As I said, of course there are people who don't think it's a chore and can enjoy it. but they are a minority. Just look at how the system works: no guarantee on targets The least amount of (effective) targets in the game When waiting you are not progressing any goals when there's no aircraft around, lack of knowledge when the next one could arrive also reduce the option to seek other tasks even if you could perform something different. A successful kill relies for 90% on the skill of your pilot rather than your own skill. He'll only die if he's bad rather than if you are good. You could be 100% accurate, lead perfectly and even predict enemy movement in advance to increase the amount of hits, but even in these godlike conditions it'll be the pilot's skill that determines the outcome. when you are successful you instantly stop an entire 1/3rd of the units in the game from participating, ******* combined-arms up completely rather than adding to it. Aircraft's only ways of dealing with G2A are liniear: Either destroy the G2A target before it destroys you or afterburn in an almost straight line away. There's no dodging in open air. For the G2A user it's a chore: He can't focus on other tasks because his weapons don't allow him, and even if he could then aircraft can always appear virtually without warning and have done a bombing run before you can effectively deter him. Of course there will be a few players that enjoy the relative calm and low skill required while using the G2A weapons, but they are a minority that you should not have to rely on. The fact that G2A weapons are also a massive "**** you" to the entire air-game and simply remove their ability to function rather than adding to the difficulty is the other side of the coin, making G2A weapons a terrible design choice for the entire game. Hey here's an idea: We add a new type of ESF. It moves at around 70Km/h and uses flak to engage other aircraft. A deterrence aircraft! Due to it's lack of speed it can't chase aircraft and they can escape, but the aircraft can't really function either. Wouldn't that be a fun gameplay element? Of course not! Every single weapon and ability in the game needs to add to it. Weapons need to be designed with both the user and their victim in mind! Every single ability and weapon needs something that can be done against it. You should be able to increase your survival chances somehow. That's one of the reasons why the Vanguard shield is so hated: Once active you can't really get an advantage except for keeping up your damage. Compare that to Anchor which has it's disadvantages in locking the player down or the Magburner which simply requires a higher accuracy to hit them and predict their movment.
I'd rather they made something I can use form the ground rather than introduce another aircraft. The SG could be a little more effective but then damaged aircraft should suffer from damage too. I can almost blow it out the sky and it performs as good as when it was new.
My idea was complete sarcasm to show how ridiculous the entire premise of deterrence is. The Skyguard and all other G2A weapons shouldn't be more effective, they should be completely different. Reduce flak range to something around 0,5m, or remove it completely. Tighten up the COF so that it can actually hit something if you aim at it. Reduce the clip size so that you have less time to find the lead point (in other words less spray&pray). Increase damage by a lot and you are set. Ideally an aircraft that hovers about and gets flanked will get one-clipped. An aircraft should have enough maneuverability to dodge shots if they know that there's G2A (which instantly improves the A2A game as well), and similar to A2A combat it'll be a contest of skill: The skill of the G2A weapon vs the skill of the aircraft to dodge. Since the G2A weapon is a dedicated weapon it should require somewhat less skill to overcome the skill of the aircraft. Since we have tightened up the COF, G2A flak weapons could now function as a light AI weapon to deal with C4 fairies and infantry on the ground. Additionally to increase the value of AI weapons they should become light AA weapons capable of dealing with aircraft. HE canons for instance would get an elevation upgrade so that they can actually aim at aircraft and infantry at high positions. HE canons can't OHK aircraft and hitting an ESF twice would be difficult, so HE canons would already fit well into a anti-big-aircraft category, this could very well be the upgrade HE weapons and AI canons on vehicles need to become useful beyond the occasional farm. Unfortunately we still have big aircraft to worry about. If a weapon can hit an ESF it can definitely hit a Valkyrie or Liberator. So we need two separate G2A weapon categories: Light AA that is designed against ESF and heavy AA that is designed against all the bigger aircraft. Heavy AA would have slower muzzle velocities to give big aircraft time to dodge and also prevent the weapon beating the light AA in destroying ESF. If well designed that the Heavy AA mounted on vehicles would be capable of rivalling the Liberator damage output in CQC. Again, that's the damage output in CQC, at long range the damage output would be lower due to more misses as well as a possible damage falloff. We could change lock-ons in a large variety of ways. For instance instead of a lock-on you fire a single high-powered flak round. Or you fire a powerful Coyote-missile. Or you require people to maintain a lock. Any type of lock-on should also require more aiming than "in their general area" and would now need to be aimed far closer to the aircraft's hitbox to get a lock, allowing aircraft to shake the lock with fast enough changes in direction. Lock weapons could also have the ability to re-acquire a lock if the lock is broken, possibly on another target. This way you could even pre-fire the missile and then lock on a target. Of course this would also require the lock-on time to be reduced significantly. What else can we think off? Practically anything is better than the current "aim in the sky and pray your missile doesn't suicide" technique we have now.
Next Patch A2AM's will be much better at killing libs and Galaxies -____- wish Afterburners were passive on the Lib so i con still have my Flares.
The dev's. It would be a game-changer on the level of the construction system but with less code required. It would also help lengthen the game's survival.
You do know that code needs to be removed as well right. Not sure you're qualified to state it will take less code or will be "an easy endeavour" which is what you seem to be saying it is. Considering the age of the game, I would be amazed if massive overhauls came in the existing gameplay. They either need to to expand the gameplay, continuing with base building and mining/ extraction and adding new vehicles and weapons or they're just going to tick over until the game dies. Is there even a roadmap for PS2?
I'm not saying it would be easy. But many of the changes I propose could be done with purely statistical changes without touching the weapon aestetics, sounds or other workings. Removing flak might be hard (not sure), but setting the flak detonation range to 0,01m should be possible, almost nullifying the effect of flak and effectively removing it. It doesn't even have to be removed completely for my idea's to work. Changing ammo count? Also just a change of a few numbers. Changing reload? Same. Changing COF size? Also defined by just a few numbers. What I'm getting at is that most of these changes would take no more effort than all the effort and balance changes we've already seen in the weapons. Increasing aircraft maneuverability in the air wouldn't be such a problem either, it would also consist out of changing the value's of each ESF. We already know they have those at hand to balance the maneuverability of the different ESF, so again in would be a matter of changing the code they already knew how to alter to make this possible. That would leave only a few select changes that would (possibly) be developer-intensive. Making sure the afterburner works in the direction of the player input. No, the biggest hurdle would be creating and testing different damage models and weapon variations to see which one's would do what they were intended to do, would neither be OP or UP and then see which one's would still be fun for both parties to use/encounter. The one's that might be on the UP side can easily be given to the infantry, assuming the weapon isn't too much UP and can solve it's deficiencies with small groups of infantry.
