Change back the dog fight mechanics

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    • Easy Regid. I have played this game for almost 2 years. And no, changes like this aren't "common." It is taking away a game feature that is very important to many players tactics. I say instead of whining about it and complaining about planes, i have a novel idea! Build planes! Boom! problem solved!
    • Easy Regid. I have played this game for almost 2 years. And no, changes like this aren't "common." It is taking away a game feature that is very important to many players tactics. I say instead of whining about it and complaining about planes, i have a novel idea! Build planes! Boom! problem solved!

      No it isn't... actually the fact that planes are SOOO overpowered good and more and more players are building more and more of them, created this problem in the first place.
      When the fake daddies are curtailed, we have failed. When their roller coaster tolerance is obliterated, their education funds are taken by Kazakhstani phishers, and their candy bars distributed between the Botswana youth gangs, we have succeeded.
      - BIG DADDY.
    • K.Rokossovski wrote:

      Easy Regid. I have played this game for almost 2 years. And no, changes like this aren't "common." It is taking away a game feature that is very important to many players tactics. I say instead of whining about it and complaining about planes, i have a novel idea! Build planes! Boom! problem solved!
      No it isn't... actually the fact that planes are SOOO overpowered good and more and more players are building more and more of them, created this problem in the first place.
      Sooo overpowered? You mean the exact same way they have been since 2015? Ha. Give me a break. Not too long ago AA got a buff, i was fine with that move. But now taking away a feature that is very useful? ha this is a joke.
    • Alright guys. We all need to calm down a little bit. Changes suck, especially when we get used to a certain way how things are supposed to go. We only have a limited amount of capacity and as you all know we have a really complex code base, which just can't be easily changed in a complex way.
      Also I want to remind you guys, that this thread was giving the community the option to give feedback, come up with ideas and bring up situations and possible scenarios we might not have thought of yet, so give freezy a break, one will never manage to please everyone 100% :)
      Nevertheless, the decision needs to be made from a Game Design perspective. One can't just make balancing changes and decide on those by running a vote and go for the highest rating. Especially regarding such a complex topic.
      We are glad you guys provided feedback over 9 pages and we are looking forward to more proper discussions in a good manner in the future.
      People don't like change, but only as long as they didn't get used to it in the end. I am positive we will all find a new strategy and way to use the upcoming changes in a smart and intelligent way ;).
      Sarah / Sasri
      Ex-Community Manager
    • Polish Hammer wrote:

      K.Rokossovski wrote:

      Easy Regid. I have played this game for almost 2 years. And no, changes like this aren't "common." It is taking away a game feature that is very important to many players tactics. I say instead of whining about it and complaining about planes, i have a novel idea! Build planes! Boom! problem solved!
      No it isn't... actually the fact that planes are SOOO overpowered good and more and more players are building more and more of them, created this problem in the first place.
      Sooo overpowered? You mean the exact same way they have been since 2015? Ha. Give me a break. Not too long ago AA got a buff, i was fine with that move. But now taking away a feature that is very useful? ha this is a joke.
      I think I started playing early 2016 so I don't know about 2015... but yeah, air has been overpowered for as long as I can remember.
      When the fake daddies are curtailed, we have failed. When their roller coaster tolerance is obliterated, their education funds are taken by Kazakhstani phishers, and their candy bars distributed between the Botswana youth gangs, we have succeeded.
      - BIG DADDY.
    • Stormbringer50 wrote:

      @Sasri

      it is not fair to make a decision after 10 votes and only 2 days of discussion. it was closed too early. i am getting feedback everywhere that they did not get to voice their opinion.
      This topic has been discussed even before we made the airplane changes. Those changes were made on the 20. of June. So this whole discussion about airplane behavior is ongoing for months already.

      I hope we can all still discuss this properly otherwise I will have to close the thread.
      Sarah / Sasri
      Ex-Community Manager
    • Sasri wrote:

