In the recent update announcement, the higher rate rewards set for attacking positions and for killing with infantry have effectively encouraged players to engage in frontline combat. This is extremely positive. From this, I also thought of those fighter planes in the game that focus on air superiority - they usually have limited equipment and their weapons are difficult to penetrate vehicles. Therefore, unless there is a large-scale bombing or they are frequently harassed by enemy aircraft, few players choose to pilot such planes, resulting in them being in a niche state most of the time and more often being regarded as a defensive measure.
Therefore, I suggest that it might be possible to increase the field of vision distance for specific aircraft, enabling the infantry to enter the pilot’s field of vision earlier. This way, the pilot can use the onboard weapons to sweep the ground and effectively kill the infantry, just like the scenes commonly seen in movies: a burst of bullets, and all the soldiers on the ground fall down in an instant. Such an adjustment might be able to save those aircraft models that have been neglected for a long time - they might have performed exceptionally well in history, but in the game, they were overshadowed due to insufficient payload capacity.
Well, how to put it? Imagine you are piloting a plane and finally shoot down a plane that was attacking your friendly position. At this moment, you notice that the enemy on the ground is launching a major offensive. You urgently need support. But you have no weapons loaded or have already lost them during the battle. In such a situation, in order to support the ground battle, it is usually a suicide mission, and then another infantry squad is sent to provide support.
Plane gameplay is honestly the third leg of the game. I think the best thing to do to make planes feel more useful is just give them more things to do. Make Artillerly like bombing runs and spawn a battery way in the back and give it a few minutes before firing, giving planes a chance to destroy them. Friendly pilots are incentivized to defend their assets
This is actually a good idea. Just like fighter jets can shoot down the large bombers on the other side. This would turn the rare and successful carpet sweep operation into a failure. Maybe it could be modeled after what WT does. When calling for artillery fire, a firing position can be generated. In this way, fighter jets can sweep the ground and eliminate these factors that cause the artillery to fail.
There could be also autogenerated structures like Flak towers in Berlin with similar AA mechanism like carriers in pacific, though less accurate, which your plane could destroy. Your engineer could make it more accurate like enabling something e.g. some extra amo. On contrary enemy guerilla could blow it up planting TNT in certain marked places like those amo boxes? Anyway it could reduce a bit enemy’s air supremacy when your team makes nothing against them (no planes, no AA).
Are we sure that the planes without a bombload couldn’t have bombloads, historicly speaking…?
If they can, they should just be given them, easy fix, it’s happened before to other planes in the game. Devs do ocassionally add bombs to aircraft that didn’t didn’t before.
Even the Spitfire Mk V could possibly get bombs, as I remember Myrm1don mentioning that Mk Vs stationed on Malta were modified to carry bombs (only x2 100lb if I remember correctly, though, but it’s better than nothing, and apparently the modification that allowed this did not impact flight performance after the bombs were dropped).
