[Suggestion] Upgraded Lightning AA Systems

I agree, if air were as weary of the ground as they are of other air, they would be on equal footing as ground armor.

Currently, ground armor has to pay attention to infantry, ground vehicles, and watch for air vehicles as they swoop past at +250 KPH bombarding everything they see.



I think that the skyguard needs to be able to kill a liberator in 1.5 mags and it needs 2x the accuracy.
It's just far too inaccurate for use against a vehicle that can move at great speeds on three axis.

With a skyguard, even at point blank range, it takes nearly two and a half full 70 round mags (Landing every shot) just to kill a single stock liberator.

It's ridiculous.



And yes, air should be as easy to kill as ground targets are for them.

That's why I suggest that all ground damage do 3x damage to aircraft if it hits within 300m.
This would keep air from getting within 300m of infantry.

Damage would remain the same for ranges outside 300m, keeping air where it should be, flying high up in the sky, not hovering and blasting infantry way racking up hundreds of kills per life.


If we forced them to fight only other vehicles, they'd have to actually earn their kills.

I agree with Gundem!

Increase the reward for attacking air. Assists should be greatly increased for all vehicle kills.

The XP isn't worth the risk of engaging the target, which in most cases leads to your death.
Also I think they should remove the requirement for lock-ons with the NS Annihilator and allow it to be dumb fired.

The Engineers' Anti-Vehicle rockets need AA ability (give them full 360° swivel and ability to look up!). It would still only really be effective at incoming air, rather than distant or parallel moving air.

I don't think further buffing tanks is a good idea and they're already extremely powerful.

Infantry have a hard enough time with tanks currently, and for this reason I disagree that the SkyGuard needs buffing at all.
I've seen Skyguards take out infantry, harassers and flash pretty quickly for an AA weapon.

I've only recently attempted using ESF and Liberators, but you are more open in the air; you don't necessarily have cover.
If you're caught in the open against 1 or 2 SkyGuards it's very likely you're going down before you can get away, or you wont be able to engage in that area while they're around.

I completely understand that others will say this comes down to the skill of the pilot, but it should also be noted that the Lightning can hide behind and under cover. Finally they can also be repaired to full health while being attacked.

You're not going to find a Liberator getting repaired by an engineer, while its being hit by AA as well as returning fire "effectively". Of coarse this can occur with the front and back gun, but what are you effectively going to do grounded?

I'd also say that tanks don't have to invest lots of certs into being able to move effectively.

I would say that the most effective AA does appear to be other air.
But in this case, I think it would be more viable to buff infantry as mentioned previously.

"You're infantry... you SHOULD stand around doing nothing to me while I reverse further back and continue to kill you all. I'm in a tank, you SHOULD be dying."

Of coarse this is my opinion, and understand others feel differently

The Skyguard can be killed with nothing but a competent solo libby and the tank buster, no matter how good the skyguard driver is.
He could be the best PS2 player in existence, heck, he could do everything perfectly, not a single shot missed, but still a single guy with a tankbuster libby can just afterburner in, tank all his shots, and mop the floor with him using only the tank buster.


This is why it needs to be on-par with the lib.
He should be able to easily out DPS a lone tankbuster.

As for the infantry buff, 200m or less (So air can't just tank in and obliterate all the infantry and force an entire base into spawnroom heroing), but 300m is too much (To keep guns like the Zephyr and Duster useful), any damage infantry do to an aircraft should be tripled.

This will almost instantly stop Air being pulled just to bombard the obscenely easy to kill infantry targets.

Especially ESF's.
They farm infantry far too easily.

Air should be mostly locked to AA/AV use.

Speaking of Duster, what appends if the lightning have a Duster gun ?
It would be nice for flanking.

All those long range fire and forget stuff is extrem overpowered and would destroy ANY air gameplay!

You guys absolute forgeting that as AA you have in 90% of all combat situation against airforces the element of suprise on your side
You see them and they don't see you.

Highly effective long range AA is like scuessfully sniping infantry units from a distant higher than 2000+meters!



Fire and Forget weapons for very close range are okay.


Also the skyguard is a good AA weapon we need just more players that use them!

Based upon the duster's only reasonable role atm.

That's exactly how long-range AA should be. Extremely powerful and accurate per hit, but shoots extremely slowly to make up for this. Which is exactly what the NS-500 SAM is designed to do, except it has the courtesy to give a long and audible warning to its target for a full 8 seconds before it fires. Something that snipers simply don't do.

Lock-ons are necessary for long range AA "sniping" because aircraft move much more quickly than infantry and the engagement distances are much longer (1000m versus 300m).

All the weapons in this thread are designed to be close to medium range weapons. Essentially they are just ground equivalents of Coyotes and Tomcats (the other weapons are direct fire). So if they're fine for aircraft to use, they should also be fair for ground units to use as well. Otherwise that's just hypocrisy.

No, Skyguards statistically underperform. Just look at their average vehicle kills per hour. Generally about 7-8. Not very much at all.

