You can't start people off with 0 air defense.

No mate, perhaps my post wasn't clear enough, I apologize - I am talking about the default burster MAX, you get one arm by default.
Everyone does.
If there's 100 troops around and none of them have spent a dime on the game, and say only 5 of them pull a default AA MAX you will still wreck face.
5 default burster MAX's are the same as 2 (and a half) dual busters - and 2 dual bursters working together are a nightmare for any pilot - it will force a retreat to decent pilots immediately and kill the greedy bad ones out right.

And that's just 5 out of 100 troops completely neutralizing the skies for everyone else. I'd say it's a pretty sweet deal.

Because you shouldn't need 5 people to fight one thing.

If I am on the ground brand new player fighting against ground stuff, I can always pick something and have a solid chance of beating a max level player. Or at least doing a hell of alot of damage.


This is not true against air, From the ground you should lose with the way the weapons are setup now unless the pilot screws up big time

Disagree with everything you are saying.

Sunderer actually a decent AA while protecting tank column.
2 fully manned trucks can take down most of the slowest airplane if they know what they are doing.

lol seriously? that's like saying a an army with only spoons as weapons can defeat the US army - only if the US army just stood still and were ovderdosing on ambien.

As long as a Liberator cant see/hit you in return, and you can hit it, you are officially 'AA', if it can shoot you, it doesnt matter what gun you have, or what you counter, its going to win.

Yeah seriously, he left out Grenades and ramming them with Flash's.

well, after they ruined the Composite Armor for ESF's, now you can even damage pretty good with your standard infantry weapon.

They didn't change the stats of Composite Armor. They only changed the description of it so it more accurately described what its effects were.

The main problem I see is that if you "deter" planes, you get jack for reward.
You sit there, helping your team cap important points and dealing thousands of points of damage every minute, and you might end up with a few hundred XP for an assist or two, and possible the cap.
It's just not rewarding if no one kills it.

I've killed aircraft with all those weapons. You're just a bad player.

best aa for newbies= ramming a galaxy into enemy air

IT WORKS

Yeah, I agree that the choice to limit your AA options at the start is folly, especially when the AA options you can cert/buy into are nowhere near as potent as the aircraft upgrades that cost the same. Starting options for people that don't want to or can't become an air superiority pilot are pretty much just the phalanx turrets and single burster maxes, the former of which is extremely vulnerable and unlikely to kill anything other than bad pilots (not to say you don't sometimes get to shoot at a lot of these), and the latter of which will almost never kill anything regardless of the pilot's skill and whose only boon is the fact that he doesn't render for aircraft at long distances (so if you decide to pull a single burster MAX for defense, which I do fairly regularly when locked at the warpgate, you're committing to being a low-impact deterrent and accepting that you're going to earn almost nothing). Resource and acquisition timer limitations also means you have to be super conservative as a single burster, since a single burster IMO can't contribute an effective enough role to justify itself for squad play, and of course is extra vulnerable when lone wolfing.

Honestly, I kind of feel like a MAX that isn't doubling up on one weapon is never potent enough at anything to make much sense, but that's another issue entirely.

That's reaching quite a bit. "Can kill aircraft" and "anti-aircraft" aren't the same thing. AA Phalanxes can technically kill infantry, but that doesn't make them a viable anti-infantry option.

no you should not,players need to pull stuff to defend against air.

Why, How is having players have no good weapon against certain enemies good for the game when you start???

I don't understand why people think just because you slap wings on something it should be OP against non flyers

I've "killed" (*cough* got the lucky kill shot with my engineer's carbine *cough*) aircraft with some of those weapons, too. That doesn't mean I was making use of an "anti-air option," or even contributed anything meaningful in doing so.

Don't get me wrong, a barrage of automatic fire from small arms can get an ESF to back off sometimes, but anti-air implies something that can be regularly employed to threaten lethal damage to an aircraft in a very broad use case.

I like how op is dodging all suggestions to use MAX AA. Bet he haven't even treid it against planes.

I love it when ESF's like to hover-camp above my head, then instantly explode. Thats the true deterent to hover campers. "Don't want to instantly explode? Don't hover over Hoki's head."

Your problem then is not with the starting ground AA options then, it's that you want one player to be able to do everything.

Dedicated AA can take down air. They should NOT give every player an option to take down air with any class, that would make roles pointless.

This argument is fundamentally without merit because the ESFs are no good against ground without a significant investment. Those planes bombing you didn't start out with that **** either - rocket pods cost either 700 SC or 1000 certs.

Giving infantry a (more) effective counter for free would be unfair to the pilots who had to put all that money/effort in to make their planes decent in the first place.

Besides, even the basic AA (Bursters, tanks, turrets) are effective against ESFs if you use them right. A couple guys with default MAXes with only the one burster arm are stll more than enough to keep a couple ESFs at bay. And as other people have said, small-arms fire DOES do damage against them as well. Ive shot down an ESF with my carbine before. It may not be easy, but 20 guys firing at it at once will get it done pretty quickly.