[Suggestion] Air units vs ground AA

Eh, Chingles isn't so much as bad as he sees PS2 in a different light. I've been playing War Thunder recently and I can totally understand where his ideas of AA/Air balance comes from, they are just very different then what we have come to expect in PS2. Bombers don't go hunting fighters often in traditional air simulator games!

As for the RM, honestly it's not that hard to do. Most new players are simply unaware of it's existence. IMHO, there should be a button for the RM that is clearly designated in the ESF tutorial. Would be a major change to the air dynamic.

You cant just make it a button you have to do it in the right direction and you need to be able to aim too

Hey, I never said it would magically fix the airgame, but it's better then what we currently have. Making it openly available is better then having it be unknown to all but a small fraction of the playerbase. That way, a player has no excuse for failure except how skilled he/she is.

realistically speaking i think when you'd try a RM in real life, the plane would simply plummet to the ground

think about it:
you have your thrusters pointing downwards, but use them to move sideways by rolling to the side, what is holding you up?

then again, without the ability to RM A2G would be pretty much impossible, since the ESFs here aren't vtols or helicopters, or fighting jets, they are floaty UFOs for all i care, and pointing lock ons on them usually makes them go away

This is what I was trying to make clear for people who try to compare this planet to Earth. This is not earth. For all we know it is a thin atmosphere low gravity moon. And if you really want to stretch it say all the aircraft have some sort of anti-gravity tech that doesn't completely negate the entirety of the weight but reduces it dramatically. Cause lets be honest ain't no way a gal is going to hover with those 2 little wing engines and those little belly rockets.

Both of these things stem from what appears to be an inconsistent vision (in part endorsed by pilots) of what the air game should look like.

Right now, Liberators sit at the top of every food chain. They naturally destroy anything on the ground, and every week there's some fresh face on r/planetside with a 'super awesome, trust me' solo montage of them taking down ESFs.

ESFs sit below that, but still above anything on the ground (puns!). People adore complaining about how AA can 'deny' a fight to aircraft, but that's not entirely true. ESFs are also a really difficult playstyle to get into, so the people with a real investment in the playstyle tend to be the obsessive KDR watchers who are unwilling to sacrifice some lives taking down Skyguards/Phalanxes. If you're willing to lose a few aircraft, taking down AA sources is actually very easy.

There are also people who can work absolute magic with Valks/Gals, but I'm going to skip them for the moment as they generally aren't used enough to be a dominant force in a battle.

Then we have ground AA. The "deterrent". The only sources of ground fire which can guarantee a kill on an ESF are the Deci, and the Titan AP. Everything else allows air a chance to hit the fire suppression and then afterburner off over the nearest hill. Effective (i.e. killer) AA from the premier AA vehicle, the Skyguard, requires 2+ for an ESF/Valk and 3-4+ for a Lib/Gal. And this is garbage.

Combined, that means if you want to clear the skies of aircraft you need to bring your own airforce. And that means getting newbies to be competitive in the air. Except, that takes months of dedicated play. Which seems to be how the Air Chav want it: "Come fight me with Nosegun/AB bro!", etc.

Don't accept that should be the status quo. Don't buy into the "Oh, I get denied from fights!" line - that's coming from people flying solo over platoon level fights. Imagine the screaming if taking down a single MBT took multiple Libs working in concert.

Spawning aircraft removes vehicles from the game. Spawning AA should remove air.

Here's an idea: Omnidirectional afterburner.

You press one to two buttons and afterburn, you go in that direction. You aim it backwards, you go backwards. You aim it left, you do a hard turn left. You use space+left you go diagonally etc.

This way you can do much better air maneuvers in all directions without the need for the engine's to be pointed one way or another. You get a much more intricate air gameplay where players can use all kinds of maneuvers to dodge, twist, turn, move, follow and attack.

This also gives much more control over the RM maneuver. Basically the RM right now consists out of moving upwards quickly while pointing your nose down, giving the illusion you are moving backwards in a circular motion. With this change you can actually go directly backwards and at the same time do a circular motion downwards/sideways/upwards or do hard brakes to let your enemy pass you by or launch yourself upwards/downwards etc.

Rm is really not hard to do... i dont understand why people have so much trouble with this.... if i could figure it out in like 15mins on a ps4 controller, doing it on pc with analog break really should not be hard.

Haha, not just Warthunder, though that's about as arcadey as I get. I'm from the generation when Microsoft Flight Simulator came free with computers, so naturally that was one of the games that I spent quite some time in.

You can just try this experiment to see if the PS2 flight model "works". Climb to high altitude in an ESF. Then plummet downwards. Pull out of that dive, and see how that "feels".

Then try doing that exact same thing in Warthunder or any respectable flight sim.

The biggest difference is momentum and gravity, which PS2 just doesn't seem to have. You never really get the impression that you're fighting against your ESF when you pull up, that your ESF has any weight to it that would cause it to resist what you're doing. Instead it sorta just flicks into place.

You can do the same experiment with climbing. In other flight sims it "feels" like your aircraft is really trying to get higher, along with all the difficulties that has. But in PS2 you just... go up. Until you hit the arbitrary flight ceiling that is.

I really wouldn't call what happens in PS2 as "flying"... it's more like a Light Assault with unlimited fuel. You really just move in a 3D space but with little of the mechanics that would seem natural to flight.

And I think that's why most people can't get into the PS2 airgame. It doesn't feel right, it's not very intuitive, nor is it particularly deep. I will purposefully fire up flight sims and War Thunder to fly around because it's fun... but "flying" in PS2 most definitely is not.

To be fair, tanks also suffer from this. The way tanks move in PS2 doesn't "feel" like they are multi-ton behemoths that would require a bit of time and energy to accelerate. And turrets feel too "flicky" in that you can essentially swing your turret around rather quickly. Like with PS2 aircraft, you feel far closer to being a modified infantryman than an actual vehicle.

