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 reloadI'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: SpawningAgain, 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: RepairingWhile 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.