Only thing that really sucks with air vehicles is that it takes forever to lock on imo
3 Seconds isn't alot until it turns into 6 seconds, then 9 seconds then 12 because they go behind a building for half a second
(6 Apr 23 at 2:44pm)Sevin Wrote: (These are my opinions and interpretations based on my own experiences and observations.)
TLDR: The answer is counterplay and control, which is mainly rooted in their mobility. Helis give ground troops very little counterplay and have way too much control over how engagements happen. Ground vehicles in my opinion strike a good balance for both sides.
1: You can’t easily take cover from helis.
Helis can often wrap around your cover faster than you can, meaning you are only safe when you're concealed from all sides. Anything you can loop around faster than a heli can, rockets will blow you out of. And thanks to the fact that they can fly, helis can often simply shoot over whatever you're hiding behind if it isn’t tall enough. You can only hide from a helicopter by getting a roof over your head—finding a building or tunnels—or maybe by hiding in a tight space between tall buildings—typically alleys. These aren't always nearby; a lot of times when a heli shows up you are caught out in the open to dry.
Taking cover from ground vehicles is a lot easier and consistent. Just about anything you can put between you and the tank, apc, jeep will protect you. They can’t as easily wrap around your cover and shoot you as they are slower and confined to the roads/drivable terrain. They can still blast you out if you aren't careful or stay there too long.
2: Shooting at helicopters feels pointless as they are never vulnerable, and can retreat and repair at any time.
Whenever you have a chance to take some shots on a helicopter, they often fly away/behind something or kill you before you can do any meaningful damage. They can disengage from the fight at any time they choose and be back in base in under 30 seconds repairing away your progress. In order to do damage they can’t repair, you have to deal 25% of its several thousand point health pool—a hard threshold to pass even with a rocket launcher—in the time it takes for them to fly away. With them always able to easily and quickly retreat at any time, they are never vulnerable.
Ground vehicles on the other hand are slow enough to be chased by ground troops to a degree, especially if they have to drive through corners and tight areas. Meaning: they can’t disengage as freely as helis can, giving ground troops a chance to push their advantage and take them down an HP threshold. The further a ground vehicle pushes into the map, the more vulnerable they become to this as it takes longer to get back to base. Tanks, jeeps, and APCs are able to take large amounts of damage suddenly—be punished—if they are not careful or get snuck up on by shotgunners, hijackers, RPGs, or just a bunch of guys with AKs. The only parallel you see with helicopters is if they crash.
3: Helicopters can be anywhere and kill you at any time and get to choose their fights.
You can’t hear a heli approaching as the noises it makes don’t reach the ground. You also can easily not see a helicopter coming as they tend to stay far up from the ground—the place where you're looking at for threats. Callouts on the location of a helicopter are essentially useless too (unless they loiter around one area, which is rare), as it only takes them a few seconds to fly to any given point of the map. People can’t run fast enough to respond to callouts before the heli flies somewhere else.
All this means, most of the time, you can't have any idea where a helicopter is unless you're looking right at it or it's already shooting you. If a heli shows up and decides to fight you, you often get caught off guard, out in the open, and without cover. So you die unavoidably. Even if you know where an air vehicle is, you can’t run fast enough to get to it before it flies somewhere else. So if you want to be the one to start the fight, you can only hope it flies over you and stays in sight long enough for you to do some meaningful damage or get a lock on.
Ground vehicles on the other hand, especially tanks, are much easier to keep track of. Their movement is much slower and restricted to roads and other drivable terrain. This allows you to deduce where one is and where it’s going with limited information. Ground vehicles, most typically heavily armored ones, often guard one area for a long time. The weapons on ground vehicles can be heard firing from a substantial distance away, announcing its presence to anyone in range. These factors combined make callouts much more effective, prevents ground units from being caught off guard and helpless, gives them the choice to avoid encounters with the vehicle as they often know where it is, and empowers players to bring the fight to them.
4: It's more fun and fair to lead rockets than to use lock on.
When shooting an air vehicle with a rocket launcher, you are forced to use lock on as leading rockets on them—moving and turning fast in any direction in three dimensions—is just impractical. In order to get a lock on, you need to aim at the heli with a rocket launcher for 3, uninterrupted seconds without it flying behind something and breaking line of sight. This can be especially hard on urban maps that have tall buildings with inaccessible roofs, or in general: maps where you can’t see much of the sky from ground level. You also need to avoid being killed while waiting for the lock on. Standing out in the open staring at the sky leaves you helpless to any who comes by. If the heli notices you, which it often will, staying alive long enough to get a lock can become impossible as you can’t take cover without breaking line of sight.