      Alright guys. We all need to calm down a little bit. Changes suck, especially when we get used to a certain way how things are supposed to go. We only have a limited amount of capacity and as you all know we have a really complex code base, which just can't be easily changed in a complex way.
      Also I want to remind you guys, that this thread was giving the community the option to give feedback, come up with ideas and bring up situations and possible scenarios we might not have thought of yet, so give freezy a break, one will never manage to please everyone 100% :)
      Nevertheless, the decision needs to be made from a Game Design perspective. One can't just make balancing changes and decide on those by running a vote and go for the highest rating. Especially regarding such a complex topic.
      We are glad you guys provided feedback over 9 pages and we are looking forward to more proper discussions in a good manner in the future.
      People don't like change, but only as long as they didn't get used to it end. I am positive in the end we will all find a new strategy and way to use the upcoming changes in a smart and intelligent way ;).
      Well i am giving my feedback. That is was just fine the way it is. It really isn't a complex issue, build planes to defend from planes. Simple solution to a "complex problem". Then you might have just lost a long time player and lover of the game. Also, i am aware of at least a dozen others who haven't written here that have said the same thing. So I know you are making your decision what you think is best for the game, if you will. And that is fine, but a sweeping change like this? Where is WildL when you need him!!!!
    • of course we can. no one has more respect for staff than I. I am doing my job and telling you that the community (well the EN community feels left out. I read the forum daily myself, and I must have missed the June post.

      We are just asking to delay doing anything until we can come up with a solution that will not disappoint so many users. and i dont mean just myself. thanks @Sasri, @freezy
    • Polish Hammer wrote:

      Easy Regid. I have played this game for almost 2 years. And no, changes like this aren't "common." It is taking away a game feature that is very important to many players tactics. I say instead of whining about it and complaining about planes, i have a novel idea! Build planes! Boom! problem solved!
      Tactics change, we adapt and adopt new changes. I have played this game for 3+ years, I have seen many crazy tactics, but the planes have always been powerful, even without the current patrol system regardless of any tactic. That is how all of us should play, we should adapt to the changes and adopt new tactics. It would be very boring if the same tactic is overused.

      Also, it has been stated many times in this thread, that this game feature is only important to a certain group of hyper active players, who spend their day micro managing planes every 15 minutes which resulted in 0 loss or heavy casualties for other less active players. The "many" here is around 5% or even less.

      I disagree on the whining part. If there's something wrong, we should speak up and change it instead of clinging on to it.
    • Stormbringer50 wrote:

      why do we need a temporary fix? are u the kind of guys that puts duct tape on a leaking pipe? haha. i dont understand why there is such a huge rush to fix it. must be the players league? most people that read this thread dont even understand the exploit.

      what a joke.
      You're being unreasonable and childish storm. If the so called "leaking pipe" is highly pressurized and the switch to turn the water off is mixed in a ton of other switches without label then yes, I would put an immediate fix on the pipe rather than leave it like that and wet the entire floor. We have to try to minimize the damage first, not go for the solution right off the bat if the matter is as complex as this one.

      In terms of coding, it is very complex indeed. A rework is what you're aiming for will require a lot of work and time to plan it out and much more time to fix the codes.

      Plus, the problem has persisted for months, so there is a huge rush to fix it, regardless of PL or not. If most people that read this thread don't even understand the exploit, why are you so fixated on getting everyone to vote for the fix?

      The ones who voted were the ones who knew of the exploit well enough and have come up with feasible solutions of their own.

      If you put up a poll and ask everyone including those who don't even know what the problem is about, the poll would be highly unreliable. It's like putting up a vote on "Here are the solutions to the calculus problem" and ask everyone from first graders to university graduates to vote. Of course most won't even know what the problem is in the first place.
    • K.Rokossovski wrote:

      Player A ticks first. EACH of his stacks fires once, each doing X damage, for a total of 5X damage. However, on EACH of those ticks, ALL FIVE enemy stacks fire back, doing 5X damage EACH (actually a bit more because def value is higher than off for tacs, but forget that for a minute) , for a total of 25X damage (!)
      Got it. Thanks for the concise explanation of the "exploit."

      Are we seriously considering eliminating the patrol-attack-damage function to resolve this? Have we already closed the poll on point, as posted by Xarus less than two days ago? What is best solution on the table? If there is a consensus solution here, I haven't found it by reading through these comments . . . .

      Eliminating the patrol-attack-damage function entirely strikes me as more than a little extreme, the proposed cure being worse than the disease. There simply has to be a better way to address the problem, AND make the outcomes more consistent with the realities of air combat. Anything that addresses the immediate problem, but results in further abstractions and further departures from reality is, in my opinion, a step in the wrong direction.

      I have always believed that the indefinite, time-unlimited offensive patrol function was more than a little goofy, and hugely unrealistic. In the real world, aircraft are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, aerodynamics and gravity. When they run out of fuel, their engines stop, their airspeed falls below their stall speed, and they fall out of the sky. The in-game offensive patrol function has ignored that reality from the beginning (or at least for all of my 19 months of playing the game). So, at the core of this problem, we have that fundamental in-game abstraction and departure from reality to address: the time-unlimited offensive patrol function of aircraft units. That's where the problem began.

