Aircraft if implemented properly will be fine. Armor and Ammo is sacrificed for Mobility and Firepower. Aircraft are also FRIGGIN EXPENSIVE and require massive amounts of training to use.
Added to the fact that if they are hit by 1 Stinger Missle, most aircraft go down. Granted we are talking about Sci-fi so the weapons are going to post-apocoliptic varriations of such yet reasonable.
Air Superiority is a deciding factor in most if not all Modern conflicts.
Why risk ground troops if you can drop a bomb on the enemy army to kill them that much easier? Or even blow up their supply convoys. outnumbered 10 to 1? no problem, they don't have any bullets.
And yes aircraft won't be all powerful but should be close in the right conditions and useless in the wrong conditions. You put a pilot over a city and the grunts have all kinds of cover from an airborne attack.
You put him in a flat open field with a huge AA gun, the plane/chopper will be shredded unless it has a better range or the element of suprise.
You put a grunt in an open town square or just outside of a city where the pilot of an aircraft can effectivly use cover and still get a bomb or strafing run into the face of the grunt, then yes an aircraft should win, but if the grunt uses the city's walls for effective cover and has a good AA weapon then it's up to whoever's the best at aiming/evading. the way it should be.
Hell if Huxley implements weather that's another balancing factor. I have yet to see aircraft that function perfectly in all weather.
Combat is about finding your weapon's most effective killing zone and engaging your enemies in that zone. Line of enemies coming down a long narrow hallway? Chaingun them in the face. Enemies camping in a small room with no other exit? toss a few grenades in their laps. You see my point.
A balanced game incorperates many weapons with many specific killing zones but an unbalanced game incorperates atleast one weapon with a killing zone that is too large or too narrow.
as to n00bs with planes raiding the "newbie zones":
NPCs should do a majority of the gruntwork in Huxley. This is supposed to be a War game, meaning the armies should be MASSIVE. NPC's with AA turrets guarding the borders of cities/newbie zones. NPC's with chainguns and rocket launchers guarding the "Instance portals". NPC's with BFGs guarding the cities and zones themselves. Without this the game becomes a barren fighting game on par with a few linked BF2 servers with stat tracking.
The game is about war, and every army has a base camp and every army has a garrison at each of its bases. Players don't want to stand around guarding a base that might see action once a week, so we need NPC's to do it because it is needed. If there were no guards who's to stop a platoon of enemy grunts(or even 1 enemy player) from being droped right at the entrance to a city to camp other players? somewhere that's supposed to be safe since it's miles away from combat? (aka griefing)
If Huxley decides to go with a skill system similar to planetside, and aircraft are even able to be piloted by players, the skill cost should be massivly more than say a rifle.
I'm also wondering how they'll handle countermeasures, ECM and the like for aircraft, vehicles AND for grunts. Backpack mounted radar jamming ftw.
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