T9s sucked last round, so I never sold my Lancaster. And I recently complained in another thread (on Suggestion board, I think) about T1-3 perf planes having more cargo than the combat planes.

I thought the Barashiki was rather disappointing; even after the plane shape was shrunken down from its bugged too-large version, it remained too slow and too high cargo (300 cargo, 200 kph) compared to the Kingfisher (290 cargo, 275 kph). I haven't seen the new Barashiki in the current round, but IMO the trade plane should be the highest cargo carrier of a tier, not the stock plane, especially since its sprite is now smaller.

I'd suggest cutting the Barashiki's cargo to 200 and raising its speed to 300kph.

Also, I think in general stock planes should be regarded to have upgrades 'built in' and thus should have fewer upgrade slots; for instance, you could give the 'Shiki 4-5 upgrade slots of each type instead of 7. As it stands, the Spectre only has 1 more slot of each type.

Remark: The Devs did not design the Barashiki as a stock plane. Designating it Stock is just something I made up to tell it easily apart from the other T9s. I'm told the Devs designed it as "Combat/Trade".

tl;tr - 'Fisher pilot in 2.5 who stayed consistently above 20million influence, could barely hold 12million in 2.6, flying a 'Caster.

Same, I did little to no combat either, the Fisher was just more amusing when it was a hurtling bus bristling with guns pointing in all the wrong directions.

Since a 'Caster could carry a whale with ease the twice daily player could just toss one in the back and come back twelve hours later for the next one. The Fisher took many more hours to cross Skytopia. 16 hours might as well be a once daily.

Suggest, some giant 450 cargo mission for the big planes that a 'Caster couldn't carry, that gives a wonderful inf/km return to give the blimps and monster planes some love.

Personally, I'd like to see more separation as the tiers go up. I understand the planes were fit to linear progression, so I'd either like to see the slope of that line increased so the tier 9's have more separation in stats/CKPH. I don't think there should be quite as much overlap as there is. And I'm not just implying the CKPH - I'd be interested in the combat planes all getting more AC, etc.

Definitely found out there was little testing on how upgrades would affect the planes with their new stats, and as a result, the Ingersoll was the best trader and influence runner by a good margin. Those of us who didn't care for its schedule opted for the Lancaster, which operated much better than the KingFisher at everything except having lots of guns. And unfortunately, there wasn't much in between, nothing around 500kph.

And the other quirks were still present, like the Skywhale being too fragile for its size and too short on cargo. The combat line getting progressively slower and less capable of catching up to targets they're meant to kill. The Avenger being a death trap. The Barashiki being a strange sort of blimp.

But so much of it was right, I love the later tiers leveling out, I love T8 having two very competitive endgame planes. It was a huge improvement over 2.4. So much so, my suggestions for everything amount to swapping numbers back and forth, trading speed for cargo and toying only with the non-CKPH stats. All my suggestions being here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9905&p=103100

I'd like to see the Spectre be a bit faster. And/or have 10 upgrade slots per type instead of just 8, though I'd have to think about that a bit.

Ingersoll is still the best trader.