Helicopter Enduring Confrontation (AB)

(WIP)

Mechanics in Helicopter Arcade Battles are similar to Air Simulator Battles EC but with limitations that it does not spawn air units (except the rare "Player on your team has been hunted" thing where something like P-51s spawn to intercept some helicopters but end up doing nothing), A capture zones and the respective pillboxes vs tank battlefields associated with the capture zone. Helicopter pads are no longer destroyable. For detailed objectives see the Air SB EC article in the link above.

Grinding target type is best done through whatever works best for your skill and experience level, but the approximate threshold is:

1 Air (Player) kill ~= 4 Hard Targets (Medium Tanks/Pillboxes) ~= 15 light targets (AAA/Artillery/Howitzer). This might be inaccurate though as I didn't check the numbers. I'll do it later. If you're lucky enough you can also find heavy tanks but I've yet to find one myself.

Next foremost you will want to maximise your earnings over time while somehow balancing it with landings, which more often than not isn't actually worth it for the travel time.

Lastly, you will want to maximise your win rate by selecting team B, because usually there's about a 60-40% ratio of players selecting rooms instead of using matchmaker and thus team B will usually have more players and players on team A will drop out after time as they realised they can't win a battle where they're outnumbered. More on this below.

• • Bombing point anti aircraft artillery defence is still 4 units but it requires less hits to be destroyed. Bombs are rather ineffective.

  • Convoy spawns with 3 medium tanks, 3 armoured cars and 2 anti aircraft trucks, or 6 tanks afaik. I think there is a light targets only convoy option but I haven't counted the ground forces. Probably something like 4 anti-aircraft trucks, 4 armoured cars and 4 transport cars.

  • A capture points is still about 4 minutes per player inside it however is still bugged, rewarding you the minimum value regardless of time spent in the capture point. Recently in 1.89 however it seems they nerfed the reward rate from 200 to 100 points.

    • Spawns in the most active zone. Imagine a health bar filling from 0 to 100, and for every second or so with players passing through the zone it spawns the zone.

      • There cannot be multiple A capture zones existing at once, imagine the ticker resetting back to 0 in this case

  • Battlefields consist of somewhere around 11 hard and 11 soft targets, with the soft targets being howitzers and the hard targets always being tanks for the offensive team and pillboxes for the defensive team. You only need about 40mm penetration to destroy pillboxes, all HEAT based rocketlets even from the rocketpods instantly kill these but sometimes the tanks may require multiple hits, and often can be buggy with gaijin's inaccurate netcode.

  • 12 airfield spawns instead of 6. They cannot be destroyed anymore probably because destroying them gave players too little reward and ended the game too early due to spawn-camping encouragement problems. I do not know yet how many unique default airfield location spawns are there, but there are 9 in air EC in case you're wondering.

  • Random / periodical ground units (red dotted in the below example[s] spawn locations of artillery, blue dots confirmed tank spawns more to come later) periodically spawn and despawn. Sometimes you're lucky enough for them to spawn right in front or around you, but other times you can be unlucky for them to despawn just as you kill them. The resapwn interval seems inconsistant with some units despawning shortly after they spawn in. Each tank you spot is always accompanied by one type artillery e.g. anti-aircraft etc. Best way to grind with this map is to guarantee team B through match listings on vietnam where you team spawns in the south. If you're on Tunisia, join team B as well (north team) and head to the middle-west side of the lake and just head east from there, then RTB, rinse and repeat. There are some more tanks along the coastline and near the cliffs in the south east and the middle eastern area of the map but I don't recommend going there since that's where all the AH-1G cunts fly.

• • Because arcade battles accepts any nation with helicopters, it suffers the same "Team B" bias bug that the simulator mode gets

    • Team B is guaranteed with room selector (which always gives you team B when available for the nation, even though it only checks if team A has player slots or not before allowing you to click the battle button)

    • The maximum player difference between the two teams before locking the other side is 2 players only (vs 3 in simulator battles)

    • Matchmaker entry favours team A first. Sometimes it's utterly stupid and dumps you into an invalid session because:

      • Teams may only have up to 16 players total, INCLUDING those left in the score screen, and those that failed the join the session but remained in the waiting room somehow. Players not in-game aren't accounted for in the 16 player limit check for the battle entry attempt function, however it will still kick you from the session anyway.

      • Players exiting the score screen are automatically dumped to the hangar, they cannot remain in the waiting room unlike SB.

    • Rooms from time to time get removed from the rooms list

    • You may NOT create a room unless through the matchmaker (so if there's only vietnam rooms open and you want Tunisia, bad luck because matchmaker is the only way to create the room by waiting until both sessions are full)