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I'll speak up as a veteran. AA is, and has always been, ineffective againsy even moderately talented CAS pilots. The only effective AA in the game is other air assets, as it has always been. This is why, since the very dawn of PR, the first thing air units do when they get up is hunt other air units.

There isn't a straight forward fix that won't make bits of the population mad. The only straight forward fix is to increase the range of AA weapons so there is no situation at all where air units can pose a threat to AA units without deception of terrain masking. This won't allow AA to kill decent CAS pilots much better, but it will allow AA to deny the free use of certain areas of the map, since using them would vost so many flares. The problem is that PR weapons are blind to map layers, so any 2km or smaller maps would cease to function properly for all CAS.

Killing a Chinook with AA manpad is harder than killing CAS HeCo / jet. Igla is the best AA kit imo. Don't wait for a lock, just aim and fire. AA rockets seem to be approximite.

[R-DEV]Rhino wrote:Ye, it works surprisingly well if you know how to use it but pretty hard to find the right situation to do it in.

The proximity "ObjectTemplate.detonation.triggerType" for AA missiles is "MTYVehicle", which flares don't come under so the most they can do is divert the missile away from a target and then once the missile has passed it, it normally can't find the proper target again.

This is also one of the big culprits for TKing with AA missiles since after a missile has gone past a flare, sometimes the only other target it can find after that is a friendly aircraft and goes after that

They also have "ObjectTemplate.detonation.detonateDistanceToTarget" which should be the distance to the target they locked on. Then again the bf2 lock system works in mysterious ways

Should AA missiles still explode on flares? because from what i've seen they just fly through flares (literally inches away from choppers) I'm pretty sure this was intentional right? I feel like it kinda nerfs AA though, back when AA would explode on flares i found it a lot easier to get kills off on CAS

I'm still waiting for Liam to get in on this cus he can attest to my story ^^ I'll try get a video for you.

Rhino already said AA doesn't explode on flares, which it doesn't. You can even see the missile "zip away" sometimes after it has passed a flare.

In terms of balance, a couple of suggestions spring to mind immediately:

1. Lower CAS (and maybe trans as well) hitpoints
   This is probably the easiest and most transparent "fix".
   As said before, a 120mm round from a tank fails to kill a Hind or Chinook.
   It takes a good salvo of hits of 30mm autocannons (as found on heavy APCs/IFVs) to down a CAS. Considering it's pretty difficult to hit a chopper with this cannon at all and it's easily avoided by flying high and fast, it's OK if this becomes more effective.
   Smaller calibers such as .50cal will also take forever or multiple guns to do reasonable damage.
2. Increase attractivity of AA. Especially stationary. While it can fire two missiles at once and has some reloads, the immobility usually means that you get kissed by Hellfires before you ever see a chopper.
   In addition, manning a stationary AA and having to rotate continuously like a retard (= best way to scan the sky for choppers) is no fun at all and nobody wants to do that ever.
   Solution: Give stationary AA a distinct advantage over MANPAD: Faster missiles, faster lock, larger splash range/damage. Or reduce the "setuptime" drastically, allowing players to jump in quickly into a prepared stationary AA if a chopper comes in. All of those would make it more attractive. Currently most players see it as a "death trap". At the most it scares the enemy CAS away until it either gets a good spot (UAV...) or a SQL laze on the AA.
3. The ability to dop flares could be restricted: Less total flares. Longer delay between individual flare drops (=no "spam"). You should be able to divert a missile, but certainly not a staggered barrage from multiple stationary or vehicle AA.

In general, having "more missiles" is not really a big advantage (e.g. AA vehicles, stationary AA). You just need one solid hit to kill a chopper. If you "shotgun" 8 missiles at once, there's a good chance all 8 will be deflected by flares. If you wait between missiles, there's a good chance the chopper will have moved out of the dangerzone already.

Increasing velocity or lock speed is much more efficient. As is reducing sturdiness of choppers.

[R-DEV]Rhino wrote:Like I said in my previous post, I normally don't fire my AA unless I'm pretty damn sure its going to hit, which is why I can achieve around a 90% hit ratio, which isn't a lie.

