A few easy kills
The report is as old as the game: it’s too hard. We already answered half of it — the guns were rebuilt and the hit sphere widened when the funnel showed kills starving even as bursts landed. But strong guns don’t help a new pilot who can’t get anyone in front of them long enough to shoot. So this pass adds the other half: a mercy wing. Some of the enemy planes are now, frankly, there to be shot down.
The pilot who wants to be caught
Meet the greenhorn. A quarter of every fighter lobby now flies his doctrine, and he is the opposite of an ace in every axis that matters to a struggling player. He stays out of the vertical — no zoom climbs, no bunts into a dive; if he changes height at all he does it in a long, shallow drift. He turns like a loaded bus, wide and flat, never standing on a wingtip. When you finally slide onto his six, he doesn’t break — he wobbles, a slow lazy weave that looks alive and shakes nobody. And given a human anywhere within three kilometres, he will drift over and hand you his tail: he steers for a point out past your own nose, so the moment you turn in behind him that point sits beyond his tail and he ambles away in a straight line, leaving you a clean, closing shot.
He carries guns, and he’ll loose the occasional hopeful burst if an enemy all but parks on his nose — with an aim error wide enough that he’s mostly hosing empty sky. A target that just occasionally, embarrassingly, bites back. You’ll know him by his name in the killfeed, too: the greenhorns fly as Wobbles McGee, Nervous Nigel, Tailspin Tammy and Cadet Clumsy, so the pushover reads in the feed and not just in the air.
Sharing the machinery, not bending it
The greenhorn is not a special-cased cheat plane; he’s an ordinary bot flying the shared flight model with a gentler brain. He branches at the same seam every other doctrine does — the level bomber, the torpedo runner, the dive bomber all read a flag and fly their own war, and the greenhorn just joins them. He’s pulled out of the vic and high-CAP assignments the way the comeback ace is, so he flies solo and never leads anyone into a fight, and he keeps the same two safety reflexes the whole lobby shares: flare up off the ground, turn back at the arena edge. A lamb that flies itself into a hill is a kill nobody gets to enjoy.
How thick the mercy wing flies is a single config knob,
bots.easyFraction — shipped at 0.25, a real
supported zero to turn it off, and read only by the pure air game so the
naval, land and combined-arms skies, which are balanced on their own
terms, never see a greenhorn.
The measurements
The house rule is to convert the feeling into numbers before touching a constant, so the mercy wing went through the air-difficulty probe: a surrogate pilot dropped into a full 36-plane match for a stack of simulated minutes, with the wing switched on and off. Across every skill tier the surrogate’s kills-per-minute went up with the greenhorns in the sky — the novice pilot climbed from 0.10 to 0.23 kills a minute (well over double), the straight-line greenhorn surrogate from 0.08 to 0.13 — while bot-versus-bot gunfire kills held near their baseline around 0.7 a minute. The furball stays exactly as busy for everyone who isn’t hunting the soft targets; the soft targets just make sure the hunt succeeds now and then.
And that lift is a floor, not a ceiling. The surrogate flies naive nearest-pursuit — it can’t tell a wallowing greenhorn from a diving ace, and it still cashed in. A real player who reads “Wobbles McGee” in the corner of a lazy left turn and picks him off will do far better than the robot that stumbled into him.
The confession
The probe earned its keep by catching one of my own bugs. The greenhorn
picks a human to shadow, and I first parked that choice in the same
targetID field an attacking fighter uses for its victim.
The two-ship focus-fire cap counts every bot whose target is you —
so every greenhorn drifting over to give you a kill was being
tallied as one of the bots allowed to attack you, quietly
eating slots off the cap and inflating “bots committed to the
human” to nearly double its real value in the first run. A
greenhorn is a donor, not an attacker; he now carries his mark in his own
field and stays off the attacker ledger entirely. The numbers above are
from the corrected run — the sort of thing you only notice because
you measured the game instead of the diff.