If you do manage to get a lock on things only get more soul crushing. You don’t move fast enough relative to it to meaningfully change the angle you're firing from, nor do you have much time to wait for a better shot (not that doing either changes much). You can either take the shot or don’t. Whether or not the rocket hits is entirely dependent on what the pilot does and how good the rocket's tracking is. Both are entirely out of your control. It might as well be up to RNG. It's very frustrating when a rocket doesn’t connect as there is nothing you could have done differently.
Shooting at ground vehicles (ignoring striders), where you use unguided rockets, makes for much more fun and intriguing gameplay. You don’t have to look into the sky and wait for a lock on. Instead, getting a good shot is much more involved. It's all about positioning, and getting close by flanking, sneaking, and avoiding its attacks as they keep their head (or rather turret) on a swivel trying to find and shoot you. You aren't forced to rely on the inconsistent guidance system. Instead, you must predict where the vehicle will be and lead your shot as such, taking into account the vehicle’s speed and acceleration, your own rocket’s travel time, and any evasive action the driver may employ. It is your own skill vs the driver’s that determines whether or not the missile will land. This isn’t nearly as much the case with guided rockets.
I did write a shitload but then realised I can no longer be arsed because I'm about to go off and watch the latest John Wick film, so here's some simple replies.
- If you can't get into cover or a helicopter is so tunnel-visioned on you. Shoot back, cumulative damage is a thing, and if one person plinks away every time it means pilots are less likely to notice the amount of damage they've actually took and less likely to repair in time to not meet the threshold.
- Helicopters are constantly vulnerable, and hence are flown exceptionally evasively and annoyingly for ground units. You can do a lot to an aircraft with a little focus and a little teamwork, and the Helicopter when it commits to an option has a much more open door to flee - so it's going to use it. (For example, why do you think ground vehicles have way more hp than air vehicles with the exception of transports? Ground vehicles inherently have to deal with the consequence of much more constant guaranteed damage because of their lesser manoeuvrability to pick and choose.)
- A single rocket and about 10 bullets will cross a helicopters threshold, sometimes less depending on a literal myriad of factors. To do the same to say, a T90, you need 2 rockets give or take but again because it can take more damage it trades off the ability to evade damage.
You did admittedly pick up on some of these already, but seemed to have missed that they are exactly why it is how it is. Helicopters can't afford to take a shitload of damage suddenly, and hence are played to minimise that because they have the manoeuvrability to do so. For ground vehicles they lack the manoeuvrability to negate damage, but to counter are given a lot more hp to be able to take a shitload of damage and hence are played less to minimise it.
- It is easily to hear and know a helicopter has been deployed, if you can't hear it then the command to increase helicopter engine noises is readily available and known ( lfs_volume X , it is recommended to alter it in increments of 0.1)
- Helicopters do indeed not stick around an area for long, because they don't have the health pool to do so, and are often the focus of everyone when they stick around for long enough to get killed. (How many times have you seen RPG classes running around RPG out purely to the area the helicopter was last sighted/can be heard).
- Good pilots are going to deny you lock-ons, RPG classes already recently received a buff in this regard because pilots did admittedly have quite a lot of warning to prevent one. This has ironically made most pilots even more evasive because remaining somewhere for any period of time has compounding risk.
So, to surmise, the reason why it is like this is because this is what people wanted, and the side factor of player skill.
If you want a vehicle to have less of a health pool and be less of a 'boss battle' to face, it's going to be played far more evasively and reserved because to do the opposite is simply detrimental to the vehicle being effective, the fun for the vehicle user is much less in being a lingering and powerful entity and more of a glass cannon mindset and hence the opposition, the opponent, has to face that mindset too.
Consequently this has changed the way fighting vehicles has become, back with older renditions of vehicles it was very much that 'boss battle', lesser to no availability for repairs but much greater health pools to reflect this meaning a vehicle is played like a juggernaut as something which entirely changes the battlefield with a continuous presence.
'I have 30,000 health so I can keep fighting until X amount of hits and then have to pull out' - Which ironically gives more opportunity to hit it.
Nowadays vehicles are a battle of little cuts until the side that doesn't have infinite respawns is eventually overcome, they can again entirely change the battlefield but they way in which they do so is inherently much less fun for both sides.
The side factor I mentioned is player skill, on average the people that use vehicles now I'd argue are far better than those in the past (partly due to the server simply becoming far more stable and having better hitreg and so on), hence the change in playstyle has been a compounding change and doubles their effect.
Quite simply for helicopters, their current variation means that's just how they have to be played to be effective, and they are played than in the past.
