less jets and more land vehicles....

@TankerFlanker Shanghai is known for abuse of the attack chopper.

This is a combination of bad map design (mostly) and the attack chopper probably being too strong overall.

Choppers and planes (BF1/BFV) are hard to balance. Any air-vehicle that are effective against infantry becomes a pain and some maps become almost unplayable for infantry, if the game has good pilots.

@RNM4010028 Jets are a counter to good land vehicle drivers. You can't just take them out of the picture.

@RNM4010028 I want more naval vehicles. BF1 reached a high point near the end.

@RNM4010028 This very much depends on the loadout of the jet. In BF4 a stealth jet equipped with Laser Guided missiles could make a decent contribution against land vehicles - especially if they did so in concert with ground forces instead of trying to 1v1 vehicles.

Obviously, Attack jets were very very much a counter to ground vehicles.

It remains to be seen whether AJ's will return but my guess is that you will either have an F35 fighter and then attack variant with different upgrades and weapons available OR just a single F35 that can be modified for AA or AG depending on your weapon and upgrade choices.

Not having dedicated Attack Jets and instead using one of the options above should allow the devs to code something that is somewhere in between the performance of the Attack Jet and Stealth of BF4 in terms of damage output against ground vehicles.

I believe the key to keeping air vehicles balanced against ground in BF2042 will be air vehicle AA missiles (not to be confused for Stinger/Igla). In BF4 pre final patch vehicle missiles were a mess. Heatseekers and Passive radar missiles on jets were awful and the ARM was lowish damage but spammable and could hit without warning and became hated because that and its long range.

Post patch they actually made PRM's worse than ARM's since not only could you hit your enemy with little warning by switching to guns (which would turn off the warning signal to your enemy) and then back to missiles at the last second which would send the PRM barreling toward your target at lightning fast speeds, but now they did a lot more damage too!

Long story short(ish) is that BF4 never quite got AA missiles right. Equipping missiles needs to make you more effective against not just against helos but also against other jets. period. EOD. Some dog fighters will try to talk about skill based yada yada yada and that's fine, you can introduce a little challenge to using them but at the end of the day there has to be a compelling return on investment when picking AA missiles on jets. If I am giving up ground attack capability then I need to be properly compensated with increased *effective* (not just on paper) AA abilities. If using guns is more effective in virtually all scenarios than AA missiles then what purpose do they serve in the game other than to fool the ignorant into picking them only to see them lose their AG potency and waste air assets?

One of the things that can make jet AA missiles more effective is the move to full or semi full spectrum missile targeting. This would be where you can go into free look and then start locking onto and firing a missile at a target. In other words, being able to lock and fire a missile at a target you are not directly headed towards. this could make AA missiles MUCH more viable in general and in dogfighting specifically.

In summary, there was a big gaping hole in BF4 in terms of anti air and that was the AA missiles for jets. If this gets plugged then I think ground forces will not be constantly under duress as they have been in the past.

Regarding your wish to replace them with tanks on maps I believe that reasonable requests should be accomodated when possible and towards that end, admins on community servers (or whatever they ended up calling them in BFV) should be able to drill down and say which vehicles do and don't show up on maps. There's always going to be enough vanilla servers out there so if @RNM4010028 wants a jetless server then they should be able to spin one up and play that way.

@UP_Hawxxeye Agreed and precisely why missiles and counter measures need to be very carefully balanced and specifically jet AA missiles need to be effective from the start so that pilots can't just use ECM and below radar to make themselves immune from AA missiles.

At the same time you don't want to turn BF into a never ending lock on battle. It is a VERY delicate balance. Look at Star Citizen. Been in development since 1972 and they still haven't even come up with a proper missile/CM system yet.

One easy thing that can be changed to benefit JAA missiles is to look at IR missiles which traditionally are your short range dogfighting missiles. In BF4 you had a locking warning and a missile fired warning. With IR missiles I think they should do away with the lock warning and just have the missile fired warning. This will still give you enough time to flare if the missile is fired at medium to max range but be almost impossible if at short range to do so.

Why?

Because If I am in dog fighting range and my short range missile is less effective than using guns then why am I picking IR missiles anyway? They are supposed to make me more effective at AA. And there is no warning at all for guns so if I am already in gun range then there's no reason in my mind to not make the IR missile nearly uncounterable at short range.

The other piece I feel is the off boresight missile firing capability which will allow players to fire even if they don't have perfect angles which should go a ways to evening the odds against ace pilots. It's still going to require some considerable skill to get those shots off as you are going to have to turn fight while free looking long enough to lock and fire a missile.

OBS firing is going to really make pilots cautious on how they approach as if they just try to go at your head on they risk eating a missile either on the approach or in the turn battle. They're going to have to do something they aren't used to: rely on teammates. Yes, they'll need to rely on teamwork with other air units and also setting up traps like drawing the enemy into your ground AA network. Many of the old school dogfighters will fight this tooth and nail but this is how it needs to work for MP.

Dogfighters should be able to setup their own custom servers and even be able to restrict to guns only. I don't want to take that away from them but the MP game needs to better reflect the variety of weaponry used in the air and not be overly focused on gun/turn battles.

Another one real quick is Below radar - Definitely needs to go bye bye for jets. Maybe for helicopters too but we'd have to see how well they survive. In exchange though I would make the Jet cannons a lot more effective against infantry and IFV's than they were in BF4