When it comes down to it, that's probably because PS2 was designed with an infantry-focus, and vehicles were based on whatever models infantry used. So there really isn't a distinct "flight model" for aircraft, nor is there really a "tank model" for tanks.

Comparing the flight mechanics in this game to other games doesn't work. This game has the mechanics that it has. More to the point -- those mechanics do the job that they are supposed to do. We could change them to be more like Ace Combat (my favorite all time flight sim) if we want -- or something even more realistic. Or we could go make it work like Pilot Wings 64! -- because watching light assaults splat would be hilarious! See how they would take that.

I mean, DBG could change flight physics to be more realistic by magically altering all of the game code quickly or realistically altering it over a long period of time (see a couple years development and don't expect any OTHER updates during that time) or we could suggest DBG make minor adjustments working in the framework that they have for significantly less money, time, and manpower to make things a bit more competitive.

i can imagine the cries of the l33t super pro pilots if they made RM into a utility slot activated item and fixed it so you can't do RM without it in the utility slot.

The point is that flying in PS2 is relatively unpopular and only practiced be a few. This is not because of limited resources (as resources generate fairly quickly) nor is it because flying is unrewarding (the highest scoring players in the game are rocketpod spammers). It's because flying in PS2 is unlike successful flight models.

I mean War Thunder has at least 11,000 players on average per day (only counting the Steam ones). That's 11,000 players invested in a flight model (and possibly their side tank game). How many pilots does PS2 have? Just a quick glance at the numbers suggest that we're only talking about a few thousand per month. So maybe no more than 1-2 thousand a day, tops.

PS2's flight model is simply not engaging. Like I said, I like flying in other games. But PS2 flight is rather unrewarding because it doesn't even feel like flying.

That's a legitimate point, and is why I pretty much agree that the airgame (and tankgame) will likely suffer for the foreseeable future. The Devs would have had to implement an actual flight model from the beginning rather than make an LA with wings, and it's far too late in the game to change that.

But if you want to know why PS2's airgame is pretty terrible and neglected, well that's the point of view from someone who enjoys flying... just not in PS2.

If it's not that hard to do, what's wrong with expanding the maneuver and allowing a much larger range of motions and tactics to create a better meta?

It's like infantry combat: about half the people seriously hate that the HA is the mainstay class because it's just got so much good properties. Big health pool with his extra shield, good primary weapon and a rocketlauncher to boot! The other half enjoys this because it just enhances the way they play. Most of these properties directly aid in the game's few goals, as pure brawn is needed more than tactical combat abilities like stealth and jumpjets.
But if we make other classes useful for other things so that all classes become useful in an attack and you get players taking groups of LA, Infiltrators and medics to do various tasks as well you get a deeper meta. Rather than "get some HA+MAX's and a few engineers/medics in between" you get much more options to assault a base.

Yes lets take away something because its different than other games....

Esfs fight like helicopters 100,000+ (maybe 200k+) people play battlefield 3/4/hardline, and id say at least 10% of them use helis every day so maybe we should make the game more like bf4....

Chingles go home, all you do is cry about air, every thread about air has you whining about reverse maneuver and liberators killing you because you play skyguard like a mongoloid.

Ah, stupid and racist. Funny how those two often come hand-in-hand.

Deflects actual argument...crys moar

i'm pretty sure he's calling you a downy. the fact that you think he's saying you use a skyguard like "a mongolian" leads me to believe he's close to the mark. i mean, what stereotype would that even be? bad asian drivers? is that what you really thought? you really are like 40+ and spend all your time playing Bill O'Rlly to a bunch of 15 year olds on the internet.

I've been trying to play the Skyguard a lot the last weeks, and it is pretty boring.
Most of the time you can pester some esf for like 10 hits at long range, firing a whole 70+ shot mag at them.
You won't kill a thing with it.

From my point of view main reasons are:
You are possible bait for everyone, air, ground, infantry, it doesn't matter.
Although the damage itself vs ground vehicles is not THAT bad, it only works close range and the ownly thing running from you will be sunderers withouth furys.

It is basically useless vs infantry, you just wont hit them. (Wich is kinda weird as you are firing 40mm explosive rounds... this normally should be an infantry killer...)

Tanks of any sort wont stop till you are dead, you can only win if it is another lightning and if he misses at least 3-4 shots, and you don't, in close combat. Good luck with that.

ESF will run from you, and either won't return or begin pestering you in groups till you are dead.

Libs will one clip you with a bunker buster from behind while you fire at an esf.

Infantry will C4 you.

So basically we have vehicle with extreme cong range, but it is very vulnerable, with low bullet velocity, big cone of fire, and explosive damage only vs air.


So my suggestion would be, turn it around. Make it deal NO Damage at all to vehicles, like a Kobalt. But make it deal ist explosive dmg always (it's still very low already), tighten the cone of fire, reduce the range drastically i would say 350 m, double the bullet velocity, and buff direct hit dmg by at least 25%.

i bet he drives a skyguard like a mongolian

they need to increase the rate of fire and increase the velocity of the skyguard to improve DPS and extend the amount of time the air are vulnerable to fire. you can hit infantry and kill them with the skyguard if you are close enough and lead a little to account for the COF that helps hit aircraft.

yeah lightnings can be beaten if you can make them miss some shots or you can circle around them near max speed and slow to juke their shots while shooting them up, also you can fire on moving harrassers fairly accurately too.

skyguard in the end ether needs better performance against air or given more flexible use such as a secondary or secondary fire mode that is more useful against ground. AA is a reaction defence, ether the AA has to be stronger or have flexibility so you can pull when there is no air around as a pre-emptive defence while still having something fun and useful to do.