Virtually no armor, crew is completely in the open, bulky and sluggish, slow “turret” movement speed, low magnification, and worst of all: It’s not doing what it’s supposed to do.
Flak literally translates to Flugabwehrkanone, which means anti-aircraft cannon, but every projectile you’re shooting with this “anti-aircraft cannon” is so slow compared to an engineer spawned rapid-fire AA gun that the in-game lead indicator for aircraft, which doesn’t account for acceleration/deceleration or turning, is useless in 90% of the cases.
And to top it all off, this thing is in BR IV and has to go against jets with 1000lb bombs now, which throws the balancing it received on its launch out of the window, because it’s even less likely to ever hit one of those, in other words: The anti-aircraft cannon is actually aircraft fodder in this game.
In my opinion, the anti-aircraft capabilities of this vehicle need to be buffed, i.e. by increasing the projectile velocity and buffing it’s “turret” movement speed.
The flak 88 just wasnt a good AA gun on its own. They where only used as smaller AA guns could not reach the alltitude needed to disrupt bomber formations and then they would be deployed into multiple Flak batteries again each containing multiple individual guns. So they really would only be used in large numbners as otherwise they would be useless.
About 20% of the german ammo production was dedicated to AA guns and still a lot of bombing raids got through with only minimal losses due to AA.
The AA would expend thousends of shell for each kill they got, so having a single 88m magicly kill every plane in existance would be quite ludicrous.
I get what you’re saying, but this is a video game, and we have tiny handheld TNT charges and clumsily thrown explosive packs instantly blowing up 50 metric tons of steel, and people spawning out of thin air when someone places a rally point, which itself manifested into reality through a few swings of a utility hammer aimed at the ground. In my opinion the main goal should be fair balancing here, not one to one realism.
And as it stands right now, the 50 bucks (!) priced “anti-aircraft cannon” one of the in-game factions has access to is actually not doing so great as an anti-aircraft cannon, and any tiny AA gun built by an engineer does significantly better at fighting off aircraft.
The only buff they could somewhat do is to give it some kind of proxy fuze and say that they are just times fuzes set up correctly. Everything else is more or less historical about the vehicle and you can only spin a turret around so fast by cranking it by hand.
That would actually be a huge and welcome improvement to the AA capabilities of this “anti-aircraft cannon”, because it would compensate for the lead indicator always being off due to it not accounting for the aircraft turning or changing its tempo, and the in-game 8,8 cm projectile traveling so slow.
I think that would be the best way to fix it, since the ingame shell is already timed fuse in the first place, so they could probably(?) bring over something from war thunder to make it work.
Darkflow could make them proximity-based and just say that the crew is timing them automatically. It wouldn’t need to be a huge proximity area, just enough so that when you actually hit the lead indicator in a pixel perfect manner, it’s not going to be a miss just because the plane was slightly turning or changing its speed at the time of the shot.
I don’t think that would be strictly needed, a time fuse could totally be implemented still - it could just automatically set the time it will take a shell to reach the point the where plane you are “tracking” (i.e., the one which has the lead indicator) will be (the lead indicator) when you fire. Even if your shot is off, the explosion radius would be large enough to damage it.
I think artifically buffing the 88 to work in an AA environment it is not meant to is silly and that giving it proxi fuses would be particularly egregious. Just accept that in the environment that the game represents the platform was used as an AT gun instead.
You say that, but there’s kind of been a revival of timed airburst shells especially for things like AHEAD style shrapnel AA shells. I don’t know why this happening, maybe there’s something about AHEAD type ammo which makes them not really work with proxi fuses?
If it’s a weak vehicle I wouldn’t be against buffing it or something, but not by turning it into some weird WW2 Otomatic thing.
AHEAD and similar ammo’s can work with timed rounds becuse of extremely accurate range finding and ballistic calculations, and also timing set electronically when the projectile passes the gun muzzle - so it receives the most recent calculated data.
And the ammunition is designed to disperse into a predictable cone of sub-particles.
It bears the same relationship to WW2 era timed ammo as phasers do to the laser in CD players.
From my experience, even with high flying and slow moving targets like AI bombers, paratrooper planes or player-controlled attack planes flying in a straight line this vehicle is not performing better at shooting them down then a simple engineer AA gun, on the contrary.
If only we had time fuze shells (which it has in War Thunder), because the in-game 8,8 cm shell velocity in Enlisted is seemingly balanced around ground vehicle combat, which means it’s traveling incredibly slow for an anti-aircraft cannon.
There are no “high flying” aircraft in this game the gun was used to shoot down aircraft at 10000 feet or more - that’s 3200 meters or so - every aircraft in this game is low flying.
Even if Enlisted had aircraft flying at 10.000 feet above ground, and even if the in-game projectiles would actually fly this far without despawning, the 8,8 cm Flak 37 Sfl. would still be terrible at hitting these targets with the in-game balancing it received: Very low sight magnification, extremely slow projectile velocity, cosmetic HE-TF shells, etc.
Personally I just don’t see the reasoning behind making this SPAA so much less effective at fighting aircraft than the other available SPAAs and stationary AA guns in Enlisted.
Well that’s because the vehicle isn’t meant to operate on its own against aircraft, it’s meant to be part of a large formation of 88 guns firing a wall of flak into the sky.
The thing is that ultimately, in the context of the combat the game represents, the vehicle is basically a TD wearing a SPAAG skinsuit.
That’s a problem from my point of view. The game is heavily suggesting that this is a self-propelled anti-aircraft cannon, both in its historic context and its in-game description, and when you try out the vehicle before buying you’ll even see that it uses the same control scheme as an AA gun, but it’s actually terrible at fighting aircraft and way more effective at killing tanks and infantry, which is misleading buyers into a false spending assumption.
It feels more like playing the lottery than taking skillful shots when you use it as an anti-aircraft cannon, and even if you hit a plane with a HE-TF shell, which is incredibly hard, sometimes you’ll not even be rewarded with a kill. In some instances, the plane will simply still be airworthy, in other instances it is slowly crashing, but an allied rapid-fire AA gun or fighter plane will hit the plane once and your vehicle kill turns into an assist.
I would bet that this is the worst selling German premium vehicle in the game, and for a good reason.