      Of course, planes on patrol should fire back defensively. That's the whole point of a combat air patrol (CAP) in the real world: to protect friendly ground and air units and other assets within the area of the CAP. Now some clever lad has discovered how to exploit the presently programmed mechanics of defensive patrolling . . . . I'm sorry, but the solution should not be to eliminate all defensive patrolling, which IS the most realistic element of the whole game dynamic in the present circumstances. Should aircraft that are patrolling defensively fire back five times as often? No, clearly not; that's even more unrealistic than the time-unlimited offensive patrol function.

      My simple solution: all aircraft units "fire" no more than once offensively every 15 minutes; and all aircraft units "fire" defensively no more than once every 15 minutes. Problem solved; "exploit" eliminated.

      Now, can we talk about putting a time-limit on offensive patrols, whereby they are periodically forced to return to their base for refueling?
    • Display Spoiler

      MontanaBB wrote:

      K.Rokossovski wrote:

      Player A ticks first. EACH of his stacks fires once, each doing X damage, for a total of 5X damage. However, on EACH of those ticks, ALL FIVE enemy stacks fire back, doing 5X damage EACH (actually a bit more because def value is higher than off for tacs, but forget that for a minute) , for a total of 25X damage (!)
      Got it. Thanks for the concise explanation of the "exploit."
      Are we seriously considering eliminating the patrol-attack-damage function to resolve this? Have we already closed the poll on point, as posted by Xarus less than two days ago? What is best solution on the table? If there is a consensus solution here, I haven't found it by reading through these comments . . . .

      Eliminating the patrol-attack-damage function entirely strikes me as more than a little extreme, the proposed cure being worse than the disease. There simply has to be a better way to address the problem, AND make the outcomes more consistent with the realities of air combat. Anything that addresses the immediate problem, but results in further abstractions and further departures from reality is, in my opinion, a step in the wrong direction.

      I have always believed that the indefinite, time-unlimited offensive patrol function was more than a little goofy, and hugely unrealistic. In the real world, aircraft are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, aerodynamics and gravity. When they run out of fuel, their engines stop, their airspeed falls below their stall speed, and they fall out of the sky. The in-game offensive patrol function has ignored that reality from the beginning (or at least for all of my 19 months of playing the game). So, at the core of this problem, we have that fundamental in-game abstraction and departure from reality to address: the time-unlimited offensive patrol function of aircraft units. That's where the problem began.

      Of course, planes on patrol should fire back defensively. That's the whole point of a combat air patrol (CAP) in the real world: to protect friendly ground and air units and other assets within the area of the CAP. Now some clever lad has discovered how to exploit the presently programmed mechanics of defensive patrolling . . . . I'm sorry, but the solution should not be to eliminate all defensive patrolling, which IS the most realistic element of the whole game dynamic in the present circumstances. Should aircraft that are patrolling defensively fire back five times as often? No, clearly not; that's even more unrealistic than the time-unlimited offensive patrol function.

      My simple solution: all aircraft units "fire" no more than once offensively every 15 minutes; and all aircraft units "fire" defensively no more than once every 15 minutes. Problem solved; "exploit" eliminated.

      Now, can we talk about putting a time-limit on offensive patrols, whereby they are periodically forced to return to their base for refueling?

      I'm just gonna be frank, you kinda skirt around the issue really. Or perhaps it's just me cause too many fancy words sorta make me dizzy.
      Let's break it down piece by piece:
      1.
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      Like many have already said this, and I'm just gonna repeat again; this is just a temporary fix, it's not the "cure" for the "disease" you're talking of. Since we're comparing it to a disease, then this fix is more like a painkiller or an antibiotic to stall for time until a more better "cure" is completed.

      2.
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      There are many nice solutions worth looking into more...if we have time. Currently, all those solutions either call for a complete rework of planes or create another problem in the future, and all require a lot of time to code. Since the problem has been around for months, we really need an immediate fix. It might not be the best, but at least we will have a ground to build on and work on the problem from there. It's a common mistake in coding where you look for the most perfect and final solution instead of planning it out and solve the problems in stages. COW is a pretty big project, so you have to understand for the devs, there are many other problems and time is at the essence.

