[Vehicle] Air to ground combat is TERRIBLE!!

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by karlooo, Feb 25, 2019.

  1. LordKrelas

    I upped it a bit yes.
    However, A would have to have nearly 50% of their force with AA-Dedicated weapons, or an entire tank's worth of nanites in a fragile max with 1\4th of their men also with AA.
    The MBTs with Rangers, aren't as practical in general-use, having lost a ton of firepower that could aim down.

    But yes, They could.
    Just requires a good deal of specialization against 1 target type, that also could leave upon the first sign of a lock, or ranger shot.
    While if they were engaged by 2 MBTs, with AV mounts, their Odds are quite low at surviving.

    So yes, it's possible, and yes I exaggerated slightly by assuming they didn't take Anti-air weapons.
    But mind you, if 5\12ths of your Infantry is Anti-air, or you have an additional 450 nanites into AA (Which is vulnerable to everything on the field, or one-burst by the ESF)
    If you met an equally sized force or smaller, with general-purpose guns, they will likely murder.

    am I still doing it? possibly.
    I don't particularly like the notion that in order to use AA, you have additional prices on top, however.
    Since... the aircraft can literally pick the fight, and vanish, leaving you with only the downsides, at any instant.
    Which makes me dislike having to constantly worry about AA like a paranoid-bugger, or be vulnerable as sin to everything else on the field.
  2. Silkensmooth

    Combined Arms is Not: "When attacked by Air, You pull Air"
    That is "If your opponent engages you with this, You must be the same thing as them, to battle them"

    Combined arms is also not, you cant fly here because every heavy has a lock on and is virtually invisible, every sunderer has a flak gun on it and skyguard melts ESF in under 2 secs.

    This game is mostly infantry players and both ground and air vehicles get destroyed by them.

    Its pretty hard to balance so they just cater to the largest play style which is infantry, and thats probly the right decision.

    So air sucks. Vehicles suck a little less. And if you really want to have fun just play infantry.
    • Up x 1
  3. Pacster3

    Cause infantry is the only thing that is challenging at almost all times. Air and vehicles are either OP or crap, just depending on the situation...at least at this point. You rarely ever have the feeling that you are on even ground with them...either they are victims or they victimize others.
  4. strikearrow

    You are, but it's because you really deep down don't like air. Combined arms means you have to be ready for anything and if you have a weak spot, then you're enemy can take advantage of it by focusing on that weakness. Air is particularly frustrating because it is so hard to kill aircraft with anything except other aircraft. Aircraft can be deterred by dedicated AA, but even average pilots won't die often to AA.
    • Up x 2
  5. LordKrelas

    Yup.
    As only Air can lone-wolf without a negative result, and profit greatly.
    Oh, and having to kill an ESF 3-8 times in an hour, since it can literally return after finally dying inside seconds, from half across the map.
    Kill an MBT, that's 450 nanites down, and the entire trip it takes of time; much more than if it ran away.
    ESF? 350 Nanites, and it takes less time to arrive than it did to kill.

    So, yes, I don't like air.
    As when I have a dedicated AA gun, that is incredibly useless against everything else, Air does not appear.
    Middle of a field, not staring at the sky, while dodging fire from commonplace infantry & tanks? ESF from literally 7 hexes away.
    Pull Skyguard, it vanishes; Skyguard is fodder to most things on the ground: and if there was enemy presence, oh look dead.
    Walk 10 feet, ESF returns.

