Air/Ground Balance, why it's hard, and what can be done about it.

This is also a good idea, your a sitting duck in an AA max, I also think the base ammo capacity of an AA max is terrible your basically tethered to a re-supply.

#1: the default ESF fighter has extra AB jets and a canon great for dogfighting. This is basically your entry level specialized dogfighter. Yes, it requires flight skill... and a lot of it to compete with the ACE pilots out there... but the extra AB fuel can actually help you accomplish a LOT. Cert into +Top-Speed, +Stealth, and Scout Radar for the ultimate interceptor craft.

#2: The only problem with AA is there isn't enough of it... with good reason. Deterring enemy air yields pitiful points in a game built around cert grinding

Excellent Post OP. Here's some of my thoughts.

I agree that anti-air is way too overspecialized. Most of them are 1000 cert upgrades that can ONLY deal with aircraft and have no other use, and those 1000 certs are much better spent elsewhere at the moment. Thus, only a select few have actual AA capabilities at the moment.

A cheap "Flash-like" aircraft would be a bad idea. It sounds great in theory, but I can only imagine people spamming those and suicide ramming other aircraft to death. That would get annoying very fast.

I, personally, would like to see a technical added as a vehicle. Anti-air / anti-infantry, fast enough to be a difficult target for air, and weak enough to be owned by a tank fairly quickly. I don't know how well it would balance, but it may help out with the G2A difficulties by providing a fast and cheap counter to air, while still being fragile enough to be destroyed by ground forces.

As for increasing the skill of AA units - that's hard to do without completely destroying aircraft. If you make something more powerful, everyone will use it and aircraft will get decimated. Personally, I always get the most satisfaction out of hitting an aircraft with a unguided rocket, because it was MY skill that took out the aircraft. Single fire/slow fire rates that do more damage would yield more satisfaction for AA troops, based on my experience. Balancing that - well that's a different story.

Air unbalance is killing the game... 2 or 3 liberators and you can't even move as infantry.

Ok, we got an enemy aircraft that is notified it's being locked on to, is faster than the missiles, more maneuverable, has flares, can out distance them, can use terrain, and lock on time is very long and lock on missiles are expensive.

Now to juuuuuuust land 3 rockets to kill the weakest one.

The mass of a wingsuit would be so low, even when hitting a fighter you would pretty much just go splat and the fighter might spin and shake a bit.

AG balance, is pretty much spot on, with a couple of exceptions. The Skyguard needs to be improved, sundies and MBT's need a quality anti air weapon, either lock on rockets, or other AA weapon.

The only real issue with Air zergs, is that the ESF has been turned into the best platform in the game, with minimal drawbacks. The problem is that SOE in its wisdom gave the ESF access to enough offensive weapons, coupled with vehicle improvements to create a perfect storm. The issue is not with good ESF pilots, the skill level for ATA combat is high, but the entry level into ATG combat is really low risk, with extremely high rewards. In addition, the ESF actually does not preform its primary role of ATA combat all that well, due to its relatively light health, so in most fights against lib's or galaxies its actually at a disadvantage, except in the hands of again, the very skilled player.

ESF has:

1) highest ATG burst damage in game
2) highest speed in game
3) best mobilty in game
4) best optics in game- Infrared @ 50 cert points , thermal is worthless but costs 4x as much.
5) Minimal requirements for defense- composite armor which mitigates most of the damage it takes against easily exploitable targets, ground vehicles and infantry.
6) best primary ATG weapon in game: AP cannon


This has led the Air Zerg concept, and right now, ESF are the best ground attack platform around. By themselves they are not great, but in a group, they can decimate any ground forces in less then 2 minutes. 20-30 ground attack ESF pretty much change the game faster then any other platform.

As far as how to solve the issue, its pretty easy, get rid of the ESF as a low risk, high reward platform against ground, by reducing rocket pod burst damage, increasing ground to air combat power on vehicles, and giving the ESF some weaknesses, other then having to only worry about flak/small arms damage. ESF should be primary ATA platforms, with a limited ATG role as secondary against vehicles only, not vehicles, bases and infantry. The primary ATG role should be filled by liberators and galaxies.

I don't know where you get the idea that ESFs are at a disadvantage against Liberators and Galaxies. A single ESF destroys a Liberator effortlessly, even when its taking the tailgun to the face for the whole fight. The second a fighter starts bringing out rocket pods against Galaxies and Liberators they go down in seconds since they are just too big to dodge rockets.

Even if Liberators and Galaxies could effectively outshoot an ESF, since they are so much slower they can't go on the offensive. If an ESF had to be afraid of a Liberator it could always run from it, but a Liberator can't run from an ESF, and right now the ESF wins that fight unless the ESF pilot completely screws up and makes himself a target for the belly gun or front gun on the Liberator.

Make ESF a more A2A balanced unit instead of an A2EVERYTHING unit.

Suggestions:
Remove Thermal sight from ESF. Every infantery will clap ones hands.
Make them shake by flack-fire. AA-maxes won't be able to harm ESF's like before, but ESF's will have problems aiming on ground targets.
Decrease area effect of the Rocketpod. Use rockets to blow up weaked tanks or standing sunderers. not killing hiding infantery by spaming missles the whole place arround.

Everyone will be fine.

I think ESFs aren't really the problem. The only thing they do that they shouldn't be doing IMO is killing other aircraft with rocket pods.

The lack of units that are fun to play and effectively counter ESFs isn't really the ESFs fault afterall.

good post, but a wingsuit is an awful idea, also whining that you didn't get replies is weaksauce.

there's no need to go with the radical when the mild is still untried (ie tweaking AA, maybe some air changes. maybe some XP changes).

