2 Stats for planes Thread - Vector Thrust

Here's an idea I've had for a while, to assist in competitive play.

Make the planes be MUCH more comparable to eachother than they are in casual/campaign.

For example, say I want to take a J-35J and fight that one guy in that Yellow Su-37 over there.
Doing this in the default game would be suicide. Draken just will NOT turn at all compared to the -37.

Having a competitive stats list for each plane would mean that, instead of becoming Ace Combat and having a sky filled with little more than Su-37s, F-22s, PAK-FAs and Su-47s with the occasional YF-23, we would have a sky filled with an incredibly diverse amount of planes zipping around.

Already, the game has support for this suggestion; you can make a new stats file right now if you want a god-tier J-35. What I ask is a second stats list that activates in Skirmish mode, perhaps by mutator. The mutator in question would look for a plane's Competitive.ini stats, and load those for the planes instead of their stock, realistic stats. A nerfed Su-37 and buffed J-35J, for example.

I'm not asking for the challenge in going competitive with a plane from the 80's to be removed, but I instead ask for the impossibility to go. J-35J can have little health if you so wish, or something to just make sure you know it's an aged plane.

EW planes could also benefit: Their main job is, of course, to jam the enemies and assist their friends, but a lot of EW planes I fear would be helpless. If their stats were to be given a buff for competitive, then at least they could stay alive until a squadmate comes by and takes care of the harasser.

TLDR, the reason I ask for this, is because that, in competitive play, you'd want most everything (but jokeplanes) to have a purpose, right? I do. Where is their purpose, when about 15% of the planes in-game are good for competition? Armored Core had a LOT of practical not-machine gun-weapons in it, like the Grenade Launchers, Bazookas, and even RIFLES in some cases. The same story is what I want here.

Of course, you don't need the J-35J to turn like an Su-47 in campaign. That'd just be silly.

I'm not sure how silly this post is. But, I have a tendency to see my posts as silly, then get a fair bit of support, so..

What's the point of having 200+ planes that all fly the same?

bornloser wrote: What's the point of having 200+ planes that all fly the same?

If the flight models for different planes were as unique as those in WipEout, then the problem would be fixed.

If only the FM were floatier...

yeah it's probably a dumb idea

Uh, no.

The thing with wipeout is that there are 8-12ish ships in each game. Not too difficult to make each one unique but goodluck doing that with VT's plane roster.

The problem with VT and other arcade flight games that are initially designed around single player is that they become very difficult to balance for multiplayer.

It is probably just a better idea to add the ability to restrict planes in a multiplayer match.

Yeah, I already knew this was a dumb idea anyway.

One variant per each family that can do well competitively sounds much more practical anyway :/

If you want to 'balance' the game, we should look at making a tier system that actually works and improving the flight model just slightly so that where different aircraft gain their speed is more important.

Oh, also, certain missiles really, really equal the playing field. It's a good part of the reason why the Mig-21 variants are incredibly bullshit.

Koeben wrote: The problem with VT and other arcade flight games that are initially designed around single player is that they become very difficult to balance for multiplayer.

FreeSpace addressed the single-player imbalance by having "Dogfight" variants of ship primary and secondary weapons in multiplayer. Compared to single-player, these have any combination of reduced damage, range, rate of fire, or velocity to make all weapons more viable. More powerful weapons had more significant changes made to their stats.

Here, aircraft would have to be made to perform similarly, which would still be unfeasible given how many there are.

This basically says older aircraft in their families would be faster than newer aircraft which use heavier avionics and whatnot. In our current multiplayer, where aircraft are limited to Sub and Main weapons, the choice is between flying faster or tighter turns.

Edited by: SpootKnight

Best way to balance all those planes for multiplayer would be to adjust their point values over time. I'm sure team based score matches would work wondefully.

The other problem is that most of you guys are fighting duels, where the shortcomings of certain planes become very apparent. If you play with teams or in larger deathmatches then it's easier to make up for imbalances with tactics-just evade until the guy on your tail switches targets and then shoot him in the back.

I get the feeling things are going to get more difficult once only a few planes can do post stall maneuvers. it's really hard to get on another player's tail without them so you'll probably have to make the standard missiles more accurate.

Edited by: bornloser

I also have an idea to improve the multiplayer balance that would like to add. Is not original, but I feel if the default goal for the match was points instead of kills it would be much better.