      3.
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      You said "Should aircraft that are patrolling defensively fire back five times as often?". I can understand if Roko's explanation is a bit...er...difficult to digest. So I think you got the wrong idea of the problem. Allow me to explain; First we have to go over how the patrol mechanics work
      _Planes will attack everything in the patrol radius
      _The damage will be evenly distributed among the enemy units in the radius.
      _Planes will attack after a 15-minute-tick
      Alright here comes the issue; like Roko has stated, say you have 5 stacks of planes(5tacs+5fighters/stack) and the enemy has 5 stacks just like you. Same tech level, same health. They all patrol overlapping each other. Now one of your stacks attack after the 15 min tick. The damage is spread out evenly over all units in the radius, in other words, one stack of planes just attacked 5 stacks of enemy planes. That will result in each of the enemy's stack will fire back using their defensive stat(given that their 15 min tick hasn't gone off), so in one stack you have 10 planes firing at 5 stacks of 50 planes. In order to prevent that, players will prevent the attack from ever happening, which result in constant micro managing planes to always be on the defense, which result in 0 loss for hours and hours and hours until one player collapses from exhaustion or go to sleep. That is the problem we're talking about, overlapping patrol.

      4.
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      So your solution is rather off. Planes don't fire 5 times in 15 minutes like you think, they just receive fire from every single stack of planes that patrol overlap them while their damage is spread out to all of the enemy planes. So barely any damage is done by the attacker, but huge damage is done by the defender.

      5. There are some other fixes you might want to know as well:
      Display Spoiler
      _direct attack a patrolling planes will cause the patrolling planes to refuel and you only have to reach the edge of the circle to force the planes back.
      pros: eliminate the overlapping exploit. Creates new mechanics
      cons: require a lot of coding since it basically is a rework
      _Treat overlapping stacks as one big stacks and is affected by the SBDE
      pros: more realistic
      cons: the problem still persist regardless of the efficiency as each stack will have different timer and will finish their 15 min tick at different times. So one stack will still attack all. Also, require a lot of coding since it is a rework
      _Randomize the attack. When there are overlapping stacks, one stack will only attack one of the enemy stack and it will be a random stack. 1 vs 1, not 1 vs 5.
      pros: eliminate the overlapping exploit completely
      cons: might be a problem to code, since we're talking about pseudorandom numbers here, what will the randomization numbers be based on? Might also complicate the dogfight. In order words, require more time, but not as much time as other proposition.
    • Regid, you just spent an awful lot of time typing and explaining, and added nothing to my understanding of either patrol dynamics or the complained-of "exploit." I understand the problem, at least as well as you, and perhaps better. It's okay if you don't like the proposed solution. But spare us all the buckets of know-it-all condescension.

      And, yes, I adopted K.Rokossovski's example for simplicity. Did you not understand that? Was I unclear somehow, even though I referenced Roko's example with quoted text? And, yes, I understand that defensive fire is reactive and automatic, and does not occur in the absence of an offensive attack. Yes, my solution would require some programming beyond deleting existing lines of code, but it would preserve defensive fire for patrolling aircraft ---- consistent with the defensive fire dynamics of every other type of ground and naval unit ---- while eliminating the complained of problem. The fact that you typed as much as you did above as quickly as you did, tells me that you spent more time typing than actually thinking.

      As for the other solutions listed, I have already read the entire thread, several times, over several weeks. I understand the "exploit" problem. I also understand that underlying all of this is the absolutely preposterous idea of time-unlimited offensive patrols, without which this exploit could not occur. That said, let's address the immediate problem in the simplest way possible, that bears some resemblance to the reality of air combat, without fundamentally changing the game, and then ---- and only then ---- steps should be taken to time-limit patrols.

      Are we clear, or would you like to bombard me with things I already understand again?
    • Actually Montana, earlier today I came up with the same suggestion you did (I had a long drive)

      I started thinking about a game where a player was incensed because I was setting my planes on patrol. He argued it was an exploit as my planes didn't need refuelling.

      I explained that when a squadron (typical squadron size was around 20 aircraft in size) is set on patrol it despatches a flight (a subdivison of a squadron) onto patrol. That flight then inflicts 25% damage before it is relieved by another flight at the 15 minute point. This process of flights shuttling to and fro means that the squadron can maintain a CAP over the patrol area albeit not at full squadron strength hence not full damage.

      Part of people's misunderstanding of how some units' work is that they consider a unit as a single entity whereas a tank regiment is divided into squadrons and then troops or an infantry regiment is made up of battalions, companys, platoons and sections. Naval units are the exception. I

      Now extrapolating that logic means that a flight cannot defend with the strength of a squadron and should thus defend with 25% of its defensive stats.

      Perhaps this alternative might be easier to encode as it is a variation of the patrol offensive action?