Today the dev stated on the livestream they are thinking about “increasing the fuse time on low altitude bomb drops” in an attempt to solve the suicide bomber problem.
Increasing the fuse time on low altitude bomb drops will screw over legitimate Soviet attacker pilots for the following reasons:
Low weight 50kg-100kg bombs must be put directly on a tank to kill it (and even then it is not guaranteed to kill)
Low weight bombs must be dropped from low altitude to achieve the laser accuracy required against an armored target.
Almost all Soviet bombs are 50kg-100kg. The only exception is the 250kgs on the IL-10, which is a lvl 29 Berlin campaign unlock.
I have videos of direct “white hit marker” bomb drops doing nothing against a moving tank. Increasing the fuse timer gives tanks more time to move, and therefore even less chance of killing the tank.
Instead of increasing fuse times for low altitude bomb drops (which will not solve the suicide bomber problem and will probably instead screw over an entire faction of attacker pilots) try alternative solutions like using whitelist scoring for bomb and rocket kills:
Under a whitelist scoring system bomb and rocket kills would only be awarded based when specific events happen:
the attacker plane flies back to the rearm point (incentivize the behavior you want to see from players)
the attacker plane takes significant damage from a hostile aircraft and crashes
the attacker plane takes significant damage from an AA gun and crashes
the pilot of the attacker plane takes lethal damage from small arms fire (yes squad ai snipes pilots far too often and the player should not be punished for this)
any other specific scenarios that should be allowed for
If the attacker plane crashes and the criteria from the whitelist is not satisfied no kill credit or xp will be awarded. This will remove incentives to suicide bomb without screwing over legitimate attacker pilots that need to drop from low altitude to be precise with low weight bombs (Soviets).
Gameplay cannot be balanced by changing the scoring criteria. You say that changing how the kill credits work will solve the problem, but what happens if there is say, a really problematic tank that needs to be dealt with?
Hop in the bomber, suicide on the tank, and bam, problem to me and my team’s advance has been removed, with the exact same lack of counterplay there is now. Sure, I didn’t get credit for the one tank kill, but “Getting xp for killing a tank” wasn’t the point. Killing the tank was the point.
Not to mention players who either: Don’t care about progression, or are already maxed in the given campaign. You can say “well, they odn’t get score for it” all you want, and it has essentially no impact on them.
What it will do is make situations where players are trying to play the game and not suicide bomb, and either screw up and crash, or simply don’t know the rules, get frustrated at the lack of progress they are making.
Basically, as long as suicide bombing remains effective, in terms of helping you win or frankly just causing damage to the enemy, it will continue to happen, even if it doesn’t get rewarded through score and xp.
The idea behind whitelist scoring is to incentivize the player to “do the right thing”, kill the tank then fly to the rearm point for credit. If they got shot down on the way there then they will get credit at that point.
Sure there will always be a small percentage that will try to abuse the spirit of the game and suicide bomb, but we can at least decline to reward them for it.
This sort of incentive still just, does not help anything. There still wouldn’t be a reason to shoot down bombers, there still wouldn’t be a reason to play fighters, there still wouldn’t be a way to prevent your team from getting wiped out by a dive bomber, etc. You are applying a bandaid solution to what is the result of a lot of serious flaws in how the game handles air support.
Also, when there is a clear “most effective path”, which I will argue suicide bombing often is, especially considering how much easier it is than “Doing things the right way”, players will gravitate towards it, because it works.
You are also seriously punishing people who are still trying to learn how to divebomb effectively, because not pancaking and actually hitting the target requires some very careful and specific gameplay.
No dont do that!! I need to low alt bomb at times when avoiding AA and fighters for that matter. Its enough that the bombs can shoot away like no tomorrow at times when low alt bombing ^^ The alt number has to be rly low then but then it wont stop the suicide bombers anyways
Ah yes, telling new players they have to drill against static tanks over and over again until they have it down perfectly or they will get no xp, that’s a great plan.
Even just giving suicide bombers no XP won’t stop them, as i think now. Only thing is to give minus XP if someone crashes within a certain time. Im personally against more and more down cuts to Gameplay because of this cheesy suicide bombing!
Punish the bad player itself rather than Gameplay and people playing the game properly, minus XP and they’ll think twice next time.
