Clipping the wings

[CHRISTIEFRONTDRIVE]

Pretty easy thread to follow. Planes are overpowered, yay or nay?

I'm inclined to think that they probably do play a slightly exaggerated role in the average battle. In real life, rockets from Typhoons and Thunderbolts were not terribly accurate, whereas in FH2 they can shoot 8 rockets down your pocket if they want to. Their impact in destroying enemy tank formations was more psychological than physical. Obviously you wouldn't want your tank subjected to a rocket attack, but one plane didn't stop an entire Panzer army.

Should an accurate rocket attack on your tank blast you to smithereens? YES!
Should this happen literally 30 times every time you play Cobra or Totalize? NO!

I don't want planes to be neutered: they were motherfuckers to contend with in real life and that should be the case in FH2 as well. But it seems like while it takes a great tanker or infantry squad to dominate a tank/inf map, it takes only any chump with a joy stick to dominate a plane map. All I propose are a few changes we can make to just slightly ease back on the fact that you get bombed far too often for a mod with only 2 bombers in it.

Suggestion 1: Land to reload

I'm not entirely sure why this isn't already in the mod to begin with. Planes have a big enough advantage over everything else on the battlefield already, why should they be able to take on 4 bombs and 800 rounds of MG bullets faster than you can dig a grenade out of an ammo box? I guess planes don't have enough of a head start over AA guns already.

FH2:



vs.



Real life:



vs.



Sadly, the crew of this Flak 18 was killed when, in an effort to resupply with fresh shells, their inexperienced gunner mistakenly chose one of the ammo trucks with the self-destructing bomb inside it and parked it too close to the gun.

Suggestion 2: Spawning

Again, not as drastic as it seems: just make it take a little longer for a planes to spawn, and maybe not make all the planes spawn all the time, regardless of the current battlefield situation. This is best experessed as MOAR PLANES, LESS OFTEN. Wait a minute!? I thought you hated planes? Nope, I think some times on some maps should have more planes than they do. They just shouldn't have all the planes all the time. A general rule of thumb is the more flags your team has, the less planes it gets. Yanks get 4 planes to start on Cobra, but perhaps only 2 once they inevitably cap out the Germans. Germans get 3 planes on Olympus, but maybe only 1 or 2 when the battle is five minutes old and in that "Panzer army camping the Allied main" phase of the battle.

"But wait!", you say. "Why should a team be punished with less planes because they kicked too much ass?". Well, to that I say I agree, even if the chances are they kicked so much as because their planes are overpowered in the first place. Nevertheless, I don't like penalizing a team for doing something good (i.e. DON'T CAP RIGHT FLANK), so with my MOAR PLANES, LESS OFTEN rule, I figure it would work something like this:

Team gets 2 planes to start the round
Team caps a few flags? 3 planes now!
Team caps all the flags and the enemy is in for nothing but ass rape for the remaining 600 tickets? 1 plane.

Suggestion 3: Repairing

While my instinct here is to say "Let them stop, get out, and start wrenching like the rest of us", I don't think it's really fair to expect a pilot to land to repair manually every time someone pings him with a rifle shot. I do think that pilot kits should have wrenches, however, and the auto repair for planes flying over their airfield should work at the same speed as if it was being manually repaired. It takes 30 seconds on average to repair a flak gun/Bofors, and another 10-20 to resupply if needed. After you respawn, find an artillery kit, and run back to your gun, of course. Assuming the plane doesn't immediately kill you again, too. Compared to how quickly a plane repairs?

Again, these are awkward suggestions to make because planes should dominate from time to time. I just wish it wasn't all the time. And before you think that last complaint to be unfair to the pilots..



Compared too..



Maybe some of you can come up with better ideas than me.

[Kalkalash]

Just bring back the ability to shoot the pilots into their cockpits with MG fire. That would help a lot in my opinion. Planes take too little damage now from small arms fire.

[Turkish007]

Just bring back the ability to shoot the pilots into their cockpits with MG fire. That would help a lot in my opinion. Planes take too little damage now from small arms fire.

I aggree, at least an MG42 or M2HB should be able to do more damage, no?

I'd also like the angle mod for the planes to be removed. This would also help a lot.

[hitm4k3r]

Pilots or other passengers in the planes can still be killed with smaler fire arms. The problem is that the angle mod was applied for planes aswell with the release of 2.45 thus leading to bouncing off bullets. You notice this mainly in dogfights when hanging on the six of an enemy plane and needing longer to kill it. Thank god this feature will be removed for the next patch.

And yes, rearming planes works too fast. Just flying over the airfield and you have your full load of rockets back is annoying as hell and too easy. That's one of the reasons for those beautiful airshows we have a the moment. If it will stay like this, there should be added atleast some additional AA.