    Easiest to drain Nanites, if you lack an angle from a spawn-room, as if they're engaged with anything, they likely can't use an AA gun.
    Or will die, or be distracted from the infinite angles of the aircraft.
    • Up x 3
  6. LodeTria


    Well HA's can, but we all know the "fighting class" has to be a little op for some reason.
    • Up x 1
  7. Trebb

    1) Pull a Liberator with SPUR maingun
    2) Hover sneakily near a decent sized engagement (helps if your side is on the offensive, less armor to worry about from defenders)
    3) Profit while absorbing 6-7 G2A launchers!*

    *2 if it's a Lancer
  8. strikearrow

    The solution is to make AA more potent in an additional role. Realistically, skyguards should be very effective against infantry and harassers. Simply make the skyguard a harasser killer and presto it becomes a viable weapon. Make AA launchers like the annihilator and swarm effective against harassers (like they are against ESFs) and they become viable too. I feel the ranger already is about right.
    • Up x 3
  9. TR5L4Y3R

    couple things i don't like are how weak coyotes are per salvo
    a2a while fairly strong agaisnst esf's take a long time to lock, and following the pts may get nerfed to be almost impossible to hit a esf with ...
    since my ping skyrockets in pts i can't test the stuff

    did anyone have tested the wyrm sideguns for esf's ? how reloably can you hit esf's with them? ..
    generaly following the pts changes being able to do a2a fights with esf's will get just harder for novices cause you can only reliably hit libs and gals as a2a missiles were made easier to be dodged ... if the changes go live the imo only damaging weapon on ambush will be missilepods ..
    aiming the nosegun is just incredibly difficult with current controls and inability to bound yaw to the mouse ..

    skyguard on vr at least against lightnings feels decent (god i hate when vr doesn't spawn all vehicles to test stuff with)

    maxbursters definitively need to be able to dmg heavy armor aswell .. but both slyguard and bursters are not good aiweapons .. gorgons may get a rof increase to be a good allround weapon, lightnings should get a walker equivalent that is good against infantry at medium to long range
  10. ColonelChingles

    Oddly enough the 40mm Skyguard shells do less damage (200 max/150 min) than a 20mm Basilisk round (250 max/167 min), according to the wiki. They even do slightly less damage than a 12.7mm Kobalt (200 max/154 min).

    And of course all those are laughable compared to the damage infantry weapons do... a 12.7mm sniper rifle will do 700/400, a 7mm sniper rifle does 400/334. Heck, an 11mm revolver does 450/275 damage. Which are all significantly more damaging than heavier weapons firing larger shells out of longer barrels.

    There's a reason why the 23mm ZSU-23-4 (on which the Skyguard is based) was routinely used against light vehicles and infantry... it can very easily tear those targets to shreds. From reports of use in Syria, they can engage distant targets with volume and accuracy and take out infantry through walls. Most of them aren't even used against aircraft and have had their radars disabled to primarily act in an anti-ground role.

    [IMG]

    The American 40mm M42 Duster was also used to great effect against ground targets in the Vietnam War, given how the North Vietnamese never really had much of an air force to begin with. 40mm autocannon were highly effective against infantry formations, able to kill large numbers of assaulting infantry quickly. And that was just with two 40mm autocannon.

    [IMG]

    So yes, the Skyguard ought to perform much better against infantry and light vehicles.
    • Up x 2
  11. karlooo

    The Skyguard uses only proximity HE. But doesn't explode on impact for whatever reason.

    Funny thing, when I first played the game I bought the Skyguard, expecting it to work as an anti infantry weapon (because of the quad gun with explosive rounds)....got very disappointed.
    • Up x 2
  12. ColonelChingles

    Regardless of whether the projectile is HE or APFSDS (a 40mm weapon can use both interchangeably and the best bet is that the one in Planetside is some sort of programmable round), the lack of damage of the Skyguard against soft, fleshy targets makes absolutely no sense.

    Essentially, with a 40mm shell, you have a 900g HE projectile flying at around 1,000m/s for a kinetic muzzle energy of almost 30,000j.

    An overloaded .44/11mm magnum carries a 22g projectile at 434m/s for muzzle energy of 2,078j.

    In other words, if we assume that the maximum damage of a .44 revolver with 2,000j of muzzle energy should be 450 (as it is in the game), then a single 40mm Skyguard shell ought to do 6,750 damage to be balanced. Essentially a single direct hit anywhere on an infantryman from a Skyguard should be able to kill them. That's what Planetside should be like.