Speaking entirely personally, I'd argue vehicles should be altered in such a manner that they are once again a mini boss battle. The older more restrictive rulesets should come back in with much stronger vehicles to deploy, vehicles should be able to be deployed to fight vehicles again (I can't be the only one to remember the fun of massive air duels/tank and strider duels both as a participant and a spectator). As the mindsets from back then I'd say it was much more enjoyable to fight with and against a vehicle when it wasn't a knife-fight and was more of a grand shit-flinging match that changed the tides of battles or even just provided interesting diversification of a fight on the side.
Though on here speaking from nostalgia seem to be viewed as speaking from a position of weakness so oh well.
OH SHIT ONE MORE SIDE POINT IS THE FACT (RATHER IRONICALLY) THAT VEHICLES ARE SEEN SO MUCH MORE OFTEN DEGRADES FROM THE ENJOYMENT OF FIGHTING ONE. AS SEEN ARGUED A LOT RECENTLY THE MORE X IS SEEN THE MORE LIKELY FIGHTING IT BECOMES STAGNANT (see: most of the arguments for adding back in old maps for the sake of unique-ness)
Plus, there's just a lot less people who play vehicles now, and factional culture has changed to accept that vehicle subdivisions/divisions will not have the larger playerbase and so they don't have such an overwhelming pressure to reach for one (which stressed the culture of deploying vehicles and sharing deployments amongst the wider populace with access to them.)
A.k.a the server culture is now much better suited to more restrictive deployments with stronger vehicles than it was in the past.
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Arguing bit by bit chip damage is effective because the pilot likely won't realize the amount of damage they have taken doesn't make sense as pilots see the hp of their helicopter on their hud.
Edit: You can't see the hp on your hud, but you can by right clicking your heli and checking the "Edit Properties" menu.
You made some good points about why helicopters play/are mobile and evasive as they are. But regardless of reason, that playstyle is still unfun to play against.
I love seeing vehicle on vehicle combat too. Vehicles deployed on either side can make the game more interesting. They can be fun to fight against so long as they aren't too oppressive to ground troops, and so long you can actually "fight" them.
Arguing bit by bit chip damage is effective because the pilot likely won't realize the amount of damage they have taken doesn't make sense as pilots see the hp of their helicopter on their hud.
You made some good points about why helicopters play/are mobile and evasive as they are. But regardless of reason, that playstyle is still unfun to play against.
I love seeing vehicle on vehicle combat too. Vehicles deployed on either side can make the game more interesting. They can be fun to fight against so long as they aren't too oppressive to ground troops, and so long you can actually "fight" them.
I wonder why people try to make points of how vehicles and classes work by never having played them
Airvehicles dont have the HP in their hud, you have to go out of your way to go into third person, right click the vehicle and check the HP under Edit Properties, which a pilot only does when they are out of danger
Arguing bit by bit chip damage is effective because the pilot likely won't realize the amount of damage they have taken doesn't make sense as pilots see the hp of their helicopter on their hud.
You made some good points about why helicopters play/are mobile and evasive as they are. But regardless of reason, that playstyle is still unfun to play against.
I love seeing vehicle on vehicle combat too. Vehicles deployed on either side can make the game more interesting. They can be fun to fight against so long as they aren't too oppressive to ground troops, and so long you can actually "fight" them.
For the pilot not noticing HP damage, they can only check the HP of the vehicle (air vehicles at least, I do believe simfphys has an actual in-built hp display for its vehicles), if they utilise the context menu and vehicle modifier section of that menu. When accessing this menu you are locked out of all vehicle controls beyond I believe increasing/decreasing throttle, so as Serry said pilots don't often check their health unless there's a lull in combat/they're already going evasive and so on and so forth. Myself personally (though I can't attest directly to other pilots necessarily, but mine is mostly just gut reaction so I'd presume the same of them at a basic level) I don't bother checking my HP unless I've taken an absolute flurry of gunfire or have taken a rocket. Hence chip damage can sneak up, and in the absence of the chip damage actually crossing the threshold it still opens the door for the threshold being crossed more often - and as I was arguing, if you know you're going to die anyway, why not?
Sidenote: If you can somehow wrangle with the LFS settings to get the HP to display on the HUD, I am unaware of this.
My argument was the unfun nature of playing against it has been borne from changes gradually applied to vehicles mostly by the complaints of the same people - those who wanted them changed long ago. Most vehicle changes beyond the long-thought out and discussed buffs and tweaks and re-definitions from the first days of the OVA-TECH-GRID-ENGI discord have happened over time from complaints about fighting them. This has, admittedly, became lesser with time, but the fundamental change to vehicle playstyle which you are now complaining about being unfun within your points, is mainly from the re-defining of vehicles as lower health more deployable entities, which is in part a consequence of player complaint from not liking fighting previous vehicle iterations.
