Back to air supremacy days, once more

Wrote my answers in red.

Yes skywhales for everyone!

I know, right?

We should add one. Right now all we have is the Lolpodder and the Liberator.

you got your head so far up a lib tailpipe you can't even see straight. once mass air comes to a battle, it's over. tanks will be obliterated, infantry massacred, and by the time defense attempts to bring counter-air (lost cause) it is too late.

but it's so hard to stay in the air now? bursters nerfed last year with gigantic cone of fire. lockons nerfed to hit every obstacle known to man. skyguard still as useless and undesireable as ever. pilots with half a brain cell can farm without opposition.

you're so delusional it's not even worth wasting any more time dignifying your garbage with a legitimate response.

And the entire time, air will still be getting less overall xp/min because to be effective in a vehicle, you have to exppect extended downtime. Sure, liberators need some balancing (or rather, a skill based anti-air weapon added) but if all you're going to ask for is nerfs, without experiencing both sides of the story, I want resource costs and aquisition timers removed so air units can be just as disposable as ground-only players want them to be.

What?? The fastest time you can possibly cap a base is three minutes. Let's say the enemy air is SO EFFECTIVE that they obliterate you as soon as they show up and the attackers IMMEDIATELY start a 3 minute cap on an Amp Station. Even if you had to fly from the farthest warpgate, your ESF will still get there in time to kill or at least chase off the enemy air and re-secure the base. That scenario had every variable stacked against the defenders. In a realistic fight, you have plenty of time to pull an air vehicle and return to the fight to chase off the enemy air.

First off how many is "mass"? Are we talking 2 squads , 3 squads, a platoon... I am going to assume mass = platoon 48+. If you have mass infantry on the ground, then all they need to do is switch to AA lock-ons or grab bursters...And the Air threat will be gone in a few minutes.. I'm sorry if you are too incompetent to deal with the situation, but in my experience the people that have issues with Air in this game are those that run Solo and or are not in an Outfit that works together...

As I have stated on many occasions Air vehicles rarely interfere with fights that myself and my outfit are in, so my perspective of the situation is different from yours. I see the Air vehicles and they attack us, but they generally die and have little impact on the fights that myself and my squad are in. Most nights we normally only run about 2 squads worth of players, but we work together as a team on Team speak and generally that is all the is needed. At the drop of a hat if we see enemy Air massing, we grab 3-4 Bursters and a couple lock-ons and we vaporize that Air threat.

Only Zerglings and those that refuse to work in groups have issues with Air vehicles. Honestly if we buffed AA so that all the incompetent zerglings could deal with Air vehicles there would be absolutely zero air craft in the air because it would become all that much more stronger for those of us that currently do not have a problem with current AA.

Those of us that use team work and work in squads have few issues with Air because of the way AA scalesand how quickly and easily we can switch to AA, we can easily take on equal numbers of Air vehicles, since we are always prepared to deal with the threat, either by switching right away to AA and most importantly we almost always have 2-3 players in our group in scout ESF's or in a liberator and our ground troops work with our Air guys. *** If the Air guys get into trouble they know they can call out in TS and let us know they need some AA and they bring in the enemy Air to our bursters and we kill them and vice versa if the ground troops are getting hit by Air we call into the Air patrol and they help the ground units. <-------This is how you play this game and succeed...If you are not doing it this way, then that is your fault...(I'm not saying you wont get wiped out from time to time, but over all you will succeed more then fail)

If only.

Unfortunatley instead of having seperate A2A and A2G fighters as in PS1, they produced the ESF Superfighter and the rest was lolpodding history.

What would happen if we focused on in-game solutions instead of begging for the bad man to be vivisected?

ATM a single lib can kill a sundy before anyone can do anything, putting a massive halt on any attacking forces. The only way to prevent this is having a massive overpop on the hex, otherwise you are screwed. 50/50 fight? Pull a lib, **** their sundies and you are done.

Nerfing something is an in-game solution. You want your thing stronger or their thing weaker.

meh. I spent like an hour in a skyguard today. Me and my buddies either drove off any air attacks or murdered anything that got to close. And we had 20+ ESFs and 2+ libs against us at times.

It takes skill to fight opposing air whether you fly a Lib or an ESF to be sure.

It doesn't take much skill to do well against ground targets even with a Skyguard around.

As an infantryman, when the pops are low...

I can opt for a lock-on which can scare a Lib off occasionally.

I can grab a "dumb-fire" and pray I hit something.

I can grab an AA MAX and blast away hoping to scare them off.

Or I can get a Skyguard and give them a bloody nose.

NONE of these things will kill a Lib unless the pilot is a complete moron.

The Liberator fires a main gun with a ridiculous TTK, a secondary weapon with the damage of an MBT, can have a crew of three, has incredible lines of sight that a ground vehicle can only dream of (and three pairs of searching eyes), has incredible speed etc, etc...

Even so, when the pops are high, a Lib or any ESF for that matter, become a high value target and will get ripped apart by the ground er, if those troops happen to "look up" once in a while.

If the Liberator is nerfed in some fashion, the devs will have to walk a fine line considering these things.

Yeah myself and a lot of other pilots agree that the ESF should have very limited A2G abilities. Libs are supposed to be doing the A2G work.

Get yourself in a outfit. Get one entire squad of Skyguards and a ammo Sunndy. Focus fire and laugh your head off as you instagib any air that fly into the hex. Congratulations, you have just ruin the air game and there day

If the air gets slow going, get one guy up in an ESF/Lib/Gal to attract enemy air. Make them circle and then dive straight at your guys on the ground when they have someone on the tail. Laugh even harder.

In other words, don't wait for like minded people. Work in a coordinated fashion within a team.

I've asked this at least 300 times before and I still need to keep asking:

Why does AA need to work as a team while aircraft can solo AA, AI, and AT?

A single guy can very effectively reduce the impact a single ESF has on the battle. 2 or 3 guys can also do the same to a 2 or 3 man Lib. Yeah, you might not be able to destroy them with ease. but you sure will make it damn hard on them. You're focusing entirely on the wrong aspect here. AA is in fact very effective as a deterrent. But also so is airs ability to retreat quickly if they have overextended. This is why you need more guys to actually neutralise the threat permanently. It all comes down to mobility and SOE are constantly underestimating how powerful said aspect is. Just look at things like ZOE or the Harasser etc.

Honestly I would love to see air have it health pool doubled, but its damage and mobility halved.

It would allow so much more flexiablity, in weapons and in how the aircraft perform, and make balance much, much eaiser. It's a mystery why they didn't follow the PS1 example.

I've said it before and i'll say it again -

A Liberator does not feel ridiculously powerful and can be destroyed in most large-scale fights.

In smaller battles, LIberators just rule - what really (REALLY) frustrates me is that AA, either a burster max or turret, just pings away while the Liberator just keeps on coming and not even bothering to take evasive maneuvers. AA doesn't even deter them and they just hover there until you are dead. Amazingly frustrating.

HOWEVER - I wouldn't want to see them nerfed into oblivion. The nerf or buff hand of SOE can be quite extreme (anyone remember the original Magrider nerf ? Shocking). I just think they need to feel a bit more pain from dedicated AA. When I pull a burster max I know that i'll be totally useless against anything but air and extremely vulnerable - so why does it feel so weak against Libs ?

Ah, the good old, "you have to join a group to be able to fight me, but I don't have to join a group to be able to fight you" argument. Lovely