HeroEnVec must have said my name 3 times in front of a mirror.... but here I'am
Lower tier fighters have always had higher defensive values (significantly higher) than their higher Tier fighters.
By increasing in tier you exchange defense for speed and offensive firepower which is fine because in theory lower ability pilots use planes with higher defense values to make up for their lack of ability (so they don't instantly die to AAW) and higher ability pilots use planes with lower defense values because otherwise they would be godlike in their ability to destroy everything that flies and resistance to AA.
Problem is what happens when you put very high ability pilots in slow but high defense T1/2 planes. The game kinda breaks.
Ultimatly we (the test team) did what we could, like 1~2 years ago when the GM's were very receptive to changes and massivly overhauled all plane values & Carrier and battleship storage numbers that were introduced with the new nations. (The goal being to reintroduce long established but equally long broken national traits and fix obvious game imbalance issues)
Most of these changes were my numbers which the rest of the team worked with me to do as much (limited) testing as possible and while we were at it we also managed to introduce the *new* T4 lvl100 fighters and boost the old T4 to a new T5 fighter at lvl115 (cv6 level) as well as tweaking scouts. (A very hotly debated subject of should scouts be caught by fighters as they had in the past).
So for Scouts we heavily modified them to be more broadly spread over the whole leveling path and not the first 65 levels then a massive jump to 120. As a result speeds, sizes and durability was also tweaked to be more linear. If memory serves I know not everything we wanted to achieve was acomplished and SDE slightly freaked out after the main patch went live and we then asked for a few more alterations post-live testing.
Bomber attack values were tweaked, some nations lost out due to their Korean values and everyone was brought back in line. Torpedo bombers were buffed heavily (still a bit too weak) and we made T2 bombers faster not slower than T1 plus left enough stats value gaps to allow a "T3" bomber if SDE ever gave us sprites for them.
For fighters, most of the work was here, tweaking defense values, applying national traits... shamlessly nerfing the American fighters for their retarded OPness in being awesome at EVERYTHING. Speeds were aligned to work with scouts, better merged balance between fighters, interceptors and scouts. It wasn't pretty nor was it perfect but I'd like to think the finished product was better than before.
The problem in balancing was always trying to create national traits in a very narrow window of stats which due to the function of the game engine gets more quirky by using higher ability pilots of lower level planes. Fighter speeds as an example were very tricky to balance due to standard flight speed then accelerated attack speed after 'locking on' to a target. (Balance between what a plane should and should not catch, ie T3 fighter not catching a T5 scout)
Anyhow I'm rambling here and hopefully someone found this atleast a little interesting. I could go on and on but I left Navyfield some time ago. Hopfully the CV patch from a few years ago helped bring order back to bombers, scouts and fighters across all nations. Its a little sad to see ppl abusing lower level content (again) but the fighters are so slow a decent player can micro around it..... there are still decent CV players right?...????