People aren’t going to suicide bomb anywhere close to the frequency they do now if it isn’t worth points, and they are absolutely more likely to return to rearm in the event that their points aren’t awarded unless they rearm. Karnisov is absolutely correct that you incentivize the gameplay that you want to see from players.
Youre not wrong that planes in Enlisted are fundamentally broken, but unless you have a time machine, theres no going back and changing that. They simply aren’t going to do a full rework of how planes exist in the game this late into development in order fix those core issues, so bandaid solutions are really all that can be done.
I mean, I am pretty sure it could be as simple a gameplay change as:
Aircraft now spawn 50% further from the fight than they do now, and
Aircraft resupply points are about 20% closer to the battle than they are now.
You know, actually make it so you can achieve more by staying in the air, instead of trying to apply meta punishments to those that don’t. Because right now, if you have no limit on plane respawns, I’m pretty sure you can do more passes by suicding each time and respawning than you can by actually staying alive, when “Losing time where you could be doing something” is supposed to be pretty much the whole penalty for dying in this game.
It would also make shooting down an attacker actually matter, because right now most of the time its just not worth the effort. If you shoot them down, they get replaced and you’ve achieved damn little to slow the pace of strikes.
Ultimately, the fundamental issue here is that unlike tanks and infantry, dieing in a plane just doesn’t do that much to limit your ability to contribute, because you essentially have to “respawn” twice after every pass anyway, once going back to resupply, and once getting back to the fight. That is the core problem, which contributes both to suicide bombing, and the fact that shooting down bombers tends to not be worth doing.
I don’t suicide bomb - but, as the OP said, when playing Soviets the only way to have any reasonable chance to hit tanks is to bomb from low altitude, and in a dive that the Sturmovik and SB-2 just really are not designed to do… and as a result I do get many more crashes than I’d like, and inflict more damage to my tail surfaces than I should (from being too close when bombs explode)!
The fact that flying has a high skill ceiling is exactly what makes it interesting.
And I agree with a combination of what you and everyone is saying.
The best way to disincentivize suicide bombing would be by:
Giving no points from kills if you die from crashing before your bombs go off (self explanatory)
Increase the respawn timer penalty for crashing immediately after spawning, mistake or not
Normalize rearming point locations (where they move forward with the advancing objectives) instead of it being static. That way you dont end up with situations where you need to go 3k meters to rearm
Do the above changes and I guarantee you that suicide bombing will be reduced by at least 50%
In the end, If people dont want to put the effort in getting better by practicing, then I dont see why we should cater to them. I spent many hours in practice range to get a good feel for flying. Practicing dive bombing, strafing, flap control, etc until I was confident in my ability to do so in a public match. I dont see why others cant do the same if they want to actually get kills in the air.
Ultimately I disagree with the extended bomb timer for low drops, and dont want to be penalize for being able to do something most players cant just because I am able to do so without crashing into a tree.
Basically after the bomb Nerf, bombs are so ineffective that you cannot kill tanks without crashing to them. I think most new players do not voluntarily kamikaze but they die trying to bomb accurately. It happens to me also !any times. Either buffing bombs little bit or !along plane easier to fly by adding TPP view should solve the problem and would be more fun using the plane in TPP view.
The fundamental role of the suicide missile is to bring the ultimate game victory by gaining battlefield dominance and gain 1.5x Exp
Even if the kill experience brought by the suicide plane itself is eliminated, as long as this behavior can eliminate the opponent’s unit, even if it is a time-delay bomb, it still has meaning.
Therefore, neither the delay bomb nor the elimination of killing experience can fundamentally prohibit such behavior.
In a short amount of time, quickly throwing a suicide time-delay bomb from the battlefield can thwart the enemy’s attack and ultimately lead to victory. Why not do this? Players will still do it.
Suicide attacks can exist, but there should be some kind of penalty for this behavior that prohibits the player from committing suicide more than once. Rather than reducing the benefits of this behavior, delay bombs and reducing bomb power will not fundamentally solve the problem
It is said that this change is to reduce suicide attacks. In fact, after reducing the power of bombs, more players would rather use suicide attacks. Baby players will not drop bombs normally.
