Enduring Confrontation Mechanics (Air Simulator Battles)

The points you earn is roughly equivalent to 146 points per tonne of explosive filler dropped on bombing bases and airfield modules, something like 70 for a player kill, 44 for a crit/fatal hit, 27 for major damage and 15 for a regular hit. I'm not too sure on these numbers though so don't quote me on these. There's some weird magic numbers behind the scenes and I haven't tested this out thoroughly. You earn about 150 points if you're the only one who captured the A air superiority zone but it's a bit more complex on that. More on that later.

The Map Objectives

Airfields

Second thing you will also probably notice that the map looks a bit like the missions you would find in IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles on custom servers such as Coconut's if you ever played that. The missions aren't actually that complex once you get to learn how they work and can become really repetitive and predictable just like normal random battles missions such as [Operation] Korea or whatever which is especially true considering that the missions last 3 hours. They used to last 6 hours but then the game got so broken that it was basically unplayable after the first 3 hours so they reduced the time limit to 3 hours. I do miss the old 64 players Stalingrad EC test though but that was a little fighter biased and bombers couldn't really get past the front line of fighter furballs. SB EC is limited to 16 players a team because Gaijin still thinks that players capable of downloading the game through a torrent system with hundreds of connection ports is not capable of handling a mission with up to 64 players *cough cough* My windows XP computer and shit aussie internet were perfectly capable of that Gaijin! But it is NOT capable of internet browsing and downloading WT simultaneously because there are too many open connection ports!!

These airfields have 4 health bars although the health bars do not empty and fill visually, they change colours. They are lime green coloured between 100 and 70% health, yellow from 30 to 70% and red from 0 to 30%. After some time they will regenerate a bit of health. Identifying what airfield modules are represented by what health bar can seem a bit weird for a new player however because they aren't labelled. The health bars are also oriented relative to the airfield take-off direction which can also confuse things further and the official war thunder news post does not identify which modules are linked to which health bar. Don't worry though, I will label these for you.

If the airfield is facing upwards (i.e. planes spawn on the south and take-off to the north), these are the following modules:

This means that the airfield in [B5] has a moderately damaged airstrip, while the airfield on the bottom right in grid [F7] has a status of destroyed tents and hangars, with the airfield being the next easiest to destroy and the oil barrels being the last. Note that the air strip also has double the health of other modules. Destroying the modules has a consequence on the defensive team's ability to repair, rearm or refuel their vehicle. Destroying the tents/toilet bunkers area has an effect of inhibiting or destroying an airfield's capacity to repair their modules. A black airstrip is supposed to prevent players from spawning at that airstrip but usually that feature doesn't work and occurs very rarely. Two maximum-loaded B-29 runs is usually enough to knock out a regular module, and about 5 to knock out an airstrip. Don't quote me on this though. All airfield modules have to be destroyed to permanently remove the airstrip from the battle (it literally disappears and everything that was on it would fall and "crash") otherwise the modules would slowly repair themselves into working conditions. It takes about 2 hours to completely recover a black airfield module to working conditions.

Every airfield has (or is supposed to have, very often bugs out) 2 passive AI fighters that circle at about 3000m. They will circle until they run out of fuel and crash and then take-off again and repeat assuming they don't crash on take-off. All AI can't repair on the airfields because they don't have a player profile with crew training data and stuff and so if they do crash without dying they'll stay crashed and won't respawn. They can chase you until you are about 5km away. If their airfield despawns these AI just fly to the edge of the map and despawn.

Bombing Targets

Bombing zones such as the one in [E1] in the image of the map above works like regular battles, you have a square of military buildings. They have a health of 3 tonnes worth of explosive TNT if I recall correctly so it isn't that much.

Intercept Bombers

Bomber interception missions consist of 6 bombers and 2 escorts. The formation flies at about 4000m with escorts that fly about 500 metres above the bombers and will chase you until you are about 3km away from the bomber formation. You only need to destroy the 6 bombers to complete the interception. If you harm them a bit too early after they spawn they may sometimes "return" and you'll fail the mission (even though they didn't drop the bombs on the targets), so I suggest to not attack them until they are at least 2 grids inside the map. When the bombers drop their bombs they may also climb or descend a bit. After dropping the bombs they will sometimes dive at about a 5 degree angle to speed their return.

Intercept Attackers

Attacker Interceptions are like bomber missions but have 8 attackers instead of 6. They enter the map at about 1500m but descend to about 500 metres for the attacking role depending on their class (R2Y2s are classified as bombers and not attackers and may just linger around at altitude and act like the bomber formation). Like the bombers, they don't actually have to hit their target to complete their mission, they just have to have at least one attacker survive and return off the map. THIS OBJECTIVE IS CURRENTLY BUGGED because completing it results in your own team losing tickets.

