Discouraging plane cycling through ammo/ordnance changes

Suggestions
1

You’re all familiar by now with the concept of plane cyclers: Spawn a plane, drop all your ordnance, crash - and repeat.

Now, I’m not convinced by all the proposed solutions to this issue and I don’t think that a penalty is the first thing you should jump to.

The following changes make plane cycling far less viable while encouraging players to preserve their plane - via changes to ordnance quantity and frequency.

Let’s look at the main reason why cycle bombing works:

You can drop all your ordnance, bombs and rockets, within one second. As quickly as you can spam the button. This allows players to drop off all bombs the moment before they crash, only few metres off the ground - making all of them very accurate. The same goes for rockets, which have their own dispersion flying off in different directions. But not when you fire them metres away from your target.

And there is also a main reason why cycle bombing is preferred over doing several bombing runs with the same plane:

Planes have very low ammo pools and usually only few bombs/rockets (with exceptions like the P-47). That means you need to fly to your ammo refill point all the time and refilling ammo in that way takes around 1-2 minutes everytime. You are also very vulnerable to enemy planes when you fly to the refill point, as you’re basically guaranteed to have your back turned towards them and you may also have no MG ammo left in your plane.

All in all, refilling is a REALLY bad deal. If your team has a good rally point, you can probably get more infantry kills in those 2 minutes than you could with the bomb that took you 2 minutes to fetch.

Here’s how we shift the balance so plane preservation is now stronger than plane cycling:

1. Add a cooldown between bomb/rocket uses. This will usually mean that you drop 2 bombs at once, and then there’s a delay of a few seconds until you can drop another 2. This change will not have a negative impact on players who spend their bombs strategically, but it stops cyclers from throwing out all of their ordnance at once.

2. Give planes more ordnance overall. While this point sounds counter-intuitive at first, point 1 makes this no advantage at all to plane cyclers. What it does instead is allow players who manage to keep their plane alive over several strafes to loiter for a longer overall uptime between refills.

On a side note, many of the planes in the game aren’t currently carrying as much ordnance as they were historically able to.

The 2 changes here reward players who keep their plane alive, which may also convince some current plane cyclers that playing their plane properly may now be efficient enough for them. At the same time, they mostly disarm anyone who just spawns, bombs and crashes. With most planes only able to drop their bombs in the order light–>heavy, this means that planes like the Dauntless can now only drop their 100lb bomb before crashing, but not the 1000lb.

5 Likes
2

Not sure how I feel about this one. I like spamming my rockets in a small radius when trying to kill a tank, and having a 2 second delay between rockets would mean I either accidentally crash with half my payload, or I gotta do like 3-4 passes just to get all my ordinance off

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Instead of making anything too complex without being too troublesome to people who purchased squad slots specifically to have multiple planes in the same lineup, I’d impose a harsher respawn cycle.

  • To respawn a plane from plane squad 1, on its expiry, you would need to spawn 2 other infantry squads.
  • To respawn a plane from plane squad 2 after using plane squad 1, you must spawn 2 infantry squads first to unlock plane squad 1, then another 2 infantry squad spawns to use plane squad 2.

Anyone with 3 planes in a roster can spawn them in a row if they wish, but they would need to spawn infantry squads before being able to use them again.

In the first place, plane cycling is generally only possible if a player has purchased additional squad slots and/or premium time. This can even be considered a reason to purchase squad slots, but at the same time, its availability to only those players who have made a purchase generally means it is infrequent enough to not truly be a problem.

I’d rather not touch plane ordnance at the present, or impose restrictions as to how the ordnance is used. I’ll stick to spawn restrictions.

Besides, assuming that the value of planes is increased due to having heavier ordnance, on the plane’s expiry, it would just open up the plane slot to anyone else in the same team to use the said plane if they have it equipped in their roster.

To illustrate my point, if you kill, say, a P-47 user after those changes you’ve proposed have been applied, the next guy with a P-47 in the same team would take over the plane slot and abuse the additional ordnance.

“Plane cycling” is a rare tactic, but multiple players taking turns getting the CAS plane if the have they opportunity to has a similar effect.

3 Likes
4

Yeah, because drop all bombs ar once cannot be considered strategical.

I definitely do not suicide with planes, but I do very often drop all bombs at once. And that’s why I don’t like this suggestion.

5 Likes
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i too drop my bombs at once and i see no reason thats a diferent strat than drop one here, one there.

if the most enemies i can spot or a vehicle is marked, why not drop all the ordinance on a single spot to higher the chance of killing said targets.

3 Likes
6

I’m not sure you notice it as much when playing infantry, but from a pilot perspective it seems very frequent in my matches. F2P players do it as well, just that of course they have to play infantry in between. But it’s still an efficient multikill for them to spawn a plane, bomb and crash.

And it’s at a point where tagging the enemy plane before it reaches the battlefield has become an absolute priority in my gameplay, because chances are I won’t get to fight it and it’ll just crash.

