It is obvious from what people are posting here that very, very, very few people have found the sweet spot for killing even a single tank solo with an IL2. So just waving your hand and saying "it is so" won't make it.
That goes both ways. Empirical evidence shows that in most cases the VYa 23mms are more than enough. However, your personal experience says otherwise. In this issue I dare say you are wrong.
I have seen lone Panzers sit out in the open being strafed by IL2's and 110G's for 5 minutes solid and not even smoke. And these are not dweebs in the planes.
As much, I've seen Panzers get destroyed the moment they spawn by IL-2s standing by. Two strafing passes and I can stop a Panzer dead in its tracks. And heaven forbid anyboy who claims that I'm an expert on this, or have good gunnery. My average hit percentage A2A is barely 4~5%.
Something is wrong. Period.
Something very well may be. At this point we cannot rule out that its you that may be wrong.
As for porking gameplay, due to the potential for easy pork-based kills a Panzer has if it gets close to a base, it must be taken more seriously than the typical pork-n-auger dweeb. And because 3 or 4 people have to stop what they're doing to deal with this - a lone Pz IV out in the open with no air cover - that is an asymetrical situation.
You're not making any sense again.
Whilst skilled gunners can fire out to very long distances the limited visibility in GVs require them to get close to a field. From the spawn to the field is usually a 5~6 mile stretch of land, often large parts of it very open. An MBT travelling 25mph has to drive often 10~12 minutes if he does so in a straight line. Hills and bumps make it even a longer drive.
If an armoured column approaches, having to stop them IS a part of the gameplay. Your definition of "gameplay" seems to rule out the GV warfare and what it can do inside the MA. For better or worse, attempting an advane to the enemy base without sufficient air cover indeed is a great risk. If you find it so hard to deal with such then it is entirely your own problem.
Just today, our field was overrun with GVs. 3~4 of us took of from that very field, and cleared all enemy GV presence within 20 minutes. We killed the Ostwind that was vulching the base during take-off(granted, it took two take-off attempts to do so, while someone else lobbed a nice bomb onto it in a single pass and blew it up), killed the turrets on the two Panzers that were bombarding the town within minutes, and disabled three more incoming from the spawn point. You can ask the FreeBird squad about this - their armoured assault, which had no air cover, was pretty much a disastrous failure.
It also reduces gameplay to the mentality of the guy who knows he can drive to an enemy base and be more or less immune to attack. Certainly much less prone to dying that if he flew there. There is so little risk in a Panzer.
He's in a tank. He should feel immune to most attacks. Who the hell would want to drive a tank if it was filmsy?
On the other hand, he should fear the tankbusters. And his life expectancy once a tankbuster is nearby is no more than 5 minutes.
It's just messed up.
Nope.
Besides which, if I really want to diddle with landing a shot between the 3rd and 4th engine grate slots, I'll pllay a different game, thank you. I play AH2 for the best flight model - not to play Panzer Leader. Don't get me wrong, I spent a full decade immersed in Rommel and Guderian ... I love that stuff ... but that's not why I play AH, and I suspect that's not why most people play AH.
Like it or not the tanks are here to stay. GV warfare is as much a part of AH as it ever was. If you don't like it then don't play near Panzers - or better yet, go kill nearby VHs, instead of complaining about it.
If your vision of AH and its attack planes are the glorified bomb lobbing planes busting an entire tank column with machine guns blazing, well sorry. That's not how it was in real life, nor how it is in AH.
ps) Here's a tip.
Check your convergence on the IL-2(if you use that plane). Set it to 300yards.
Both IL-2 and Hurri2Ds are wing-armed planes, and only at a certain distance will all the bullets converge at a single point. If somebody starts strafing a Panzer with an IL-2, its safe to assume all of his shots fired further than 500 yards out will fail to penetrate.
A common mistake people make, is they go strafing a GV with long bursts from 1.0k out, and think all their shots landed on the target.
Try observe it with full zoom - you will see most of the shots fired miss and just throw up dust. The rest of the shots give of teensey hit sprites(about 1/4th the size of the normal one), which indicates the round failed to penetrate and bounced off. Only the big white hit sprite indicates that it hit the armour, and did not bounce.
You will soon realize that when people strafe a tank, they only land about 20% of what they claim to have landed. In the cases you saw, I could bet that the IL-2s started firing long bursts from far out. You see all the shots that seem to land around Panzer, and see that its alive and think "something's messed up". Well, it's not.
This is what I do. Approach a Panzer from its 6 O'c, and use full zoom view to observe the target.
Don't fire a single, long tracking burst onto it. Approach at about 30degrees angle, and try hard to keep your plane steady. And then, when you think you have the aiming, fire a long burst when the distance marker is "400". Pull away at the last second, and more often than not you will see immediately that the enemy tank is damaged.
I don't aim for no 'sweet spot'. All I do is just position my self at its rear quarters, and fire at real close distances.
Fire only the cannons. The MGs throw up nothing but dust all around the tank, which obscures your target.