Air Superiority Zones

Periodically, based on hidden values the player isn't able to access an air superiority zone will spawn. The zone is cube shaped with the height it extends to being dependant on the length of the corners of the cube (about 4.5km on some maps, some goes higher, grid square sizes are inconsistant) and takes 4 minutes per player to capture the zone. The rate of captures unlike tank or tournement duel capture zones, do not always cancel out to zero, but rather subtract off each other. For example if you have 2 on your team inside the cap and 1 enemy, it will capture at a rate as if there is only one player on your team in the cap grid. Regarding the points distribution, before March 2019 it used to reward a raw 600 points to everyone who was inside at the time of capture point completion. Gaijin was a bit vague on the changes in regards to those that left the capture point before it completed but we can probably assume that they don't get any credit, so stay inside it at all times. Here's the article regarding the changes to the capture point rewards. But in a nutshell, it distributes accordingly to those who spent time in the capture point and not a flat rate at the end of the capture. Downside is, that it is more than just a single-fold nerf to the rewards because the rewards cap out at 300 with one player inside the capture zone. Unlike Arcade Helicopter Battles, I have never seen multiple air superiority zones exist in simulator battles. Like helicopter battles, after the air superiorirty zone has been captured a ground battle will start opposite to the side of the team that captured the zone. This ground battle has afaik, next to zero influence on the outcome of the battle other than being ground targets. The defensive side will spawn howitzers and bunkers/pillboxes, and the offensive side will have howitzers and tanks. Strangely enough these targets cannot injure other targets, they can only either despawn (when the objective expires), self destruct on their own or have players destroy them.

Destroy Convoy

The only moving targets you will find are those in convoys which are rather rare spawns unless you have many players in the session. They tend to bug out and get stuck at the edge of the map and players are given about an hour and a half to eliminate them. Sometimes they will not spawn in. They are the only form of moving ground units, consisting of medium tanks, SPAA, armoured cars and utility trucks. There's probably about 4 of each. These targets do not despawn when the objective expires from what I know. THIS OBJECTIVE IS CURRENTLY BUGGED because completing it results in your own team losing tickets.

Passive Ground Targets (Non-objective ground units)

Passive ground targets away from objectives such as howitzers and random AA placement that spawn at the start of the mission across the map do not move however they periodically respawn and despawn as the front line moves. There is little benefit to destroying these, not to mention the difficulty in spotting these targets. Should the front line engulf an airfield (ultra rare!) that airfield is supposed to become unusable but this has never happened before because the front line moves so slowly. These ground targets regularly spawn in certain areas at certain intervals and automatically despawn after some time.

Airfield Defenders

All airfields own 2 NPC/A.I. class bots that circle the airfield. These do not attempt to fly further than about 5 kilometres laterally away from the airfield they are stationed at. They may not respawn sometimes due to bugs, and typically respawn in a pair after about an hour. The bots automatically land when they run out of fuel unlike player-class bots. If you're in need of short quick spawn points to spawn your super (e.g. Super Sabre), two of these bot kills will usually result you in about an additional 189 spawn points with 2 registered hits, a crit and a kill.

Random Events

Very rarely a team will get "Player on your team has been hunted" message (Yes to more broken rushinglish). This is actually just poor russian english but what it actually means to say is that a pair (2) AI "hunters" fighters will come for a random player and will chase them until they receive damage or run out of time. Should they receive damage or run out of time they will just run away. These do not count as objectives so you can basically ignore these bots by two ways: 1. Fly a curbed pattern. They suck at marginal deflection shooting. 2. Fly on the deck near the ground. All AI in war thunder has a stupid "ground proximity" behaviour where they will pull up very harshly and attempt to level their wings when less than 100 metres away from the ground regardless if their plane is upside down or not (and thus crashing into the ground like an idiot if they are inverted when this gets executed). You can exploit this behaviour by simply flying near the ground and they will never be able to hit you while you do this.

Victory Conditions

A team will win when:

• 1. Air superiority points (bottom left corner of the screen) reaches 15 000. In reality though, it's actually more influenced by bomber activity than objectives and kills activity which seems a little bit dumb to some people.

  2. The enemy team loses all tickets

  3. Enemy team loses all alive players (happens when bots bug out and don't spawn, or they get replaced by players that don't spawn in, or when players leave the match but the bots don't substitute the missing players properly etc) and thus ticket bleed as normal. One way to cause this directly is to destroy all airfields but occurs very rarely epecially with patch 1.89 where the enemy team will more likely run out of tickets before being bombed to elimination as they now have 6 airfields as opposed to 3.