Tired of aircrafts domination.

I reckon air is pretty strong, maybe Libs are borderlining being overpowered but thankfully, it's not too hard to avoid them as an infantry in bases.

you do understand that air has to get within 300 metres (at best, in an empty fight. Far lower in anything more) for infantry to render, if a target has not rendered they cannot be damaged, so air DOES have to get close , yet AA has a much better time rendering air at a much higher distance.. see how this could be flipped into the AA is broken idea?
its the same argument as tankers have against the AV mana turret, just replace MBT with ESF, and AV mana with AA.

I have 1k+ hours and I don't own G2A rockets. I don't need them.

It's get good or get the tools to compensate. You can't do neither and expect to still make an impact, and I ain't a fan of any balancing act that encourages lazy incompetence.

There's G2A xp, air vehicles are worth plenty of xp, the act of merely performing AA decently will make your playtime better than just getting farmed even if it is boring. What else do you want for AA? The ability to farm as AI and AV too?

YOU pulled a SG and what did the rest of your faction buddies? Sitting on their hands, thumbs up their ***?

It's not like ONE Skyguard is the "universal remedy" against an overhelming air superiority, even when a skilled driver could make a difference between a total loss and a well defended loss. Pull 3 or 4 SGs and the air superiority of the enemy will change to a blank blue sky where your air buddies can wipe the rest of the fleeing trash.

Are you insinuating that in a game simulating massive scale warfare, that maybe numbers have an effect on the outcome? Great scot i think we have a winner
"One skyguard teaches them caution,
a skyguard, two burster maxs and a base turret make them pay"
-Batman (...probably)

You're implying that ground AA can farm to begin with.

And, as a lib, you can farm as AA, AI, and AV. So, why cert into anything else when you can just do that?

That's the point i'm trying to make. It's a free market in this game, so players can do whatever they want to get the most XP. Currently, there's no incentive for many of the players to choose the path of AA-only for various reasons.

Other than to completely deny air domination in your hex and sometimes to those surrounding it?
its almost as if it would give all the people in that hex a breather from all that "so incredibly OP air" sounds like an incentive to me

i suggest exchanging selfish entitlement for some empathy and teamwork once in a while

Or (gosh and I know this sounds crazy) even just for fun! A squad of skyguards is great AA, but also hilariously and ridiculously fun, because you can sneak/gang up on ground things like tanks and just give them one of those classic PS2 "wtf" moments. Another fun combo is skyguards and banshee mosquitos--completely goofy, but it can actually be really effective (at least in smaller numbers). One if my friends (who doesn't have a skyguard) found an abandoned one once, and used it to keep air away while my wingman and I booped a bunch of infantry with banshees (none of them pulled AA or hopped in the AA turrets at the adjacent tech plant for some reason except for a few times where we got some squadmates to drop and C4 them). Aside from showing that teamwork is OP, it also shows that in this game too many people worry about stats/farming/being farmed. Our outfit specializes in doing a lot with a little (or a TON with a lot), being organized chaos and using teamwork to do crazy all-over-the-place things that decide fights in our favor, even when allies are being slower or numbers are against us.

Ultimately, I feel like this thread is showing that the game has a huge learning curve, and a lot of people get stuck on doing conventional, local things (oh no I'm being farmed by air in this spawnroom) instead of doing less direct, creative, biggerscale things (falling back to an adjacent base with AA, dropping behind enemy lines to their closest airpad and hacking terminals, placing tankmines on the pad, taking over AA turrets behind them etc.).

1 skyguard is just free certs to a good crew.

1 skyguard and 2 bursters is 650 infantry resources you'll never see again for the joy of making the Lib crew have to repair and perhaps farm another hex.


Batman would invent AA that actually was a counter not just a deterent, without a shadow of a doubt (or of the Bat).

1 skyguard means they have to think, its no longer a mindless farm, i didnt say "1 SG kills all herp" infact quite the opposite, but they know AA is up, that the people they are facing aren't totally inept

no one cares about resources, and im not talking about a one lib situation, WHY OH WHY do people keep making this game out to be some 6v6 bullcr*p??? you have multiple flak sources NO air can enter a hex NONE, thats why the lib recently got its survivability buffed.
so what if they leave? that skyguard can travel fast, and those maxs can switch at the terminal 20m to the left, and the turret guy can get off the turret, i call that an effective engagement

you seem to think counter and deterrent are different, you go sit above a base with all its 48+ AAA "Deterrent" and not leave and tell me how countered you were, id say pretty dead. deterrents are just counters you weren't exposed to for long enough.

a 3 man lib should not be countered by 1 person with an aa weapon sounds fair to me.

Tell that to all the random pubbers or new players that play.

"Wow, you spent all your certs on guns instead of AA?! Man, you're so selfish. You're supposed to be on AA duty so the rest of us can farm and get xp!"

This whole game is built on selfish entitlement. Why do you see so many people run infront of a max to get a peak for the kill? Or can't reverse back in your tank because 6 other tanks are pushing up? The game even tells you if you did "good" or "EXCELLENT" based on how much XP you did in a round. It's. Literally. XP. Based. Period.
That drives the entire motivation of all players.

You can change the players perception of something by giving it more or less XP. Remember that XP buff to killing vehicles way back when? Yeah, I bet the average person now tries a little bit harder to kill vehicles now because of that. Remember the nerf to spawncamping sundies? That was the norm for players to do, but it was all changed after XP revamps.

The same can be done to motivate players to gravitate towards AA when they are being air dominated. Just give more XP for damage hits. Especially on hits for galaxies, since you currently get 0 XP per hit. That could make it feel worthwhile for the average player, without even touching the damage models for AA. It's the perception of making a difference.