If a J-35J gives 800 points and a Su-37 gives 3000 for each kill I think this makes the idea of selecting weaker aircraft a lot more practical.
This means the player that uses the J-35J can be shot down 3 times and still be ahead of the Su-37 if manages to shoot it down a at least once
However the points given for each aircraft need to be tweaked to find the right balance

That's a good solution, but, I'm only really worried about a handful of planes, and that's really because we have nothing to compete with the F-22/F-35X: both variants are kind of strictly superior to everything prior in virtually every way, especially after stealth gets worked in. I feel like when there's a few more modern planes and things like the NATF this won't be such of an issue, but there's kind of a point where it's not exactly fun to fight those planes without equipping really nice missiles.

A tier system might benefit the game, but lately I've been playing War Thunder's tier system to my advantage up until they put my favorite plane up against jets to the point that I'd almost say that would be a good way to handle it: for awhile the 1.0 spread actually does pretty alright... And then battle rating 6.0 hits and everything hits the fan.

Anyway: in VT as it is, you don't have much more reason to pick a Su-37 over an F-22A over an F-14D or an F-15C. Each aircraft has its flaws and advantages. It's not until you deal with the forward swept wing variants that you start going 'Augh,' because these planes both roll faster and turn tighter than non-swept planes that can be compared to. If you play within a certain 'tier,' most of the planes in the game balance themselves out in a number of features. The only thing I'd say that isn't balanced is plane progression with how good they are, but I haven't actually seen what challenge progression looks like in about a month. With a few more 'super' tiered planes, the ones that already exist I feel like would end up being balanced out, and everything else is already kind of a matter of preference and flying style.

Edited by: Boogie_Van

I think the game would probably benefit from something like Tuning-Lite (for swapping in some reasonable weapons) and a stronger archetype based balance for initial stats so that aircraft are somewhat competitive when all things are considered together. It would make something like assigning point values a lot easier too, since you start to get an idea for how aircraft stack up against each other. Of course, my own table is only a rough idea to illustrate a point. Something like pitch rate, would probably have a higher weight in a rading than fuel or some other smaller score, since VT values turn rate so highly.

@IbizenThoth
I actually use a similar system, but in a different way, all the performance is dictated by measurable characteristics, like wing aspect ratio, weight, engine thrust, etc. The only exceptions are the avionics, they will be updated with a new formula (at the moment it was only applied to A-10,A-12,F-22,F-36) that will consider the role, but will also consider other details, like age, role purity, how state of that art it is, if it has radar, IRST, ECM pods, laser tracker, etc.

But I do admit the formula I use works fine in giving each aircraft a more distinct feel, but probably not so good at creating a perfect multiplayer balance, at least on stats only. That is why I think one solution could be to make each aircraft award the player with a different amount of points.
Also, I don't think this formula is final, there is always room for improvement even after release. Something I´m also planning to add more values so each aircraft can have distinct avionics, like changing the max lock number, how far can show the gun lead aim, SAAM circle radius, etc

@Boogie_Van I like the idea of a tier system, or at least something that can be used to limit the aircraft selection, but that we can think what can be useful. (Age, overall performance, value in points, role?)

Well, I sort of confused a tier system for a battle-rating like system, but you'd want to use the latter to place the former, anyway:

Cannon location: A plane with an inboard cannon (F-14) is easier to get guns kills with than outboard cannon (F-15, F-22)
Weapon load-outs: Sort of a given, but this has a drastic affect before actual performance of the aircraft, similar to the gun location: you can forgive a shitty plane with a set of good weapons pretty easily in this game
Stealth: While I don't see it as important right now, as stealth becomes further implemented into some families, we'll probably see them perform better (F-22/F35)
Pitch rate: More important than turning radius
Turning radius: Still important, let's not lie
Vertical acceleration/ascent rate: Not as important as one would like in this flight model, but still applicable to a dogfight
Horizontal acceleration: Same as above; I should note that these (vertical/horizontal) are an important difference to flex in certain dogfights
Roll rate: a defensive function in this game, but the aircraft with a higher roll rate is easier to keep safe
Target size: death pencils and F-16s are PITAs to shoot out of the sky because of their size
Health power: most definitely the least important, but it still matters: what tames F-16s and Mig-21s is taking them out in one shot, what makes F-22s begrudgingly difficult in close quarters (not that they're good at it, just that they're annoying) is their big pool of health

Planes that have multiple good qualities and fewer and fewer weaknesses should be weighted higher and higher, so an F-14 and an Su-27 should be considered 'better' in terms of Vector Thrust than an F-15, the F-22 has pretty acceptable everything and stealth, so you can see where that's going. The key part in making a tier/battle rating system that works is making sure that planes which are blatantly better in virtually every regard are kept off the table in matches where they don't belong; and as I'm saying that, this isn't like War Thunder, we do have missiles, and it's way, way, way easier to kill things if you're a good shot with missiles and have a set that aren't crap, so the better performing plane doesn't really matter so much when one below it has acceptably performing missiles and doesn't handle terrible: it's why the Mig-21 series is so god damned good, R-60 + good plane = lethal combination.

