no time to manouver if it is attacking against skyguard. Many ESF:s crashes just in a place where skyguard was a few seconds ago. ESF must AIM straight and that is deadly manouver indeed.

If terrain is plain move and make rounds same time as shooting. If rough terrain then move when reload. Turn and move is important. Also check cover and try to remeber where it is. Tree, big stone, slope , building just hide behind them when you reload. And change places often. "skyguard is between those rocks just make a circle and attack ....where it is? "

Skyguard has two basic options.
1)Save your teammates
2)hunt the points.

If you save teammates shoot always when you see enemy aircraft. Priority - shoot always enemy out of friendlies ESF:s Libs tail. Why? Because some pilots LURE enemy aircrafts just toards you and you get points and more points! Current air method is to know where is friendly AA . So if you notice smoking friendly esf coming towards you then it is likely there are enemy behind it and you get good warning time to precise your aim. I even try to shoot in the midle of dogfight because if I hurt enemy badly then the friendly ESF takes it out and I get assist/critical hit points.

Unfortunately enemies has learned and make multiplane wave attacks, saturate sky with airplanes and use Galaxies as decoys.

Skyguard against infanry is like lottery. One Ha takes 2 and half clips to finish - have just bad luck with bullets.

Once skyguard was cheap(125 sc) but it is the time when skyguard was garbage. Even today Skyguard has trouble to make dmg agains very high flying Lib.

Against libs you'll need either two skyguards or high ground.

the damage difference a skyguard does close up vs a distance is extreme. High ground is your friend.

It doesn't really matter if it does decent damage to infantry. It's so inaccurate that you have to be right on top of them to actually hit anything. I tend to laugh at skyguards as I take my time aiming my Decimator even if they are shooting at me.

Maybe we would see more if we had a way of changing load out for armour like we can resupply and change load out for the MAX.

I'm definitely in favor of being able to change weapons, possibly at a fractional cost (25% of vehicle cost to swap loadout?)

And it does matter if it's decent against infantry. The overall flexibility of a weapon matters quite a lot actually. A skyguard's TTK against a lone infantry is way shorter than the multiple Decimators it's going to take that infantry to kill it. Is it a bad idea to engage infantry who are dug in to some really good cover? Sure. But I find I get plenty of incidental non-air kills with the Skyguard overall, whether it's doing 20-30% of a Harasser's health by shooting it as it zips by or taking out the occasional infantry.

I'm not saying it's the weapon you take if there's a lot of non-air out there. It obviously isn't. I'm just disputing the idea that it's useless apart from killing air and that you should only ever sit back in the rear being bored and waiting for more air targets. There are situations where that's the wise plan, and situations where you should aggressively help your empire engage all targets after the air is cleared.

It would be great if the Skyguard did bonus damage to harassers, the land lolpodders.

I really wish this was true.

Theoretical TTK yes but the huge COF makes it close to impossible to actually kill someone with it unless they are very very close. So the Skyguard is in no way even remotely effective against infantry. If it had a much tighter COF so you could actually aim the darn thing, then it would have been flexible. But it can harass harassers unless they have an anti vehicle loadout because then you are dead.

Skyguard is food for any AV harasser. And any Heat/AP Lighting just for the notice.

You can do great things with the skyguard, but how effective you are is vastly dependant on your utility / defence slots. A skyguard with stealth and firesuppression will be able to show up at unexpected angles and hunt aircraft without much worry aside from the odd harasser, but with some skill and careful timing even this threat is severly diminished (you open fire and run to a different location and picking pathways that are out of sight and stick around behind enemy lines were the harassers usually dont hunt).

For anyone who's curious.

TTK ESF
Weapon:---------Time:---Shots:
Walker----------4-------41
Skyguard--------5-------33
Basilisk--------6-------26
Kobalt----------7-------67
Ranger----------12------43

Heh heh. The idea of a heat lightning considering anything food amuses me.
A skyguard can take a heat lightning if he has a marginal skill advantage.
Ap lightning is more like it but ive lost a couple fights to skyguards in my ap just because i underestimated their close up dps. So again not food.
Harassers in a 1 on 1 fight. Yeah, your boned. Your also outnumbered and fighting a vehicle with an aa gun yet still able to put sognificant hurt on the guy. Now two skyguards will be able to tear a harasser up pretty good. The constant fire is bad for harassers. Again. I wouldnt call a 2 vs 2 'food'

Few? About half of Lightnings I see have skyguards...

Only because nobody puts a walker on a harasser.

don't know the answer to your question, but I will say skyguard is my favorite vehicle in the game I love being in a support role and I love anti air because I used to always roll (or float in my case) around MBTs and ESFs would always piss me the **** off, so using a skyguard and scaring off / killing ESFs makes me feel good because I know they wont start pissing my team off

This is what kills ``Skyguard`` for me... You need to place so many hits on Lib to get it down yet Lib can quickly and effectively deal with you with either a belly gun (i.e. Dalton) or a nose gun (tank-buster). Skyjoke is a better term than Skyguard.

In current form Skyguards are effective only against ESFs, infantry without cover, and/or incompetent players.

Good advice, but harassers/libs can buddy up, too.