Why G2A makes no sense

Quite the opposite, I don't fly at all.

I'm a tryhard infantrypleb, who acknowledges a certain (often perceived) imbalance, but chooses to utilise the tools at his disposal, rather than whine on the forums.

This is a trollthread that you are copying from some archive out of 2013 right? Everyone knows that A2G has been nerfed to irrelevance.

What i think is op has missed the whole point of the game's logic.

First, think of a large fight group. Put 3, even 2 skyguards there. They can clear the skies from threats in 1 min. Id doesnt have to be "kills". Clearing the sky is enough for you to proceed. And you get 3-4 out of 10 destroyed.

And max. Again as i sais you missed the point of the game. You cant fight ALONE in this game. You cant just pull a thing and kill the other thing. You need to combine it with others. For maxes? Yeah, 2 anti air max can eaaasily kill any esf's and harrass lib.s like hell.

And even once again, you missed the point of the game, you say air can damage anything. Well, yes, because ITS AIR. Thats the reason its called air support. Why should we use air then? Just pull another tank. Air's job is harrass anything. Tank's job is fast clearing vehicles. Infantry's job is, kill other inf, support tanks with your explosives and capture points. And air? Support everthing. So you need to damage everthing.

they acknowledge that when they have no issues with medic being the healer and engineer being the repair guy seeing as it there role in the group but then forget about the group when it comes to killing stuff or being killed. and your right killing is not everything detering matters. make a tank run away or a airplane fly off helps.

Not as much as killing it would have. If you "deter" an air vehicle, it'll nip behind a hill, repair up and come straight on back. All you've cost him is a little time. If you *kill* him, you've cost him:

• more time (respawning, getting to vehicle term, flying back etc.), during which your friendlies are free of air-*****,
• resources (and if you kill him fast enough you can run him out of them completely, then problem solved),
• oh, and since you're spoiling his precious KDR, he might piss of and leave you alone completely.

Deterring the target is, in every possible way, inferior to killing the target.

Put two skyguards *anywhere* and any half-way competent 2-man lib will hose both of them and never break a sweat. In fact, given how completely nerfed the SG has been, it's entirely possible that an ESF with Hornets will just park itself outside your effective range and nuke you to death - unless you run away... you're not "deterring" ANYthing then! And from the rest of your post, you clearly have no idea what's going on. You've just got back. Go play a bit more, learn some, and *maybe* then you'll get a clue.

Exactly. Also, I love how the best solution against once ESF is "have 3-4 people pull skyguards" or "everyone in the fight switch to burster MAX or lock-ons". The amount of AA needed to deal with one air vehicle is so disproportionate that when an air zerg happens there is nothing AA can do to stop it.

Also once that air vehicle leaves, a ton of people wasted precious nanites just to scare it away. And since no one can main AA, the air would be back after a while anyways.


Make air a high risk playstyle, it shouldn't take a dozen players to scare away an ESF.

There's much wrong with G2A and A2G.

To start with, flying is a solo excercise for the most part. Even Lib pilots will only be with their gunner(s) but will rarely ever have any coordination with others at all. That isnt too surprising as the game lacks the requisite tools to play together as air.
This solo experience means that when you enter the range of multiple G2A sources, all of them will shoot you. And just like ground units any time something is focused by multiple units they tend to have a bad time. Air is ofcourse the only unit type that can actually survive this consistently and still get somethig done. We can actually see that during air-balls the G2A units become laughably underpowered with collisions between aircraft being the largest factor of deaths (in fact when Oracle Of Death was still active, friendly collisions acounted for more deaths than the best G2A unit). This because it becomes impossible to focus-fire on a single target and it takes too mich time to properly take down any aircraft solo while so many targets take hits for each other by sheer accident.
Another quite laughable joke: G2A launchers often kill more ground vehicles than aircraft, or at least they used to. Any ground unit here trembling at the thought of a G2A launcher showing up?

On top of that an aircraft is still able to do things like bugger off to another fight if it thinks too much AA is present, while a G2A unit cannot. Additionally almost any type of aircraft loadout is useful in any fight while every single G2A unit becomes obsolete the moment air is gone as it can barely do anything else. It is the only unit type in the game that makes itself obsolete and it often just means you've shifted the problem to another fight rather than actually deal with the aircraft.

The solutions are simple:
1: make the air-game more accessible to players so you have more air-targets to engage. Having air-combat above and around your base should be normal.