And how often do you end up not shooting because it's not going to hit? How often are you getting killed before you can even lock on? You holding back because the flares make a hit impossible is - to me anyways - one of the reasons why we complain about the current CAS gameplay. No other asset can negate their own counter to this extend and this is often being reflected by better CAS pilots getting obscene(for PR standards) scores, with a few costly asset kills here and there mixed in.

But even against flare spamming choppers, its possible to find gaps in their "flare shield" if you know how the missiles work and how to use them.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not good at manpads and AA, but even more experienced guys struggle(this is an understatement) with hitting anything.

This is why you need to move to a place the CAS doesn't expect you to be so they don't flare spam before you start trying to lock them. CAS only really flare spam when they go into areas they know have AA, or are likley to have AA, so you need to go outside of that if you really want to get a good shot on them before they can do anything about trying to counter you.

While it sounds like a good idea great in theory, most CAS choppers gain altitude over the main and only drop into visual range when they get a laze or have erected their AA blockade. I'm also questioning the competence of these pilots if they get hit "from the flank" as the lock tone will make the pilot aware of danger regardless. And then he drops a few flares, ascends a bit and then avoids you altogether or asks the CO to scout you out. Great.

I would say it was more balanced in 0.98, when the helicopters were faster, flares flew to the direction the chopper was heading and didn't stay up for as long. And the fact that you had 30 flares. I'd say most 1.0 changes for attackhelis were just making it worse.

Making helicopters slow, flares drop straight for the ground and stay up for a longer time means you hover high above enemies and once they fire the flares are already 50m away from the heli, making near misses useless. In 0.98 the near misses made more damage because flares would either stick close to the heli if moving fast or disappear fast when hovering and dropping them below.

This is a problem with jets too aswell, I played Arctic Lion and used the Gopher, against dutch CAS. I kept firing AAs at both the jet and the apache, at the end even 2 gophers against them. First ground to air kill we had was after 35 fired AA missiles. If you have the opportunity to fire 30+ AA missiles at the jet and he still doesn't get even damaged, there's something wrong.

The AA removal change did something similar aswell. Trying to change something but the outcome turned out to be opposite of what it was supposed to be.

I don't want to be rude about this, but there really is no solution to the air/aa balance in PR without making the whole affair comically unrealistic and unintuitive. In real life, the air/aa game is hideously complicated with layers and layers of threats and countermeasures.

The only direction to take PR in is a simple relationship between AA and air assets where aa provides a broad, and hard detterent to air that has no counter at all except for ground units clearing or suppressing the AA. The game just doesn't have enough mechanical complexity in the engine, or scale in the game to implement make a really satisfactory system. No matter what is done, some section of the community is going to be mad.

More suggestions to make CAS more of the surgical tool it should be (especially Hellfires):
- Delay between firing individual rockets. Currently you can fire Hellfires faster than you can empty a G3 magazine. Only necessary for LG mode really. Having a lazed target always should be beneficial over manual guidance

- Lock time on laze targets. Just a 1-2sec delay. Currently the hellfire is well underway before an AA that looks directly at the chopper has a lock. Which is stupid. Or: Reduce lock time for AA missiles. Considering the missile takes time to fly, there's always enough time to drop flares, but it's another step to make AA more powerful.

Less related:
Change smoke grenades to finally be IR opaque. Almost all current-day smoke grenades are opaque in NIR and SWIR (spectrum used by TI), and DEFINITELY does for all vehicle-mounted smoke launchers (e.g. armored vehicles). What's the point in obscuring your tank if the deployed smoke doesn't even cover the thermal imaging of your enemy?

Reducing the fire rate is actually a reasonable idea. Shooting the LG missiles that fast is bit of an exploit anyway.
So what would you say: 1 missile per second?
Lockdelay is already 1 second. Dont see a real reason to increase it as it would only make people use LG on laze markers instead of waiting for lock.
IR blocking smoke is coming

Puttin in a delay would only encourage people to use the switch missile trick to shoot faster. I'd rather keep looking at AA and the flares and try find a solution there. The suggestion to lower AA lock time isn't bad, aslong as it does not affect air-air missiles for jets, since these are very balanced atm.