    In some strange world though people think that this:
    [IMG]

    Should do over twice the damage of this:
    [IMG]

    A cartridge smaller than your pinky doing twice the damage of a cartridge larger than your forearm. Ah Planetside. :rolleyes:
    • Up x 2
  13. AllRoundGoodGuy

    [IMG]
    • Up x 1
  14. ColonelChingles

    Doesn't (really) matter if you get hit by a kilo of copper, feathers, or nanites. A kilo of anything going 1,000m/s as an anti-air 40mm projectile ought to is going to kill any person dead. Or at the very least do more damage than 0.02 kilos of copper/feathers/nanites going at a much lower velocity.

    I made a graphic once about the damage weapons should do had Planetside been properly balanced.

    [IMG]

    There might be a few minor changes/errors in there, but if a .357 revolver does 375 damage, then all other weapons are adjusted appropriately to be balanced. Granted at a certain point you're well within overkill zone where it doesn't really matter what you smack a poor meatbag with, but it just goes to show that most vehicle weapons ought to be OHKs against infantry.
  15. Campagne

    Properly balanced according to you. PS2 isn't trying to be a milisim, it's trying to be a game. :confused:
    • Up x 1
  16. ColonelChingles

    [IMG]

    Perhaps the game could have been saved as a milsim. Certainly going the ARMA route can't have made for a worse game than what PS2 is now (even if not all PS2 players go through Steam). I'd rather have PS2 be that blue line like ARMA than that green one. Heck, had PS2 actually done things correctly it would probably have been more popular than ARMA, given its F2P nature.

    The complete lack of immersion and believability is probably what is killing the game. I'm not asking for realistic windage or penetration mechancis (though they would be cool). Even a milsim is exactly that: a simulation of the real thing and like any game it cuts corners. But the mental ******ation that went into PS2's overall damage model strays too far from reality. Again, when a shell smaller than a finger does more damage than a booming autocannon, there is something very, very wrong with the game.
    • Up x 2
  17. silent wave

    Air-to-ground combat is simply awkward.
    Scythes are like huge paper airplanes: big targets, easy to blow up.
    Mosquitoes can snipe against any target, especially aircraft, and outmaneuver or flee any flak, especially from a ranger gun.

    It takes 150 direct mid-range hits from a sky guard to destroy a galaxy.
    It takes about 32 tank heat shells to destroy an orbital strike.
    It takes 15 (or 18?) tank heat shells to destroy a shield sunderer.
    It takes 2 tank heat shells to destroy a mosquito or reaver.

    While you are doing all that, you could have been killed 10 times over by a vulcan harasser, or about 7 times over by a sniping mosquito or reaver.

    Think again about how easy aircraft has it. There is no effective counter to aircraft except that which is exclusively anti-aircraft but weak to everything else, and a skyguard or ranger harasser is no match for an ESF shooting at it, much less against a liberator with a shredder, dalton, or zephyr belly gun.

    If you don't like air, remember the fun times, such as at the anomaly today, when a valk and two scythes landed on me in the air.

    [IMG]
  18. Campagne

    I think there a lot of other reasons to be placed ahead of "not a milisim" on the list of reasons of why PS2 has failed to be successful. I think if you compared it to other less popular titles and not the most popular milisim game things would be closer.

    I really don't see how have the current balance over "realistic" balance would ever make the game's popularity skyrocket even if done from the start. I think if anything the game would be even less popular because there would almost never be any reason to not be in a vehicle, and with PS2's slip'n'side nature and overall weightlessness of supposedly heavy vehicles that wouldn't go over very well against the competition.
  19. Pikachu

    Do you know of any game that does have real life based proportions to big weapons but isn't short milsim-style TTK? (assault rifles taking 5+ bullets to kill)
    • Up x 2
  20. TR5L4Y3R

    .... yupp let´s bring realism into a pseudfuturistic game ..... ..... again ....