2: make G2A weapons multi-functional, dealing with G2A sources should be par of the course just like dealing with AV or AI weapons is the core of ground combat. For that to work G2A weapons need to be present before aircraft show up.

3: remove deterrent type weapons. G2A weapons should require similar skill as operating infantry, tanks and aircraft, and subsequently be rewarded for it. On the other side of the coin the aircraft in question should have the option to dodge attacks and avoid damage. For that to work G2A needs to have a division between weapons that can reasonably hit fast moving ESF but deal little damage to slower aircraft and weapons that might have trouble hitting larger aircraft (say a HEAT canon with high elevation) so that we dont end up with deterrent style weapons again.

4: get better coordination and teamplay tools so that air and ground can communicate with each other without needing stunted squads and platoons. Rarely will an aircraft be in your squad or platoon if you want to guide it to a target for example.

5: balance aircraft properly so all aircraft see similar use. No one-size-fits-all ESF anymore.

That is where the fun part starts (for ground of course). 3 Skyguards on rocks near the south-east Indar warpgate dont allow any aircraft to leave warpgate.

Correction. Dont allow singular aircraft to leave, but only if said aircraft try to fly over the rocks instead of through the canyons. There is a very short and tiny window to shoot aircraft if they use the canyons. Worse still is that one suicidal Liberator is able to get in and kill one, then escape alive if he knows what he's doing. Especially on that rock face as you can avoid their elevation angle on your approach if they are on the rocks. That is a 3 people versus 2 people with more than twice as much resources spend that still lose one of them simply because even with max hits they dont out-DPS the Liberator.

And having done this tactic a few times and also being on the receiving end a common way to stop it is... by having 3+aircraft attack them. Because G2A sucks balls. It does require the aircraft to not beeline for them so the individual Skyguards dont focus-fire on the first they see, but thats it.

So why ESF and Libs hunt small groups / solo targets around map if you cannot fight alone? Trying any AA to against these players is just 100% vain. They fly off for 5 -10 min, just to return later. Pulling AA max, Skyguard is just waste of nanites because air units just leave. Lock-on G2A gives same result, without nanite cost. And most players dont even bother because XP gain is none existent.

Air supports everything by killing everything.

ESF Hornet missiles, 8 hits on the top of a lightning to kill it, 2 missiles per reload = 3 reloads needed to fire 8 missiles, reloads are 3 seconds = ~9-10 seconds to kill a lightning.

Lightning AP turret, 4 hits to kill a lightning(front and sides), 3 reloads needed to fire 4 shots, reloads are 3 seconds = ~9-10 seconds to kill a lightning.

Lightning HEAT turret, 6 hits to front, 5 to sides, 4-5 reloads needed, reloads are 2 seconds = ~8-10 seconds to kill a lightning.

Lightning Viper turret, 11 hits to front, 10 to sides, 1 reload needed, reloads are 4,5 seconds + 2,5-2,75 seconds fire the shots = 7-7,25 seconds to kill the lightning(more or less point blank range though, longer time with range due to gun spread).

MBTs dont have much better damage output on their main guns, very much comparable with what the lightning can do and neither of these two can even begin to dream about the firepower a Liberator has.
Do we have to explain it more?

I think making the lock on rockets one hit kill an ESF and a small bump in range, but having reduced maneuverability so that a hard maneuvering plane can avoid it unless very close or from certain angles, would be a good compromise.

When I fly I get killed a lot by other planes, very rarely from ground fire unless I do something stupid.

That would still have the problems of lock-ons being low-skill and requiring the player to be mostly in an open field.

A better method is to keep current damage, but make the missiles be laser-guided with a relatively low maneuverability. It means you can shoot them instantly, you can use them against high-altitude/long-range targets and have a better chance of killing them while still requiring some skill to do it.

You can add different warheads (on top if being laser-guided). The basic warhead would be a flak warhead with a small range, say 1m flak detonation instead of the ridiculous 8m that basic flak has. That means the missile is allowed to have a good velocity and maneuverability as it takes more skill to get it close to the target.
You can have a coyote style warhead. Since it would still have a lower maneuverability you would need to guide it in front of the target to hit it
You can have an air-burst warhead. When it comes within a certain range of the target (say 2m) it detonates and releases a shotgun-pattern of shrapnel. This is a wonderful tool to balance for both big and small targets and reward for skill simultaneously: if you shoot off-center less shrapnel will hit the target (or none at all even), if you shoot at the center you can deal more damage than the other warheads.

