As of right now, planes in this game are heavily gimped due to how their flight models were imported from War Thunder. How so? Well, currently planes spawn in with fully loaded fuel tanks, which hampers the flight performance of pretty much every aircraft for no real reason. While this is less evident on something like the Yaks or Bf 109s, it becomes incredibly evident on something like the Mustang with over an hour’s worth of fuel. Seeing as games tend to last between 20-40 minutes at most, that much fuel is completely unnecessary and only serves to make flying planes more frustrating. As such, I want to suggest an idea that will fix this issue, but also another issue I’ll address shortly.
Thus, I suggest giving every single plane in the game 5 minutes of fuel so that they may be allowed to fly at their absolute maximum performance and not become unflyable at random like the Mustangs sometimes end up doing. What this would also do is cut the amount of time that any plane would spend in the air, effectively restricting people from hogging the plane slots all game long. You might ask why not just add a separate timer for such ends, however seeing as both fuel load and such a timer would be completely arbitrary if either of them were implemented in such a way, it is better to kill a few birds with one stone this way.
Furthermore, if a pilot manages to keep his plane flying for all 5 minutes of fuel, I believe there should be some amount of reward for “successfully returning a plane to base” or something along those lines. This should also incentivize players to decrease the number of suicide runs, alleviating another (albeit lesser) issue. This may also incentivize players to learn to fly properly instead of simply forcing headons, but that may be too much for this playerbase.
Anyways, I’m starting to get snarky so I think I’ll just cut it here. Feel free to provide any sort of response, I may or may not read it.
15 seems a bit long as I have seen quite a few games run that long. I’d be willing to negotiate up to around 7 minutes, but that would be my hard line.
You’re someone who yeets their entire payload in one go and then goes for a refill, aren’t you?
Take the Su-2 for an example. 6 bombs, allowing you to attack 3 different tanks. And exclusively 7mm cannons, which give you the best anti-infantry uptime if you have the necessary precision.
Add to that the powerful best turn time that lets you strafe fairly frequently and you have a plane that doesn’t need to fly to the refill point for a long time.
This kind of gameplay is rare enough, but it’ll vanish entirely if you put such a short timer on airplanes.
The only ones unaffected by this timer are plane cyclers or players who generally just crash their plane every few respawns for some exp.
Depends on the plane, but most planes don’t have the option to do multiple attack runs at once, especially fighters and a good chunk of attackers like the Bf 110s that are not the G-2 variant. Therefore, what I propose would provide an improved experience for those planes which make up the bulk of aircraft in the game, and thus it would make sense to sacrifice a bit of utility from those planes like the Su-2 and P-47, most of which already quite strong, so that aircraft as a whole are more enjoyable.
I’d lower it even further than that personally so that people can’t simply sit in planes for 2/3rds of a game, even if that game is progressing faster than average.
I don’t agree with any sort of arbitrary plane time limit in general.
Now fuel is a separate argument. I have thought of this game having a fuel mechanic. I am not fully aware but as some have said here there may be some invisible fuel meter. I would say if that’s the case they should make the fuel count visible.
What we have in-game are fuel tanks at their maximum capacity.
Planes have variance in the amount of fuel they can carry, as well as use up.
Issue is, depending on how an aircraft is utilized, they may have more or less fuel than their direct counterparts. And fuel weight is modeled in the game.
A multi-engine bomber designed for theater-wide operations will take off from farther airfields that they are designed to have an abundance of fuel for the several-hour-long journey. Likewise for their escorts. For planes that are intended to be interceptors, or not intended to fly long distances at all, they don’t need as much fuel.
For example, a P-47 has roughly 50% more range than a Bf 109 because it was a bomber escort, and by necessity, was laden with fuel to accompany bombers to their targets and return. German and soviet single-engine planes, by comparison, don’t have as much range because they’re striking targets that are geographically more accessible.
Because fuel weight is a factor, having every plane start with maximum fuel load by default penalizes higher-capacity planes intended to be used from farther airfields, and makes already cumbersome aircraft- Particularly bombers, even more cumbersome than usual because they have several times the fuel capacity of fighter planes.