Senshi wrote:
- Lock time on laze targets. Just a 1-2sec delay. Currently the hellfire is well underway before an AA that looks directly at the chopper has a lock. Which is stupid. Or: Reduce lock time for AA missiles. Considering the missile takes time to fly, there's always enough time to drop flares, but it's another step to make AA more powerful.

This would be good, if we had good view distance because IRL an Apache Longbow can fire a Hellfire at a target up to 8km away. And IG, the AA can see your lockon box far before you see them on the ground.

Is it possible to readd the old ZSU/Vulcan FOB deployables?

If so, is it possible to readd them and modify them to have a higher minimum traverse as well as a radar system and bullets with behaviour like AA missiles on an alt position? Ie, simulating a ground based radar guided AAA? Since the velocity of the rapid firing, low damage missiles is so high, they would only function if you already aimed near an enemy aircraft, and it would add a layer to IADS that isn't so affected by flares.


This would be cool.

I tend to agree with the above posters, it's an odd situation when something is besting its direct counter. I have always liked to think of games, especially PR as a game of picking the right counter.

Eg:
Enemy have a strong infantry force -> Send armor/bombardment at them
Enemy have armor -> Attack/defend with AT weapons (and have your armor as backup), use CAS
Enemy have CAS up -> Use AA
Enemy has AA up -> Use armor/infantry to destroy it
...etc...

You don't often see tanks rushing at manned AT stations that they know about, so CAS shouldn't feel ballsy enough to take on AA in my opinion, but that's just me.

Truism wrote:Is it possible to readd the old ZSU/Vulcan FOB deployables?

If so, is it possible to readd them and modify them to have a higher minimum traverse as well as a radar system and bullets with behaviour like AA missiles on an alt position? Ie, simulating a ground based radar guided AAA? Since the velocity of the rapid firing, low damage missiles is so high, they would only function if you already aimed near an enemy aircraft, and it would add a layer to IADS that isn't so affected by flares.

I'd love that, but I doubt it's going to happen

Spook wrote:Puttin in a delay would only encourage people to use the switch missile trick to shoot faster. I'd rather keep looking at AA and the flares and try find a solution there. The suggestion to lower AA lock time isn't bad, aslong as it does not affect air-air missiles for jets, since these are very balanced atm.

You mean reducing the fire rate? Switching weapons would have no effect on that and you would not be able to get more than 1 missile per second. Currently you can get 600 missiles per second and that is what makes the switching or spamming on laser so effective. Reducing the splash damage helped already a lot against spamming missiles, but you still see it being done on lasers.

Need MCLOS

Spook wrote:Puttin in a delay would only encourage people to use the switch missile trick to shoot faster.

Which is also can be fixed by adding weapon-ready delay of 1 second.

I personally don't feel like this is that big of a deal. People just don't seem to have the right idea on how to use AA against helicopters. The strela's hit detection is beyond fucked up right now, but I can shoot down a CAS helicopter with a stinger with an average of ~two shots / kill. I generally agree with Truism in that the current system doesn't allow a lot more balance. (We don't even have a radar in PR... Air stuff is really simplified.) Significantly nerfing flares/hp would make using CAS too fragile and too risky. We are kind of stuck with a system that either means helicopters do good vs everything, or they get raped by any and every kind of AA there is.

If you want AA emplacements to be actually threatening instead of annoyance, make them be projectile based instead of missiles. Bullets are always harder to deal with when you are flying.

Aleon, we have moved the discussion towards "how to fix", no longer "is there a need to fix?"

To enlighten this discussion, a short explanation on the lock range mechanics:
The biggest restriction there is view distance: You can only lock on targets that are inside your view distance. Viewdistance is a "sphere" of fixed distance per map, and it usually extends ~10% beyond the range where the fog thickens to full opacity (which is why you sometimes see tanks or choppers as silhouettes against the sky, but in "fog color").
And as you only can lock on targets that are rendered (= inside view range), both CAS and AA will only be able to lock on targets that are inside that range. CAS has a slight downside when hunting targets without a laze, because it will only be able to discern targets against the ground inside fog range, not view range.

The objective of this discussion is to refine the intended role of CAS as a hard-hitting surgical tool which is highly effective against armor and any kind of lazed target (or even well-reconed fortified infantry), but at the same time allow both infantry and vehicles a realistic counter. Which logically should be AA.


