air to ground and ground to air combat (suggestion)

[term1x 10]

dear BI,

I really appreciate and really enjoy your game, have over 600 hours invested into it (only Arma 3 hours), so I was thinking to make a suggestion to air to ground and ground to air combat. Current implementation of all mighty all seeing air to ground target lock is really a bit I would say no skill needed implementation. I have played both sides of this coin and I can tell you that a good blackfoot (24 air to ground almighty rockets) or jet pilot can't be shoot down by anything, if he knows what he is doing.

Last time I was flying a blackfoot (AFM hardcore) stayed out of range of any AA and my gunner just spammed R and killed over 40 enemy vehicles without even seeing those. Poor enemy vehicles didn't even have a chance to properly defend and saw me on radar. This happens almost every time, because there is no real reason to close the distance, when you have such type of almighty target locking. Don't understand this wrong I love to play, correction to fly a blackfoot, but there is no skill needed when killing as a gunner.

So my suggestion to make it interesting and more tactical, just implement following (really simple and it's more closer to real world than what is implemented now):

1. implement radar guided (long ranges, no visibility needed) and heat seeking (close ranges, visibility needed) missiles

2. give vehicles both parties (air, ground) the option to shutdown radar => this would make radar seeking missiles useless, but also your radar would disappear and your radar missile lock wouldn't work so only heat seeking direct visibility lock/missiles would work

thanks for this awesome game and keep up the good work,

term1x

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

The game difficulty settings can be adjusted.

Turn off 'tag friendly/tag enemy' and in your scenario, scatter some friendly armor around as well as some civilian vehicles. Then implement stiff mission-failing penalties for friendly/civilian vehicle casualty, and if it is MP, a small level of database and a user interface. Using this, present to all players a 'leaderboard' or statistical representation of people's performance. At that point, you will see much more cautious use of the ATGM.

A couple ways to improve current system:

1. Vehicles which are 'engineOn FALSE;' should not appear on the vehicle radar whatsoever, unless they have recently been on for a few minutes, to simulate heat signature decay.

2. Vehicle camo nets should completely hide the vehicle from radar, not simply make locking difficult as it does now.

[Imperator[TFD] 444]

The game difficulty settings can be adjusted.

Turn off 'tag friendly/tag enemy' and in your scenario, scatter some friendly armor around as well as some civilian vehicles. Then implement stiff mission-failing penalties for friendly/civilian vehicle casualty, and if it is MP, a small level of database and a user interface. Using this, present to all players a 'leaderboard' or statistical representation of people's performance. At that point, you will see much more cautious use of the ATGM.

A couple ways to improve current system:

1. Vehicles which are 'engineOn FALSE;' should not appear on the vehicle radar whatsoever, unless they have recently been on for a few minutes, to simulate heat signature decay.

2. Vehicle camo nets should completely hide the vehicle from radar, not simply make locking difficult as it does now.

#1 was true in Arma 2 until they added the "Target Empty Vehicle" command. A downturn in gameplay in my opinion.

Also I do believe your suggestion might not work if players are using the "Target Next Enemy" keybind which will only cycle through hostile targets.

As for the OP's post this primarily comes down to mission design and 'balancing' (gasp! I SAID THE B WORD!!) and whether or not a specific scenario factors in the capability of assets/weapons provided to players. Missions like I&A where players are granted almost everything under the sun are going to be far harder to balance than a mission specifically catered to each asset/weapon that is placed. In addition to this any mission that indicates enemy presence via the usage of an AO marker (ie giant red circle where the baddies are) is going to foster complacency in it's players as they will learn to only become aware of possible threats in the vicinity of the AO.

Using the OP's example of the AH-99; I would balance this by having the scenario randomly spawn patrolling 2-3 man squads of MANPADs soldiers that are not in anyway shape or form marked on the map. These will not show up on radar (duh) and only by actively scanning constantly with thermal imaging will an asset be made aware of the threat.

While the tab-lock issue is definitely something that needs a good overhaul there are many ways that this advantage can be mitigated - unforunately usually when these methods are introduced the playerbase will whinge as the game becomes too difficult. BIS went a long way to helping this issue by removing the magical all-seeing radar from most vehicles and only leaving it active on a vehicle that has some similar system in reality. :)

[term1x 10]

@MDCCLXXVI

I like the idea with "engineOn", but it would only work on shoe size maps, where you actually don't have to relocate, even 1km is deadly in current form of air to ground target locking, flanking also doesn't work as the target lock spread is quite huge.

if the camo net wouldn't allow to lock on, this would be quite OP

@Imperator_Pete

"Target Next Enemy" + "Target Empty Vehicle" should be completely reworked to allow only target "engineOn" vehicles

but I still would like to see the implementation I proposed, would change the game into a chess match between air and ground and skill would actually matter

and I think it can be done as a mod, but I would like to see it implemented in vanilla

[BobbyBlue 10]

I agree, spamming R is not fun. :(

[the_demongod 31]

...'balancing' (gasp! I SAID THE B WORD!!)

Nothing wrong with the B word at all. Balancing exists in real life. Think about it. Want super accurate guided missiles? In real life, you have to stay exposed and point a laser at your target. Want to find enemy aircraft? You can, but your radar waves tells everybody else that you're there, even if your radar isn't pointed at them. Want to carry a massive amount of weapons on your aircraft? You can, but you're going to fly like a winged brick. Want to carry a super-advanced, heat-seeking guided AT missile launcher (AKA the FGM-148 Javelin or Titan missile)? You can, but the rounds are very heavy and expensive and fragile and require 5 minutes of active cooldown prior to firing.

My point is, the more attention to detail and realism BI puts in, the more balanced and fair the game will naturally become. And I think it's a shame that BI is leaving out some of these things that are super simple (for example, having to self-designate for DAGRs, Scalpels, or any other laser-guided missile), because they would greatly improve the quality of the game.