Compare that to the stationary AA turrets, which average 10 AVKPH.

Or the weapons on air units. The rocketpods get 15-19 AVKPH. The Dalton gets 16 AVKPH.

All we're asking for is for the Skyguard to be as effective of a G2A solution as ESF and Liberator weapons are A2G solutions. That's fair and balanced.

I think vehicles should be more about supporting infantry rather than be there to farm them. I think these changes would make a much more exciting game with more teamwork and options for squad and platoon leaders other than waypoints. It would make intel more valuable as well.

Air should have much less armour and HP, they should be more like a glass cannon with much much more firepower. So they dont turn into farming machines they should very inaccurate. To make Air usefull to a fight they should have ground targeting support. This can be done in a number of ways, infil laser, squad and platoon leader command console, tank commander command console that uses a drone to designate.

MBT should have much more, HP and resilience against all arms. They are there to give infantry cover to advance and to counter enemy armour. They should be effective in open ground but their turrets should only have a maximum rotation of 60 degrees on either side of the forward facing reference point. this and a slower rotating turret limits their ability to fight in close spaces. Their weapons should be excellent at medium to longer ranges but useless up close.

These changes would make the game much more fun with diversity and tactical options. It encourages greater teamwork and give leaders a reason to be a leader. squad and platoon leaders should have access to more powerful weapons. Platoon commanders could be the only ones with access to carpet bombs where as squad leaders could be restricted to a single jdam or something like an A10 tankbuster run whereas infils may only get access to lightning tank with a mortar barrage. These weapons will have to have a limited range due to rending issues but the target assist allows aircraft to duck in and out much faster.

After a target has been marked, either by device or on a command console map and the ordinance selected, then a mission is given to near by available aircraft with that ordinance. They can then accept or decline the mission.

lightnings could have more light support weapons, the skygard gets boring after awhile. turning it into a missile system to lock on to aircraft would allow it to deploy hydraulics and allow it to do a rocket mortar barrage.

More open maps with more space for tank battles, then make the larger bases even more urban for infantry with 6 outer bases rather than 3. make it into more like a city. vehicles only enter at their own peril.

Counters for these new weapons could be things like laser detection warning. If a air strike is ordered by a CUD then a smoke marker for where the air/mortar strike will land etc.

Gotta love Blender.

(Now try adding basic materials by creating the material/texture, selecting the polys, and clicking apply )

(Also check out the new Booltool)

More weapons is always a good thing.

Are there any detailed guides for doing this? When I extract the files from PS2 I also get a bunch of .dds texture files, but I have no clue what to do with them...

In other news you can now flashbang aircraft out of the sky! And does exactly zero damage to anything, so of course it's balanced!

You could find an extractor, and learn how to UV unwrap and painstakingly re-create the map to fit the texture file, but an easier , albeit less authentic, method would have you going to the materials tab, and creating a new pseudo 'texture' from there.

The materials tab is in the same row as the world, object, camera, and physics tab, there on your right. You can click on the + button to start creating a new material. Once you've finished making that material and any other materials by clicking on the + button again, you can select the polys you want to have the selected material, and select 'assign', which should be under the materials list. It's not as detailed as extracting those .dds files and aligning up the UV map to fit the file, but it does let you to apply some colors. Now keep in mind that if you use the internal Cycles render engine (all the cool blender heads use cycles), there is an extra step, but not that complicated, and it adds a lot of possibilities.

If you use cycles, here is a basic intro by Blender Guru:



I don't know of a basic intro vid to the standard Blender Render off the top of my head.

Okay, so now I'm interested in extracting PS2 model data.

And continuing on after a brief break while overseas...



The NS-2 has been renamed from the "Mountain Lion" to the "Simba". Both because "Simba" begins with S, and that it means "Lion" in Swahili. Yes. I bet you didn't know that this guy...



Was essentially named "Lion". It'd be like if Disney made a human character and named him "Man". Or if Pluto was just named "Dog" or something. Foreign languages are not an excuse to be lazy! Though to be fair, there are guys in Africa with the first name of "Simba". But that's okay because they're people and not lions, and it's pretty much like "Leo" or "Leon" (both of which also mean "lion").

Makes me wonder how they translated that movie in Swahili. Did they give Simba a different name in that version? Or was the movie essentially about a lion named "Lion"?

Anyway...

So in the above picture, you can see Simba doing what the NS-2 SAM Simba is meant to do; take down things that fly. It's essentially an enlarged Tomcat (because lions are just big tomcats ), but along with that are a few perks it has over the original Tomcat. For starters, damage is increased because, well, bigger missile means bigger warhead. Another is the improved (or rather pre-January 16, 2014 patch) tracking system, which just acts as how the old Tomcats acted. True fire and forget.

Since inception, the NS-2 SAM has been slightly improved by having its fixed rails slightly elevated. This allows the missiles to still fire if there is a low barrier in front of the NS-2 SAM. Before there were... accidents.