In other words, why fighting vehicles isn't as much of a grandiose slug fest as it once was, and is now this knife fight of a thousand cuts, is because this is what people wanted.
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Combine Planetary Commander
"If I'm not causing someone else to have a stroke, then I am definitely having one."
(7 Apr 23 at 4:44pm)Serry Wrote: I wonder why people try to make points of how vehicles and classes work by never having played them
Airvehicles dont have the HP in their hud, you have to go out of your way to go into third person, right click the vehicle and check the HP under Edit Properties, which a pilot only does when they are out of danger
Sorry, it's like that for ground vehicles so I thought it would be the same. I would love to test and experience flying helicopters, but I can't as I'm not in a division that has access to them. Forgive my ignorance and the assumptions that I had to make, but giving my input seems more productive than doing nothing. Thank you for the correction.
I thought people wanted stricter deployment rules and didn't ask for them to be adjusted to be more frequently deployed. Where did you get this information from?
Cause from my understanding deployment has never gotten stricter but more loose.
Time to write out a big ass essay response to this
3 Seconds isn't alot until it turns into 6 seconds, then 9 seconds then 12 because they go behind a building for half a second
I did write a shitload but then realised I can no longer be arsed because I'm about to go off and watch the latest John Wick film, so here's some simple replies.
- If you can't get into cover or a helicopter is so tunnel-visioned on you. Shoot back, cumulative damage is a thing, and if one person plinks away every time it means pilots are less likely to notice the amount of damage they've actually took and less likely to repair in time to not meet the threshold.
- Helicopters are constantly vulnerable, and hence are flown exceptionally evasively and annoyingly for ground units. You can do a lot to an aircraft with a little focus and a little teamwork, and the Helicopter when it commits to an option has a much more open door to flee - so it's going to use it. (For example, why do you think ground vehicles have way more hp than air vehicles with the exception of transports? Ground vehicles inherently have to deal with the consequence of much more constant guaranteed damage because of their lesser manoeuvrability to pick and choose.)
- A single rocket and about 10 bullets will cross a helicopters threshold, sometimes less depending on a literal myriad of factors. To do the same to say, a T90, you need 2 rockets give or take but again because it can take more damage it trades off the ability to evade damage.
You did admittedly pick up on some of these already, but seemed to have missed that they are exactly why it is how it is. Helicopters can't afford to take a shitload of damage suddenly, and hence are played to minimise that because they have the manoeuvrability to do so. For ground vehicles they lack the manoeuvrability to negate damage, but to counter are given a lot more hp to be able to take a shitload of damage and hence are played less to minimise it.
- It is easily to hear and know a helicopter has been deployed, if you can't hear it then the command to increase helicopter engine noises is readily available and known ( lfs_volume X , it is recommended to alter it in increments of 0.1)
- Helicopters do indeed not stick around an area for long, because they don't have the health pool to do so, and are often the focus of everyone when they stick around for long enough to get killed. (How many times have you seen RPG classes running around RPG out purely to the area the helicopter was last sighted/can be heard).
- Good pilots are going to deny you lock-ons, RPG classes already recently received a buff in this regard because pilots did admittedly have quite a lot of warning to prevent one. This has ironically made most pilots even more evasive because remaining somewhere for any period of time has compounding risk.
So, to surmise, the reason why it is like this is because this is what people wanted, and the side factor of player skill.
If you want a vehicle to have less of a health pool and be less of a 'boss battle' to face, it's going to be played far more evasively and reserved because to do the opposite is simply detrimental to the vehicle being effective, the fun for the vehicle user is much less in being a lingering and powerful entity and more of a glass cannon mindset and hence the opposition, the opponent, has to face that mindset too.
Consequently this has changed the way fighting vehicles has become, back with older renditions of vehicles it was very much that 'boss battle', lesser to no availability for repairs but much greater health pools to reflect this meaning a vehicle is played like a juggernaut as something which entirely changes the battlefield with a continuous presence.
'I have 30,000 health so I can keep fighting until X amount of hits and then have to pull out' - Which ironically gives more opportunity to hit it.
Nowadays vehicles are a battle of little cuts until the side that doesn't have infinite respawns is eventually overcome, they can again entirely change the battlefield but they way in which they do so is inherently much less fun for both sides.