Having to spawn infantry in between airplane uses adds additional delay so I’m not all against it, but it also sabotages the cycler’s team with the extra ticket cost. So I don’t think it’s a good solution either.

7

The reason I don’t see this as strategic is that you’re essentially just improving your chances of hitting, just like Shiivex described. Save for the odd massive group of enemies, of course, where you actually need the extra AoE.

Often times you get more value out of engaging more targets than using more bombs on the same target - whereas plane cyclers ALWAYS, 100% of the time, benefit from dropping all of their bombs at once since they don’t get a second chance.

8

I don’t see a single reason why should I be punished because few individuals exploits the game.

Just make suicide bombing punishable as “toxic behavior”.

If some guy gets enough reports, 1 day ban and so…

1 Like
9

Guess I’ll make enemies

Limit the amount of planes to 2 per player. Frankly I think being able to take 6 vehicles of any type into a game is ridiculous. If you want to play vehicles go play war thunder.

In 30+ years of gaming I’ve seen this cycle happen over and over with combined arms games. The vehicle players are so vocal they get the developers to pander to them so much it makes the infantry play lack luster at best.

PS: I don’t need a lesson in how easy it is to kill vehicles with infantry. I don’t want to spend all game dealing with them and everything else because the rest of my team is incapable of doing so.

Also don’t need to hear go play an infantry game if you don’t like it. There isn’t anything even close to Enlisted that is infantry only.

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10

I want to play ww2 vehicles, not ww2 vs cold war vehicles. :man_shrugging:

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11

But mowing down infantry with cannon and coax fire is why I play this game! lol.

Seriously though, I play aircraft a lot, and if I crash it’s accidental.

1 Like
12

This is NOT a good solution. Players need to be able to use their ordinance on demand. Sometimes it only takes one shot, other times you need to be able to carpet bomb.
Like I said, NOT a good solution.

Again, NOT a good solution.
MOST aircraft is currently given enough ordinance to strafe the targets between 1-3 times. Anything more than that and there isn’t enough time in between strafes which to operate.

The point of this is that the time which they have to go re-arm gives the opponent an opportunity to move forward.
Therefore increasing the ordinance will only result in basically the exact same issue that you are trying to solve.

3 Likes
13

This would be a great argument, I can see your point. However, tanks evade this restriction already. I’ve just had a match where a Ho-Ni got an angle on our spawn and proceeded to clear our infantry for so long that we practically had no tickets left by the time he had to refill.

This isn’t me trying to counter your point, I would love if tanks couldn’t do this either. What I’m trying to say is: I’m not convinced uptime is a balancing concern at the moment.

And before you argue that tanks can be eliminated: Planes even more so, they even take damage from basic infantry rifles.

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They do have a lot of WWII vehicles, most is the same stuff as enlisted. Maybe more… I’m confused

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I’m not disagreeing that the tanks in this described instance are an issue.

The thing is that its not a direct “this works for planes so tanks should be the same” situation.
PLEASE NOTE: Tanks don’t have the freedom of movement like aircraft do either though.

I’ve stated on other posts my suggestions for fixing those issues, but this is for the sake of aircraft and how to resolve the issue of “Plane Cycling”.
However, very careful thought is needed about how proposed changes would interact with everything else, NOT JUST in regards to the plane cycling.

16

More pushback against them from the community. Shun these idiots. Make them quit their actions or quit this game

17

Hear, fricking hear buddy. Cheers bro I’ll drink to that. RIP my Jumbo Pershing

1 Like
18

1.Many aircraft do not support repeated hovering attacks. For example, IL2-M3 will definitely stall and crash after spinning more than 3 times in a short period of time. Most bombers will also stall after repeated hovering, and for players, crashing after dropping the bomb is still the best choice.

2 This actually encourages Kamikaze attacks to some extent, but in a way that punishes normal bombing. Only one bomb can be dropped at a time, which means that planes with 50kg and 100kg bombs can no longer destroy tanks with carpet bombing. If you cannot bomb accurately, you will have to repeatedly circle and attack, and any fighter can shoot you down. Therefore, the most effective way is to launch a banzai attack with a plane carrying 250kg bomb.

3 As mentioned above, the aircraft repeatedly circling and attacking in the war zone are only food for fighter and AA guns. In fact, the number of bombs that aircraft can drop may not be greater than before, because they can only survive about 2 rounds in front of AA and fighters.

4.In situations where the plane may be shot down at any time, pilots still tend to drop as many bombs as possible in a single hover, which encourages blind bombing rather than precision attacks.

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What would be good is that the planes carry their full weapons capacity and you can customize the bombs, whether carrying several of 50kg or 250kg, etc. but that has a penalty for excess weight, affecting
maneuverability and height

20

That seems draconian.

I’ve killed two tanks and an APC by dropping all bombs within about 1s.

Being strategic with your bombs can mean dropping them all at once.

Also, if the bombs are small, you may need more than one drop to get a tank.