The problem is both they've made Libs ridculously powerful in small fights and that you can't kill the threat (if they are remotely sensible) just drive it off (from where it can either come back or go somewhere easier).




AA isn't a counter, the Devs have repeatedly said that; it isn't designed or supposed to kill Air, just drive it off.

And it most certainly does not act as a counter currently, in fact currently it doesn't even really act as a great deal of a deterrent for good pilots.




The problem isn't that a 3 man lib cannot be countered by a 1 person, it's that it can't even be countered by 3 people (outside of ESFs or more likely another Lib).

Libs will be nerfed (again) or AA will be buffed (again), the current situation is too much like just after Live (when most of the orginal Lib farmers farmed it up until the inevitable nerfs rolled in).

Defo a great idea, ive had it myself and it would be essentialy the same (could also put a burster in the back for additional firepower) but i want more vehicles not less (although id be immensely happy if they did do this). SOE already shot themselves in the foot by putting AV weapons on the harraser instead of giving us the enforcer, thresher and marauder. Their intent to not give us many vehicles was evident as soon as they stole those names for secondary tank weapons . Like you say its a shame that these devs have ignored what worked well in the last game.

Ye the ranger is not effective against anything, anything at all, even bumblebees laugh at the pittyful damage output.
What makes me think anyone wants to run AA? Well besides the fact that many people (including myself) enjoy playing an dedicated AA role, this is a fluent game. Friendly tank column being spammed by libs ill get a skyguard, base camped by masses of ESFs ill fall back to another base and spawn a skyguard. Plenty of situations where it would be useful. Also PS1 had 100s of dedicated AA players, PS2 would be no different.
Not sure if you know this but the pic i posted was the actual vehicle from PS1, it was called a skyguard, it did however have a machine gun mounted as a secondary that could be used to kill troops so it wasnt strictly AA only but the stryker, phoenix and lancer made short work of it so not a good idea to try and farm troops with it.

Let's play some devils advocate here:
I have way too many stuff to unlock for my desired playstyle, why should i waste my certs for a playstyle that i don't like (AA max) and doesn't suit me (ESF) just so i can deter a lib? That's right, i wouldn't. I would spawn somewhere else. Now if i would have access to some proper AA without having to cert it, then i would probably help deter aircrafts, even if i can't kill them. Like the AA turrets in some bases. But often i don't have any turret avaible, or it's destroyed. So i shrug, and go elsewhere, leaving my faction to die to bombardement.

That right there, is what i'm betting is going through the heads of most non-organized players, and while it is not my genuine feeling about the situation, i can completely get behind it. And the result is the dominance of air we can see right now.

Now admittedly, i don't have any AA certed aswell, because, well, i still have enough stuff to unluck for my suited playstyle, but i allways hop into AA turrets and try to use them strategically (= don't use the AA turret in the base being attacked, use one in a base nearby). It works most of the time, but sometimes i indeed simply spawn elsewhere due to air raid. Let the sucker circle over an empty base he's not capping anyways.

Tl:dr: Make AA more readily avaible, let us deter aircraft (note: deter!) without having to spend 1k+ certs.

Oh come on, this is such a strawman arguement. This is a combined arms game, as we read in this very thread a hundred times, where players fullfill different roles.

If I chose to fill an AA role then I should be effective in it. It does -not- make sense to say that I should not be able to destroy the the Liberator from 350m+ away as it cannot see me, when at the same time it has no problems taking out the Sunderers, base defenses or other vehicles that MY TASK IS TO PROTECT as AA role.

I don't think we should be talking about balance this early after an update. Let's see how it plays out once all the people stop using Libs because it's no longer the shiny new toy.

Over saturation in any part of the game causes problems. Once any element reaches a critical mass, it's going to be over powered.

Stop talking sense, we may have to ban you from this conversation if you do not start sensationalizing and over exaggerating!

i agree the lib is now better than it was, but until the waters settle we cannot call OP or UP

but it is... does flak drive esf's off? that means its a deterrent, it means that if they dont leave imediately when they take damage, if they keep flying on that path , they WILL die, thats a counter. you cannot have a deterrent if there is no fear of loss. which comes in the form of AA its a case of wording that i recognise counter and deterrent to be the same, one just has more exposure time

is it that the pilots are good and so avoid all AA. or just that the pilots are better at flying than the gunners are at AA? because WASP just finished a session and our AA was nailing libs and esf's with ease and efficiency and that was without even having the air squad running...

and this statement is just wrong, 3 burster maxs, 3 skyguards, 3 base turrets, or any of the inbetween will kill a a lib before it kills all three of them. unless the players doing AA clump up and generally play really bad.

and the lib farming was mostly due to incredible damage output, rather than ability to not die as quickly

Having enough man power to be able to create a umbrella of AA, so your friendly aircraft can come in and wreck the enemy is awesome. TR squad use to do that , when Strikers were way OP to enemy aircraft. 5 guys on the ground protecting friendly Mossies was pretty awesome to watch. To bad most havent figured this concept out. Air is supposed to cover there ground forces while the ground forces cover there air and take out enemy AA, so the friendly Aircraft can take out tanks and ground forces.. The two work together to defeat the enemy and conquer continents. So many time i see reavers flyn into libs diving into base getting in there libs way, all to let some enemy ESf come in from behind and wipe them out. ESF are supposed to protect there libs from enemy esf ,and when the sky is clear make a few runs on infantry. Just my take on how a good platoon should function!