It also needs to be fun for the aircraft. So if a missile is fired there will be an invisible lock-on attempt like we have now (which will not guide the missile), but on all targets within 1000m within the lock-on cone. This way aircraft do get a lock-on warning and using their flares would disrupt the laser-guidance of the missile.

To make it more enjoyable you could trade some of your damage for debuffs against aircraft. Having a weapon that leeches part of their afterburner and locks their ability slot for a moment would help the user get more shots in. Or imagine how useful a missile would be if it made the victim maneuver as if on fire, but retain its speed...

There's so many things we could do with the G2A game that does not involve OHK's. Its also a bit weird that you think that c4 ruins the tank game but a costless "look at your enemy and hope it doesnt dive/someone doesnt walk passed" has to be a OHK weapon, especially when you compare it to an AV turret.

No offense, but that's insane. 1-hit lockons?! **** that. And I'm not even a pilot! I'm a pure infantry (+ sunderers for spawns) grunt. I totally think AA needs to be buffed. Maybe 3 rockets to take down an ESF. But 1? BS...

I wonder if people would prefer the game to have all missile launchers fire laser guided dual purpose missiles and all fast firing guns were effective against both air and ground targets. No more over-specialization or lock-on missiles. However this would mean less weapon buying and grinding for the developers.

AFAIK three lock-on hits put an ESF on fire, and seconds away from dying. Tacking on some extra damage to push it over the "edge" would be easy.

Why would it mean less weapon grinding and buying? They currently have a dozen different infantry weapons for each class with many being very similar to each other, yet that works (up to a point).

You could sell variation in weapon mechanics. Like the laser-guided missiles already having the option to fire different missiles, each of which could have a secondary use against a ground target. The airburst variant for example could be fired at a slower pace and manually detonated to kill infantry and light vehicles, if you can detonate it at the right moment.

The Skyguard could be reworked to an auto-canon against air and infantry, providing protection to vehicle columns.
Other weapons could provide debuffs, or a weapon-related ability that the player can use. Just think of the variety that the Unreal franchise has in its weapon setup despite (almost) all weapons being anti-infantry based.

Aight, that was some interesting math, however, you did forget one KEY point. The esf is able to hover at angles that aren't possible for the turret to reach, and is faster and more maneuverable than a lightning. So sure, on paper, the tkk is the same for an aircraft to kill a lightning and a lightning to kill a lightning. The key difference is, the lightning actually has the possibility to defend itself.

Also, one reason the MBTs actually have dps similar to the lightning is because they have a secondary gunner, and people complained they were too powerful, so the devs gave us the solution: COMBINED ARMS INITIATIVE! In short, nerf infantry and vehicles, then make air dominate everything in the game.

I just thought I should add that because some people just refuse to understand the problem.

You're exactly right, air can just nuke everything, and in the worst scenarios, it can outrun anything if it has to. Liberator and galaxy pilots even have the possibility to simply hover at max height and still completely wreck things, while remaining out of reach of anything. Not that AA would do more than tickle them, but our rockets disappear long before that range (and LOL, out of range of lock-ons ofc, not that that's an accomplishment). I wont even mention the fact its that our characters aren't able to look straight up, so we can't actually fire our rockets at the angle of a max height aircraft hovering above us even if rockets didn't disappear at that range.

Yeah the point I was making was that even in just a pure DPS war a ESF can be comparable/better than Lightning/MBT turrets, then the ESF have all the obvious advantages of flying, speed, etc etc since the guy I was quoting was of the opinion that air is fine because it 'harasses' and 'supports' both air and ground and that tanks role in the game was killing vehicles quickly.

I would be fine with that if it was true, as we know aircraft > ground in most things, even DPS.

I earned the nickname in AH3 "WirbelGawd" with almost 11,000 career kills in the German Anti-air vehicle. The dispersion on the shells is pretty bad at about 1200-1300 yards but inside of 1,000 yards (900+ meters) it is a grinder with a relatively tight ugly and damaging hit box. Very accurately modeled in this game. In PS2 the Skyguard dispersion at 500 meters is like bottle rockets coming out of an oversized PVC tube. Everywhere. So am I to understand in the future that anti-air guns have gotten worse than their predecessors in WW2? Scratching my head. Mind you at close range it eats aircraft but outside of 200-300 meters you are just annoying them or chasing them off.

Finally learning how to fly in this game and my Reaver disagrees. I have died to everyone of these weapons in the last few days. Horribly LOL See you up there! OINK