I think it makes a lot of sense to have CAS as a kind of "glass cannon": Every ground vehicle is scared endless of TOW missiles, to the point where you simply don't go somewhere because there MIGHT be a TOW. And: If you see the TOW, you are usually already dead.
CAS can swoop in and just say "Oh, there's an AA emplacement over there trying to kill us. So there must be a FOB nearby. Let's go there and kill them. Flares ftw."

Aleon makes a good point: Currently, bullets are the best counter to CAS, because you can't block them. However, it is ridiculous that they are actually more effective than missile-based systems. I'd propose to simply replace the absolutely ancient and outdated Strela/Igla and Stinger with newer systems, but that is unlikely to happen due to the need for new models and full code for them. "Realistically", modern AA systems(as in: post-1975) wouldn't even give a missile lock warning for CAS, because they use passive seekers (most warners nowadays actually detect the fiery trail of the missile post-launch, not the lock-on). Let alone the many developments that are specifically geared to allow missiles to separate between flares and the actual target.

The simpler solution is to increase effectiveness of the existing means of AA. A reduction in sturdiness for CAS would be great, as it's currently too easy for it to survive a missile hit badly hurt and limp back to base. While bullet-based systems are non-deterrable, they also do very insignificant damage. Even heavy autocannons (30mm) require ~8 hits to take down a CAS. Doesn't sound like much, but it's very hard to hit a moving CAS in the first place. If you are stupid enough to get into range of a tank, it has every right to blow you to bits with a single hit. And if you stay in the range of a 30mm autocannon, it also should deal significant damage to you.

No other vehicle is granted this luxury in resilience. Even tanks more often die to a HAT hit than not, despite their HP being designed to barely withstand it. Since 1.0 even the new "heavy LAT" deals significant damage to a tank if it hits at the side/rear, forcing it to run for repairs.

Check this video.
At mark 10:45 you can see the gunner spamming missiles vs a BTR. The reduced splash means the BTR survives for some time, but still it's a ridiculous amount of firepower raining down over the course of a few seconds. The entire video is worth a watch, a couple of awesome scenes in there, but also several scenes that show how carelessly CAS can be used currently.


tl;dr:
- Reduce hitpoints a bit (10-15%?) to turn CAS into more of a glass cannon instead of a flying tank
- Increase weapon delay between missiles fired (1 missile per 5 sec?) for self-guided missiles only to make the use of lazes more attractive again.
- Maybe: Reduce flare-spam (limit flare/second rate. Or deploy "flare salvo", then "reload" for x seconds for next salvo, opening a brief window for a well-timed AA missile

That would definitely be enough to both further the reliance of CAS on good intel while retaining their strength in LT mode.

To boost AA:
- Reduce time to missile lock
- Reduce "weapon ready" delay when manning stationary AA

viirusiiseli wrote:I would say it was more balanced in 0.98, when the helicopters were faster, flares flew to the direction the chopper was heading and didn't stay up for as long. And the fact that you had 30 flares. I'd say most 1.0 changes for attackhelis were just making it worse.

Making helicopters slow, flares drop straight for the ground and stay up for a longer time means you hover high above enemies and once they fire the flares are already 50m away from the heli, making near misses useless. In 0.98 the near misses made more damage because flares would either stick close to the heli if moving fast or disappear fast when hovering and dropping them below.

This is a problem with jets too aswell, I played Arctic Lion and used the Gopher, against dutch CAS. I kept firing AAs at both the jet and the apache, at the end even 2 gophers against them. First ground to air kill we had was after 35 fired AA missiles. If you have the opportunity to fire 30+ AA missiles at the jet and he still doesn't get even damaged, there's something wrong.

The AA removal change did something similar aswell. Trying to change something but the outcome turned out to be opposite of what it was supposed to be.

Agreed on these points, 0.98 cas and aa was just more fun and rewarding for me, on both sides. Currently as it is now I find myself having to relearn how to play cas and take advantage of the high slow flying aa resistant choppers, and just accept that even with an aenger against a non flaring havok, my 8 missiles will probably miss. Cas has always been very powerful, especially with spotters and uavs, but the current interaction of cas with the ground is one in which they can hang out for long periods of time and really only worry about a guided hat, or tank able to stick his barrel up in the air.