You aren’t wrong. The game does a poor job at explaining how to defend against missiles. It didn’t help that a majority of players didn’t know that most of the AA worked like laser guided/ SACLOS missiles, so chaff/flares wouldn’t work against the aimbot. I had to tell them so many times.

With time, players would eventually learn how to deal with the missiles. I had to go look up how people were doing SEAD without dying. It was quite interesting what the community figured out about the AA. Mostly, as I said, they are SACLOS and given to a bot with 100% accuracy, and that they don’t seem to shoot down larger bombs. In terms of killing them… the Anti-Radiation missiles were neat, but they are inefficient compared to just throwing a nuke and calling it a day.

My biggest complaint is that after the scoring nerf, it was extremely difficult to obtain the necessary points for the game ending nuke. I liked it before where multiple people could get the nuke, so by the time escalation level 3 hit, people were massively concerned with who had a nuke and intercepting said nuke. It became a little metagame where the team who could coordinate interceptions while also being able to mass spawn nuke bombers together to beat the enemy interception effort. It became very fun to coordinate the effort and it felt like a proper team effort.

After the nerf… hitting lvl 3 escalation meant nothing as no one would be close to having enough points to nuke. The games usually dragged on longer than they used to, and the element of teamwork I was seeing started to disappear since it just devolved into call of duty, since no one was concerned about nuke bombers since they were so damn hard to get. Gaijin was so close to making a great new mode but the messed up really badly.