[Jimi Hendrix]

 Can APCs or the ammo vehicles reload AA?

 IF not, they should.


 

[Mudzin]

Mobile Flak88 NOW!!! 

[Matthew_Baker]

it takes only any chump with a joy stick to dominate a plane map.

Just one little nitpicky thing; I have a joystick myself and of the very few times I've actually flown, I think I've shot down MAYBE 3 planes. And the only time I've ever killed something on the ground was the one time I managed to get my hands on the Hardy in Keren.
Dogfighting? forget it, I can never go up against the big boys who plane whore like it's their job, even with my joystick. Now I'm an admittedly terrible pilot but I think flying takes just as much skill if not more than tanking or inf.

That being said I agree with pretty much everything you've suggested here. Planes should have to land to rearm and repairing from an almost smoking wreck to full health should take about as long as it does to wrench a tank up to full health. Spawning I think should be map based, with the only maps that really need addressing being Cobra and Totalize like you said.

But I think the combination of long time to repair and landing to reload EVERY time you run out of bullets is not only more real but will keep planes out of the sky all round like they are now. Now planes can still be dominating forces to be reckoned with, but they'll only be a force for a short amount of time before they have to go back and prepare for another sortie.

I think the only hard work that would need to be done is making some of the airfields easier to land at. Iirc some of them are almost impossible in combat. 

Also yes it's WAY too easy for people to memorize flak positions, but unfortunately I don't have a good suggestion for fixing that other than give each gun 3 positions where it would spawn at the beginning of each map and then randomizing where the flak spawns every new round. (a lot of work tho)

[Slayer]

Lol, Christie, you sure know how to bring your point across I laughed

@ Suggestions: what about if the reload time would be as fast as it is now when you land, but 4x slower when you keep flying? Don't know if that's possible, but that way a pilot could choose for a full resupply (but then he has to land) or for a quick resupply (but it won't give him full ammo  back, only a part).

The other suggestions seem fine by me, but since I don't fly (at least, not seriously) it wouldn't change much for my playstyle.

[jan_kurator]

Pilots or other passengers in the planes can still be killed with smaler fire arms. The problem is that the angle mod was applied for planes aswell with the release of 2.45 thus leading to bouncing off bullets.

Afaik angle mod doesn't affect bullets but bigger calibers (that's why .50 on allied planes is much more powerfull than FWs cannons now) and I'm not sure is it still possible to kill pilots throught the glass as it is coded to be bulletproof and all cases of shooting pilots in the air before 2.45 technically were bugs (what was actually fun) not sure is it "fixed" but I hope it's not.

[Mudzin]

Well, I was killed by tank several times, so it seems that the glass is not bullet proof...

[Born2Kill 007]

Can't judge on FH2, but from my FH1 experience i would like to add this:
If you force a pilot to land+stop everytime he needs a reload, the result will be that the planes on both sides will always rape each other.

The idea of the mobile AA on the other hand is very good.

Thirdly: what you are proposing here is that the pro-pilots would get a worse k/d rating and would therefor influence the map less because it's way harder to stay alive when u're in the sky, i assume. But keep in mind that by doing so, you will demotivate every newbie and average pilot because it's absolute misery for them to fly.

[hyperanthropos]

Can't judge on FH2, but from my FH1 experience i would like to add this:
If you force a pilot to land+stop everytime he needs a reload, the result will be that the planes on both sides will always rape each other.

The rule on 762 is (and this is the only relevant server, therefore it stays fpr public play) that you are not allowed to attack starting planes or planes on the ground inside the base. Its in the "planes only attack statics in enemy base" rule iirc.

[Strat_84]

Afaik angle mod doesn't affect bullets but bigger calibers (that's why .50 on allied planes is much more powerfull than FWs cannons now)

Well, the problem with the FW guns is mainly that *someone* messed all the shells speeds in 2.45, thus messing the shells trajectories, and that *someone* didn't even care it would also affect the aiming ...
So when you're shooting a target with the FW190, the only things hitting the center of the aiming sight are the machinegun bullets, the gun shells drop like some bird crap way below ... 

Oh, and talking about being shot in the cockpit, it still happens in 2.45. Just as it happens quite often a plane gets severely damaged or shot down by a simple MG42 on the ground.

[PanzerKnacker]

...and thank Dev's for that as it's my job to do that on Cobra

[Korsakov829]

More than half of all FH2 players can only take off, turn to side, and dive straight into the ground, like some animal just falling over and dying for no apparent reason. Forget about landing, the few who manage to not crash into the ground a minute after take off almost always just bail out and get a new plane, rather then crashing into an allied tank some fool taxied with to the airfield. On the bright side if people are forced to land then that would discourage all those rookies.