Suggestion: airraid mission

Suggestions
1

Hi all,

First of all, I’d like to say Enlisted is a great game, it’s been over 20 years since I had so much fun with a game. I’ve been playing with this idea in my head that I’d like to share here. I’m quite confident it will be a great addition to the game and I’m confident the programmers of Enlisted can make this work.

The idea is to have an airraid mission. A formation of 5 bombers (flown by AI) has to be escorted to bomb a factory in enemy territory. It will take 7 minutes to fly to the target and 7 minutes to get away from the target and enter the ‘safe zone’ (so the game will last 14 minutes). It will take place at high altitude so the terrain doesn’t have to be very detailed, except near the factory. I’ll write down how it plays from the perspective of the attackers and the perspective of the defenders.

Attackers: you spawn in your plane, in formation with the bombers. I’d recommend bringing a fighter to this mission, because waves of enemy planes will be attacking the bombers. and they can come from all directions. If you lose your plane, you can’t respawn in another plane, because it would be weird and unfair if a new escort plane magically appears in a formation of bombers. To compensate this, the bombers act as a resupply point. Get near them and your ammo is reloaded. If you crash, you can respawn as one of the bombers gunners and continue the defense from there. I know currently you can’t man the guns of the bombers, but in time this will be possible. So in the beginning of the match, the bombers gunners are AI-gunners. But as players crash, these gunners will be taken over by players. On a side note: it would be epic if this would play like in that really old call of duty mission, where you start out as a gunner and as your crewmates get shot you have to run around in the bomber to man the different guns. But simply pressing numbers to man different guns will do too (with a waiting time like in the tanks now). The mission is to get the bombers to the target alive, where points are divided among the team for each building the bombers destroy. The team also gets points for each bomber that makes it back to the safe zone.

Defenders: you spawn in your plane, a fighter or something like the BF110 is recommended. The mission is to destroy the enemy bombers attacking your factory. You can vote to spawn north, south, east or west of the attacking bombers. All players will spawn simultaneously in formation, because then you get more the feeling of a squadron attacking the bombers instead of random planes coming from all directions, which wouldn’t feel realistic. Spawning is only possible once every 2 or maybe 3 minutes because else the defenders don’t stand a chance. You get a total of 3 planespawns. The factory is defended by Flakguns manned by AI. If you are out of planespawns, you can take over one of the AI’s manning the Flakguns or observe. For each downed bomber and for each surviving building, points are distributed among the team.

The team with most points, wins!

The idea of this, is that I feel a lot of work is put into all the planes in the game and most of them you never use (why would I bring a fighter with only machineguns with me if there is a chance the enemy is only using tanks?). Also, it would bring a nice change of pace in the missions, because we don’t get to see much big scale vehicular warfare. Ofcourse you could say: go play Warthunder, but I like Enlisted much more.

Well, that’s my idea, I hope you like it!

2 Likes
2

if you want a plane game there is war thunder
planes are generally an afterthough in enlisted (enlisted is infantry focused)- there are much less of them and their overall handling is worse

2 Likes
3

This sort of pure air combat is the domain of something like warthunder, and doesn’t really make sense in enlisted, which is a combined arms and infantry centric game at its heart. The people who would be excited to have a forced plane mission would be frustrated with how rare new plane stuff is, and the people who don’t care for planes would be in the reverse situation, where they can’t use all the parts of the game they do like.

Like, your idea could be fun, I just don’t think this is a good fit for the game we have in front of us. The effort would be better spent looking at why the aircraft provided in the game at present aren’t used in the normal game.

4

You can make it balanced, I personally think that Enlisted is better than War Thunder, but that’s my opinion. I mean, if you want to take a middle ground between it, you can have one team all aircraft, trying to bomb or destroy a location, while the defending team will be infantry or aircraft. Having them set up AA guns to try to shoot the other team down.

5

still wouldnt solver the issue of having very few viable squads(only figher/engi squads would be viable)
also i dont think infantry players would enjoy what is purely the most fun part of being infantry(/s)-getting bombed by something you can barely fight against

it could be balanced, i dont doubt that, the main problem is making it fun. i can tell you that shooting planes flying in a straght line isnt very fun and the enlisted flying/damage models arent doing the concept any favours

6

I meant balanced as in equally using Infantry mechanics and vehicle mechanics. I thought most people in this game would prefer a more realistic, immersive war scenario, having Infantry fighting alongside, inside of, and against armored vehicles and planes. If some vehicle only modes were implemented, than they should make them optional when queueing up. You said that Infantry wouldn’t appreciate being bombed, but then follow up saying it’s easy to shoot down planes going into a straight line? I think these modes could be fun if effort was put in by the devs, and the playerbase wouldn’t be so braindead as to repeatedly do the same thing over and over again, when they’ve been killed doing it so many different times. If there are going to be vehicle only modes, that means there would be infantry only modes

7

The game cannot afford to split up queues more than it already does. 8 is already bad enough, it does not need to get up to 16 separate queues.

For the “One side is all aircraft, the other is infantry and aircraft” solution you proposed, that is not meaningfully different than having all aircraft on both sides. The only way infantry have to engage planes is to either randomly shoot at them with no lead indicator and hope they get lucky, or get in a flak cannon. That doesn’t exactly fully engage the infantry side of this game.

8
  1. Custom Games exist, it would not be splitting anything up.
  2. The idea I proposed isn’t a solution, it was brief concept I had for another game mode
  3. The focus of that gamemode would be on aircraft, yes. However, the infantry would be using AA and getting xp for the squad from that.

Overall, I don’t see the issue of having modes that focus on vehicle combat (tanks or planes) especially since this game differs a lot from War Thunder imo. The opposite would occur too where there would be missions that focus solely on Infantry as well, whether that be a map that’s solely in a building, underground in a subway, or something where planes or tanks cannot reach it.

9

I don’t really see the problem if somebody prefers infantry play. That can be solved by making this gamemode not show up when you randomly join a game. Right now, if you don’t like the train mission, it’s also easily avoided.

I think adding this mode would add a lot to the variety of this game. I played Battlefield 1942 and one of the things I liked there, was that you had maps that were solely about tank combat and maps that were solely about plane combat. It’s a lot different when there’s suddenly 20 planes in the air instead of 4 at maximum.

10

That’s what I was thinking. Having certain maps prioritize one area of combat as opposed to a combined arms thing that we currently have in game.

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