Know what else is notorious ? Balance problems in new games, and the people who dont believe balance issues make it out of beta. Just give it time.

Fine tuning things is inevitable in this industry. But over adjusting/balancing is where SOE works its charm. None have them beat. So whine away, they'll listen.

To me having a small, guns only fighter would be nice...

but...

It should cost as much as a MAX (100 resources) and not disappear when landing. If it's light enough that collisions between it and other planes have similar results to a Flash hitting a tank, ramming won't be a problem. In fact Libs could ram their way through swarms of these if they try hard enough.

Base turrets also need a buff. An anti-vehicle turret is quite a challenge for my Lightning, and I have the 100 mm HEAT cannon upgrade. If 2 focus fire on me and for some reason fire accurately, I need to get turret down in 2 seconds or I spontaneously blow up.

The equivalent to this would be the AA turret being quite a challenge for ESFs with rocket pods, and two making the ESF either hit burners in 2 seconds or explode.

The MAX is OK, a single Burster arm is enough to grind an ESF to 2/3 - 1/2 health when most rounds from a full mag hit (yes I ran into an ESF that allowed me to experimentally try this out today).
The Skyguard does similar damage to a single MAX held gun that's half the size, also being unable to shoot down an ESF with a single full, mostly accurate magazine.

The Skyguard should in fact be able to shoot down an ESF with greater effectiveness than a dual Burster.
It's a tank that carries guns bigger than the whole darn MAX...!

With 25% accuracy (still rather high when a plane flies erratically), 3-4 clips would be required anyway, which takes a while.
This allows to quickly kill a hovering ESF, but also means the high speed, low drag guys can get away or blow it up first. Everyone's happy.

Then maybe you just need to speak up more and it wont happen.

I don't think that would be different enough from the fighters we already have to really justify adding it, and it wouldn't fill the role of disposable air unit to the point where you have something to shoot at that can be expected to go down. A lot of what makes ground combat in this game so dynamic is the interplay between expensive large units and disposable infantry, because it allows you to have a constant stream of potential kills without having to make vehicles trivial. Air doesn't have that.

I agree there, base turrets definitely need to be reworked. Personally I would like to see the whole idea of the turret moving up and down on its telescopic mount extended into a defensive resting position, akin to a disappearing gun from the late 19th early 20th century. Basically you would hit the spacebar to extend the gun into its firing position at which point it can be damaged, or retract it into its defended position where it is shielded but can't fire.

That would make base turrets a much more dynamic unit. Instead of just sitting there and having to take a pounding you can retract the gun. If someone is coming at you with rockets, retract, the salvo does nothing, then you extend again and keep firing. If you fail to see it coming however you die. Same with the anti vehicle turrets. When you have a bunch of people pounding away at your turrets, retract, wait till they focus somewhere else, then pop out, take a few shots... Instead of being able to simply nuke all the turrets in a base in the first minute of the fight you can only keep them suppressed if they have competent operators.


Disappearing Gun Coastal Battery

Right now AA weapons are very, very good deterrents to air - one single AA missile will essentially make you wait it out for 30 seconds if you have flares I, or indefinately if you don't have them (WHY DONT YOU HAVE THEM??). Skyguards, although not the single-man death machines of betas past are still very good for point-defence of tanks etc against aircav assaults and sets of burster maxes are still a fantastic deterrent. Yesterday I was faced with two people with AA missiles and two burster MAXes (single arm I think) who basically defended Zurvan from an aircav assault; we simply couldn't get out of their reach.

Right now I feel that the most common reason aircav are so good right now is that people aren't educated enough on how to kill them. The majority of tanks I see don't even try to cover their backsides when I go in for a strafing run, and aren't using bumps in the terrain to gain elevation for killshots (vanguards, you are very, very good at killing air if you try; I ran NC on beta and you can just blast them out of the air!). Infantry need to remember to adapt to a situation; 1-armed burster/anti-infantry MAXes come default so I can see no reason you don't run this (your MAX AV weapons are pathetic anyway).

All this talk of people unable to "cope" with air is because they don't want to have to compromise their specialty anti-tank or anti-infantry loadout - this isn't a good enough reason!

Bleep bloop the mosquito is fun to fly

No, there needs to be a compromise - you can't have something that is good against EVERYTHING - that's why the AA missiles in beta were overpowered - they hit for full damage against vehicles, had no drop and could still lock onto aircraft. We should be leaning against good "all-rounder" weapons and push for role/specialised weaponry to allow for more variety in gameplay - that is why AP/HE/HEAT side-grades work well for tanks. One possibility is making split rockets - HE/AP(think: shaped charges like an RPG). Right now you can kill two infantry or a tank with a clip of rockets to the rear - there should be some kind of way to make us pilots have to choose what we can engage.

Fighters are good against everything.

Besides, AA guns don't have to be good against all ground targets. they can be good against infantry for example, and they still wouldn't really be as strong as HE shells, since they won't kill people who they don't have a clear line of sight to.

The issue is that the AA guns aren't accurate enough, so they aren't all that effective against aircraft. The solution here is to increase the power and/or accuracy of the AA guns, not nerf all planes. People will cry that air are overpowered until they are back like how they were in the middle of the Beta, when they were completely useless. Planes should be able to kill things, but you can definitely keep them away if you have enough AA presence. It just takes larger scale strategy than what a single person can manage; you need to be coordinated with an outfit (which is how PS2 is meant to be played).