The naming system is based off of the old SA-2 SAM, which was essentially just a (bigger) rocket on rails:

These look nice, I really like the second Sundy idea. Maybe something that give Pilots an effect similar to EMP grenades when in a range of the Sundy?

I've been mostly on the receiving side of air power, but a few days ago I tried my hand at Libby gunning for a short while. My experience as a infantry player are that AA is very frustrating as air units get away easily before AA can kill them, and that if that happens, the XP-reward is abysmal. On the other hand, flying in a Libby in a major fight, you can get to be the focus of a lot of attention and then survival becomes a challenge.

And as has been said in many threads about air before, the balance problem is pretty straightforward, but difficult to solve. In a small fight, air rules, and in a big fight, air gets hammered. In this thread I've seen numerous suggestions, and personally I think a combination of two things would be the first step to addressing the problem.
- AA weapons should be more versatile and not just be good at AA. I don't really see the need for more specialized AA weapons, or for quicker killing AA weapons as it would remove Air completely from the large fights. But who would really complain if that Skyguard would also be a somewhat more competent anti-tank weapon. Not as good as a dedicated AT Lightning, but in the same range as a HEAT lightning? And make it a bit better against infantry as well. That way, a Skyguard is not helpless in combat once the Air is gone. What this would mean for Air is that you should expect more Skyguard Lightnings, as they are now useful against all types of targets. On the other hand, certainly in big fights, the Skyguards you worry about might, thanks to their greater flexibility, be also more in the frontline, trying to take out enemy armor or infantry. So its a mixed blessing for Air, con: more skyguards, pro: less focussed on killing Air.
- The same could be done for AA weapons on Sundy, Prowler and Harasser. Give their AA guns a larger field of fire, so it can also fire downward at infantry on the ground. This would make it more attractive to put on those as well.

- Secondly, I think the XP reward for driving off Air should be increased. Simplest fix would be to start by doubling the amount of XP AA gets for doing Air damage. Other XP options, such as actually taking into account if an Air unit was driven off seems to be rather complicated.

Finally, I think it would be important to note that I think SOE should not go overboard in any direction and do massive changes here in one go. There is a difficult balance here between making AA better/more prominent in small fights without making it excessive in large battles, and I think that is best achieved by taking it one step at a time and seeing the impact of each of those steps before considering the next one.

I don't understand why a dedicated AA weapon that could outright decimate Aircrafts would be a problem when a thing like C4 exists on the Ground. Either remove C4 from the game/nerf it's damage by half or introduce a dedicated AA weapon that would almost OHK ESF's in less than a second if it comes too close. It would kill Liberators in 2-3 seconds (One clip or less) if it gets too close. Atm Libs can just hover in fron of the dedicated AA vehicle and tank 3 magazines.

Hmmm... that would be an interesting idea. A passive defense system that scrambles up their HUD. Would also protect the Sunderer from enemy air attacks as it's harder to aim when their crosshairs are fuzzed out.

To be fair, in a big fight around a base every vehicle gets hammered. If you bring a tank, you'll get swatted down pretty quick too. That's just the nature of big fights... the more enemies there are the greater the chance that a bunch of them will choose to shoot at you.

Giving AA a role as an anti-infantry tank can be risky... you don't want it edging into HE territory. And the entire point of the Skyguard is that it counters air... but in return is countered by threats on the ground. The problem with the Skyguard is simply that it's ineffective as a counter to air, making it essentially vulnerable to infantry, armor, and air threats.

Increased EXP for shooting at air might be a bonus. Worth trying it out to see if that puts a lid on the air game. The latest "Lightnings everywhere" change is also decent, because it increases the chance that a Skyguard might be in the area.

Small steps are fine of course... but SOE really has to do something faster. The longer it goes on that SOE does nothing to reign in the skygods, then the greater the nerf the peasantry will demand. And we're pretty pissed as it is already.

Ah... been awhile... but the collection is almost finished!



Not much to say. It's a ground-Shredder. Not overpowered at all, because if a Shredder Liberator starts shooting at a Shredder Lightning on the ground, the Liberator should still win due to its larger pool of hitpoints.

As has been mentioned before, the Shredder Lightning can only fire in a forward 90-180 degree arc, and cannot be lowered to effectively engage ground targets. But if you were to park it on an incline...

The official designation, NS-3-30-4, describes the vehicle turret. It has 4x 30mm rotary cannon, and each cannon is made up of 3 barrels. It's named after both the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled AA gun and the GSh-6-23 minigun.

I like the SAM swarm lightning one for longer ranged lock on AA capabilities. The turrets don't look light lightnings however. Though curious, think you can model a lightning with a short barreled Mortar system? I've always found an interest in long range artillery vehicles which would be nice to have in this game.

I like the NS-500, just make it insta gib libs and ESFs...I want the pilots to feel the pain we on the ground feel when they do strafing runs with lol pods and zepher

Nice models!