The side factor I mentioned is player skill, on average the people that use vehicles now I'd argue are far better than those in the past (partly due to the server simply becoming far more stable and having better hitreg and so on), hence the change in playstyle has been a compounding change and doubles their effect.
Quite simply for helicopters, their current variation means that's just how they have to be played to be effective, and they are played than in the past.
Speaking entirely personally, I'd argue vehicles should be altered in such a manner that they are once again a mini boss battle. The older more restrictive rulesets should come back in with much stronger vehicles to deploy, vehicles should be able to be deployed to fight vehicles again (I can't be the only one to remember the fun of massive air duels/tank and strider duels both as a participant and a spectator). As the mindsets from back then I'd say it was much more enjoyable to fight with and against a vehicle when it wasn't a knife-fight and was more of a grand shit-flinging match that changed the tides of battles or even just provided interesting diversification of a fight on the side.
Though on here speaking from nostalgia seem to be viewed as speaking from a position of weakness so oh well.
OH SHIT ONE MORE SIDE POINT IS THE FACT (RATHER IRONICALLY) THAT VEHICLES ARE SEEN SO MUCH MORE OFTEN DEGRADES FROM THE ENJOYMENT OF FIGHTING ONE. AS SEEN ARGUED A LOT RECENTLY THE MORE X IS SEEN THE MORE LIKELY FIGHTING IT BECOMES STAGNANT (see: most of the arguments for adding back in old maps for the sake of unique-ness)
Plus, there's just a lot less people who play vehicles now, and factional culture has changed to accept that vehicle subdivisions/divisions will not have the larger playerbase and so they don't have such an overwhelming pressure to reach for one (which stressed the culture of deploying vehicles and sharing deployments amongst the wider populace with access to them.)
A.k.a the server culture is now much better suited to more restrictive deployments with stronger vehicles than it was in the past.
Arguing bit by bit chip damage is effective because the pilot likely won't realize the amount of damage they have taken doesn't make sense as pilots see the hp of their helicopter on their hud.
Edit: You can't see the hp on your hud, but you can by right clicking your heli and checking the "Edit Properties" menu.
You made some good points about why helicopters play/are mobile and evasive as they are. But regardless of reason, that playstyle is still unfun to play against.
I love seeing vehicle on vehicle combat too. Vehicles deployed on either side can make the game more interesting. They can be fun to fight against so long as they aren't too oppressive to ground troops, and so long you can actually "fight" them.
I wonder why people try to make points of how vehicles and classes work by never having played them
Airvehicles dont have the HP in their hud, you have to go out of your way to go into third person, right click the vehicle and check the HP under Edit Properties, which a pilot only does when they are out of danger
For the pilot not noticing HP damage, they can only check the HP of the vehicle (air vehicles at least, I do believe simfphys has an actual in-built hp display for its vehicles), if they utilise the context menu and vehicle modifier section of that menu. When accessing this menu you are locked out of all vehicle controls beyond I believe increasing/decreasing throttle, so as Serry said pilots don't often check their health unless there's a lull in combat/they're already going evasive and so on and so forth. Myself personally (though I can't attest directly to other pilots necessarily, but mine is mostly just gut reaction so I'd presume the same of them at a basic level) I don't bother checking my HP unless I've taken an absolute flurry of gunfire or have taken a rocket. Hence chip damage can sneak up, and in the absence of the chip damage actually crossing the threshold it still opens the door for the threshold being crossed more often - and as I was arguing, if you know you're going to die anyway, why not?
Sidenote: If you can somehow wrangle with the LFS settings to get the HP to display on the HUD, I am unaware of this.
My argument was the unfun nature of playing against it has been borne from changes gradually applied to vehicles mostly by the complaints of the same people - those who wanted them changed long ago. Most vehicle changes beyond the long-thought out and discussed buffs and tweaks and re-definitions from the first days of the OVA-TECH-GRID-ENGI discord have happened over time from complaints about fighting them. This has, admittedly, became lesser with time, but the fundamental change to vehicle playstyle which you are now complaining about being unfun within your points, is mainly from the re-defining of vehicles as lower health more deployable entities, which is in part a consequence of player complaint from not liking fighting previous vehicle iterations.
In other words, why fighting vehicles isn't as much of a grandiose slug fest as it once was, and is now this knife fight of a thousand cuts, is because this is what people wanted.
Sorry, it's like that for ground vehicles so I thought it would be the same. I would love to test and experience flying helicopters, but I can't as I'm not in a division that has access to them. Forgive my ignorance and the assumptions that I had to make, but giving my input seems more productive than doing nothing. Thank you for the correction.
Cause from my understanding deployment has never gotten stricter but more loose.