Conquest DESPERATELY needs a difficulty tweak.

[JtDarth]

You reach alert level 10, and ace squadrons and airships begin to flood in in such numbers that you basically can't do anything other than beeline straight for objectives. Attempting to stand and fight at ALL, doesn't work, because they spawn significantly faster than it is possible to kill them.

By alert 15, you have a mass of 20+ enemy planes on you firing missiles at basically all times, preventing you from doing anything other than long hit and run attacks because if you try to turn, you WILL get hit pretty quickly. Add in that player missiles aren't the most accurate, and you can't stay linear long enough to do a gun run, and the mode very quickly goes from fun, straight into unfair and tedious BS.

There's not only an abrupt spike in difficulty at alert 10, but it's also way more difficult at that point then it should be. There is zero way I have found, for actually surviving at alert 15+, short of grabbing an interceptor and MLAA and taking really long passes. Which is just tedious as hell.
Something needs to be done about this, or the game isn't really going to have any staying power.

[IxianMace]

I agree. I spoke about this in another recent thread about this topic here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/895870/discussions/1/2965021152089775648/#c2965021152090069958

[Frolonov]

I tried easy mode and 0.5x alert level, reached about lvl 40 by using PW.MK1 and get overwhelmed by enemy ADMM(BML-U). The worst thing is that the map would be reset after KIA, which would take too much effort to start all over again. It would be much better if progress could be saved.

[bingbean]

Yee, fight vs no primary targets is like fight vs Hydra. You kill one of them, next two just spawn behind you. This spawn frequency is annoying. I think it will help if the spawn point is at least 15 km away of you, to have a little more time to prepare for next wave.

[Pluto9510]

The things is, if they tune down the difficulty, it will be too easy when you are using the boss plane... (it is op as hell, I don't think it is good for balance, even in this single player game)

[Frolonov]

Maybe conquest mode could involve more strategy and remove the number limit/level limit of allied unit(there's resource limit on the map), so they won't be taken out that easily by infinite enemies and the game won't become 30~40 planes chasing the player, at least leave some time for the player to aim and fire instead of dodging missiles all the time...

[JtDarth]

Publicado originalmente por Pluto9510:

The things is, if they tune down the difficulty, it will be too easy when you are using the boss plane... (it is op as hell, I don't think it is good for balance, even in this single player game)

The solution to that, is to not balance based around the boss plane. Just look at older fighting games that let you play as their final boss. Or even earlier entries in AC for a more direct, in-genre comparison.

[BCGaius]

Yeah, Conquest is pretty baffling right now. There's almost no ground attack involved apart from a token SEAD mission type (which is also the easiest, because you can just go full speed from objective to objective and ignore the 10,000 planes chasing you), so all the various bomb options are pretty pointless - MLAG is the only thing you'd ever want for the handful of ground targets worth engaging.

As mentioned, air combat turns into a mess past level 10. There's absolutely no point in engaging non-priority targets apart from a tiny amount of credits and very temporarily getting rid of one source of non-stop missile locks. So you're forced to just sort of speed through everything at full throttle spamming MLAA, getting off a couple STDMs are priority targets, and then spamming flares as you run away to get some distance and do it again. With the incoming SAA nerf, there's even less point to taking anything other than as many MLAA as possible.

Some of the plane upgrades and loadout options don't make much sense, there's no real sense of progression once you've gotten out of the F-4/MiG-21 tier unless you want to use the mega-plane, and some of the loadout choices are just bizarre. Why does the F-15C have a ground attack slot, such poor stats relative to the other F-teens, and no real variety in AA missiles? It's nice that the F-14 gets cosmetic Phoenixes instead of AMRAAMs, but why are they just plain old MLAAs - shouldn't the F-14 have more specialist long-range AA options compared to the others?

Anyway, loadout/progression issues notwithstanding, Conquest definitely feels very bare bones right now and not really all that functional. I got to Alert 20 on my last run, but that's really because the only viable strategy I've found past 10+ is to just spend forever kiting enemies until they're strung out enough to make a SAA/MLAA pass on a priority target, then run away again, so the alert level rises several times per mission. You can just run away indefinitely, and it's basically suicide if you don't. Not a very compelling style of gameplay, unfortunately - Conquest was by far my biggest interest in PW.

[levo85h]

Publicado originalmente por BCGaius:

Yeah, Conquest is pretty baffling right now. There's almost no ground attack involved apart from a token SEAD mission type (which is also the easiest, because you can just go full speed from objective to objective and ignore the 10,000 planes chasing you), so all the various bomb options are pretty pointless - MLAG is the only thing you'd ever want for the handful of ground targets worth engaging.

As mentioned, air combat turns into a mess past level 10. There's absolutely no point in engaging non-priority targets apart from a tiny amount of credits and very temporarily getting rid of one source of non-stop missile locks. So you're forced to just sort of speed through everything at full throttle spamming MLAA, getting off a couple STDMs are priority targets, and then spamming flares as you run away to get some distance and do it again. With the incoming SAA nerf, there's even less point to taking anything other than as many MLAA as possible.

Some of the plane upgrades and loadout options don't make much sense, there's no real sense of progression once you've gotten out of the F-4/MiG-21 tier unless you want to use the mega-plane, and some of the loadout choices are just bizarre. Why does the F-15C have a ground attack slot, such poor stats relative to the other F-teens, and no real variety in AA missiles? It's nice that the F-14 gets cosmetic Phoenixes instead of AMRAAMs, but why are they just plain old MLAAs - shouldn't the F-14 have more specialist long-range AA options compared to the others?

Anyway, loadout/progression issues notwithstanding, Conquest definitely feels very bare bones right now and not really all that functional. I got to Alert 20 on my last run, but that's really because the only viable strategy I've found past 10+ is to just spend forever kiting enemies until they're strung out enough to make a SAA/MLAA pass on a priority target, then run away again, so the alert level rises several times per mission. You can just run away indefinitely, and it's basically suicide if you don't. Not a very compelling style of gameplay, unfortunately - Conquest was by far my biggest interest in PW.

Spot on. Hit and run is the only viable tactics on high alert level as your friendlies don't do much and hostiles keep spawning in. With the upcoming nerf to SAA, engaging in long range won't be any easier either, which makes it pretty stale and unpleasant.

[Frolonov]

I think ally units should have an accuracy/dps buff. It takes 3~4 railgun shots from an ally C205S class air-cruiser to take out a cargo plane and its on board SAMs almost never hit anything, while ally 'war hero' hardly shoots down any planes...

[Lex85]

Besides pure tweaks to Aler Level rising rate, a solution would be to implement special missions (maybe RADAR / AWACS hunt) that can lower the Alert Level by "x amount".
Those mission could be even optional, only for you to discover later that if unmanaged, Alert Level will make the progression impossible.

Just a thought...

[boris.glevrk]

At the current state I think conquest isn't really expecting you to complete the map... it's always a score challenge to see how far you can go.
At least that's what I think from playing exclusively on hard and 1x alert multiplier.