I don't really know how you'd plug in thoughts like age into the process except in regards to what weapons are equipped, but I would say you should look at overall performance to place the aircraft in its tier/battle rating, and then once its in a tier, as long as it doesn't become blatantly obvious that it needs to be moved, value in points could measure an aircraft being 'better' than its compatriots within a tier rather than having that plane fight where some might consider it reaching just past the peak of its ability.

I've got a serious issue with envisioning how this should be done though, because we have a very small amount of planes that really sit on top of the pile. Most of the F-22/F-35 variants are double edged swords in terms of their advantages and disadvantages, but there's not really many comparable aircraft capable of going up against the top ends, but 4th through starting 5th generation planes actually seems pretty balanced to me, 3rd not so much (fucking Mig-21s), so I think we should look at what we consider the 'meat' planes of Ace Combat games because they're pretty well equal with each other already, and then worry about the extreme fringes we have that normal flight games don't have to care about: those awesome superplane-esque variants and death pencils. Once there's enough planes to fill out, for example, higher and lower tiers, we should look towards making them.

But any battle-rating or tier system should probably be thrown out until the game is basically feature and content complete anyway. Any drastic changes to the flight mechanics, weapons, and so forth would basically turn it into attempting to balance an ever-changing alpha/beta/etc that kind of defeats the point of assigning an aircraft to a tier/battle rating, for example if you improve the flight engine like what myself and Ibizen have been talking about, you'd see the balance shift in large parts toward energy fighting that would mean issues like outboard guns are less important, and how well the aircraft accelerates needs to be weighted higher. Sticking to just the idea that different aircraft are worth different points and that even a 'team deathmatch' is done by standard for points rather than kills would be viable for now would help to balance out the roster with an added black/white list function for the host if we didn't already have it.

I don't think anyone would really mind, either, if multiplayer say, before release was focused on more co-op and worried about competitive multiplayer around or after release. I realize there is the Wardoge tournament and all which gives us a reason to look at competitive balance, but I would say that the blacklist took care of virtually every thing I'm worried about except for just about one plane, but we'll see if it makes a difference (when someone picks the same offshoot prototype you're considering, you wonder if there might be an issue...)

Edited by: Boogie_Van

@Times - I'm personally a fan of using banlists in conjunction with a composite score system (adding weighted stats values together for a number to calculate the aircraft's general effectiveness) alongside aircraft tier-ing according to its archetype in vanilla MP gamemodes.

More specialized game modes for MP would do better with an extra layer of meta systems to allow us to offset certain strengths and weaknesses using a non-combat mechanic like cost or the point award modifier you mentioned. For example, ACI type competetive CoOp could probably use something like a cost system to make a capability vs respawn trade-off, sorta like the mission budget idea proposed in the gamemodes suggestion threads. F-22s may be pretty good, but you can only afford to use one in the mission, vs an F-5 which is generally much worse in all respects except for cost allowing for much greater attrition resistance.

One thing I think should use two separate stats is the standard missile ROF. I keep noticing that standard missiles Itano more often than XMAAs, which completely defeats a lot of possible A2A tactics, since you can NEVER mitigate the risks in a head on engagement by defeating missiles on the approach, which significantly devalues the power of faster, less maneuverable aircraft.

Oftentimes, I find myself face to face with an enemy and defeating 3 or more volleys of standard missiles before I pass by them, completely preventing me from establishing my own lock. Since I am less maneuverable, I can't win the opponent's tail, and my speed means nothing if we have similar standard missile ranges (at least when talking about a multiplayer match with no SP weapons as we have now). This puts me at an unfavorable stalemate that is very difficult to break using my own aircraft's strengths. No matter how many standard missiles I defeat, I will never have an opening to get my own lock unless I give the enemy equal opportunity to shoot me down in a head on pass.

If we keep the current flight model, we either need to give the faster aircraft a pretty large inventory of effectual special weapons and notably better top speeds, or we need to reduce the standard missile fire rate to reduce the number used in a head on pass to two. While the reload rate is probably not bad for campaigns, since the player is sorta a super soldier (regardless whether they are portrayed as such) in comparison to other units, it could do with some toning down for multiplayer and skirmish. It flattens out gameplay variety when a missile is always available to create a cone of denial in front of a fighter, especially for less maneuverable fighters which have little choice but to fly straight into the cone and can seldom escape if they aren't particularly fast. Granted, turn rate has always been a big sticking point of mine, and I'd love to see some kind of corner speed mechanic implemented eventually.