[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Raymac

Call me a masochist, but I like that bases are dangerous for air. I like knowing that if I plan on doing a rocket strafing run near a base, that I have to bring my A game or I'll get blown out of the sky. It would feel like easy mode if there was less AA at bases. In fact, once you take out the AA at a base, you pretty much own the courtyard at that point. AA is super powerful in PS1, but I think thats the way it should be. Air superiority is essential, and should be difficult to achieve.

I just wanted to point out that in my proposed altitude idea low-altitude would be the most common AA, and therefore it would still be quite dangerous to do a rocket-strafe run since that is what the ground forces would likely have readily on-hand. You'd want to use trees, hills, etc for cover and bey very fast to avoid it. So I think there's still be a lot of risk and danger there. The only real difference would be that in addition to hills and trees, altitude could also be something you could retreat up to, though trees and hills likely better.

@Malorn - The more I think about your WW2 flak gun idea, the more I like it. My only concern would be lowering the gun to use it against ground troops, but that would be easy to fix by only allowing the flak to only explode at after a certain altitude.

This is another reason why I like altitude as the factor and not distance. You can set the flak to detonate at a certain altitude (with some minor random variance in there of course). It oculd also have a minimum altitude, making it worthless against infantry. You can also make the damage very low against non-aircraft targets. That's more of a damage-type discussion though.

The mechanic I'm thinking sort of reminds me of how the rocket attachment worked in BF 2142 where you have a range-finder (or altitude-finder) on a target and then you used the mousewheel to adjust the distance. So for a flak gun user it would be a little delay between acquiring the target, getting the range, and then adjusting the altitude offset. For the pilot if they didn't change elevation then they'd get rocked by flak once it had acquired them and set the altitude. The gunner can observe the pilot changing and then lower/raise the flak altitude using mousewheel (or whatever button they want) and then it becomes a cat & mouse game. In either case it would take a lot more skill to use a flak gun. As a consequence they could make the flak gun considerably more effective.

Such a flak mechanic would certainly not be EZ-mode and I'd want to see it reward good skill by being quite deadly. Aircraft direclty assaulting a flak gun would be an interesting scenario too since hte flak user would acquire range and then reel it in while firing until they hit the mark.

I'm a little concerned that the flak idea would almost be too hard for most players to use effectively and pilots might make AA batteries easy pickings. One way to make it not quite so complicated is to give the Flak an effective spread of altitudes, like +/- 15 m or so that if it encountered aircraft anywhere in that spread it would detonate , otherwise it would go to its set range and detonate. That would make it so the gunner would need a ballpark figure as opposed to a precise range but would still need to make adjustments for evasive aircraft in order to hit them.