Timeframe and country based loadouts

[Ramius007]

It's preety str8forward. What we have now is a mess, both pve and pvp, creating issues of artificially boosting some weapons based on 3rd party developer wishes. In older FC3 Mig 29 compaign we have R-77 capable Mig 29 tackling F-16C with Amraams all in early 90's, ffs. On MP servers it's same, everybody wants to take their favorite aircraft to MODERN setup, so we have 2 F-14's and 1 with buffed missile, like F-14 wasnt capablt aircraft in it's time frame. I was interested in buying F-5 during Halloween sale, just to find out that a lot of weapons were missing, not only Shrikes, but also L and M Sidewinders or Chinese/IRussian weapons, this could be easily fixed with country and era focused  loadouts, this would also make balancing in MP much easier without relying on poorly made or unrealistic mods.

[Mike_Romeo]

3 hours ago, Ramius007 said:

I was interested in buying F-5 during Halloween sale, just to find out that a lot of weapons were missing, not only Shrikes, but also L and M Sidewinders or Chinese/IRussian weapons, this could be easily fixed with country and era focused  loadouts, this would also make balancing in MP much easier without relying on poorly made or unrealistic mods.

DCS is a hard core flight simulator that doesnt care about multiplayer balance but about the accurate representation of a specific variant of a aircraft. If you want a different version of a aircraft, the developers would have to start from the scratch to give you a 1:1 representation of that specific aircraft with all its capabilities.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Mike_Romeo

[Tippis]

Balance isn't really a factor in and of itself, and MP balance even less so. Most of that is up to the mission designer to decide on, and with the new warehouse API calls (once the bugs have been ironed out), there's a lot of control that can be put into that segment.

But there are still some design decisions that make things needlessly complex and unrealistic.

One is the daft decision to make only one specific version be all that a plane cane be, ignoring what the exact same plane actually can realistically carry, and then tying this to something as arbitrary as the year of production rather than the year of service.

Another is that weapons aren't restricted in nearly the same way as far as year of service, and instead only rely on the (still, equally) irrelevant year of production of the carrying aircraft. The most immediate and obvious example is the APKWS, which can be used by anything that can fire Hydra rockets, which essentially means any western (and a few more) aircraft made after the 1950s, and possibly the occasional '80s Honda Civic… and yet, it is nonsensically limited to just a few airframes that have are produced 60 years later because that's when the rockets were being rolled out. Actual compatibility and realistic use is ignored.

The third issue is that restrictions and availability are often set not to accurately or realistically reflect airframe capabilities, but rather arbitrary peacetime doctrine, often adopted from units that have never even seen combat conditions. This, too, is something that the mission-maker should be allowed to control, but currently aren't.

Having the tools and abilities to mix and match more would massively increase what mission makers can do, what they can restrict, and what they can recreate in a realistic fashion.