Definitely my favorite along with Operation Metro for conquest. You can snipe, use vehicles, run and gun, whatever you want, very balanced in what playstyles can be successful.
I prefer non-violence on Caspian Border. 
I sucked it up and was able to unlock the laser designator. I’m not exactly sure how it works yet. I don’t think it’s possible to lase something and then get into a tank and shoot it down.
I tried.
You need the guided shells unlock for the tank for the soflam to work correctly. You can also use javelins as an engineer and i believe planes also unlock guided missles. On xbox at least the javelin is junk. The planes can simply outrun them no need to even flare. I have also heard that they can often miss when used on tanks with soflam. The solflam can also lock onto enemy vehicles without you running it, I am not sure how close the enemy has to be for an autolock.
If you check out “sacriel” on youtube, he has a couple SOFLAM vids with some cool uses for them. I’m still trying out jav or stinger with lazed targets… Especially with the javelin, I seem to miss more, even when lazed.
3 new short videos:
A helicopter is trying to spawn camp us and gloriously gets what he deserves (funny)
A guy shot me out of my chopper from long distance with a sniper rifle. In return, I spawn into an airborne helicopter and hit him with an RPG at 350 yards or so. It was just a lucky shot firing into his general area, but still awesome.
I shot down the same little bird chopper 3 times in a single round with RPGs.
Got my first MVP ribbon lastnight, woo! Had a pocket rezzer following me around. I really seem to go up and down in how well I do from match to match, does anyone else do that?
Same here, my first few rounds I’m rocking, the middle few I’ll be average, and then the last few I suck it up royally. Of course I’m drinking the whole time so that might have something to do with it.
Yep.
I am just terrible at this game, in general, but I seem to have days where I am just “On” and days where I can walk into a room, find a guy with his back to me, shoot from 5 “virtual” feet away and miss while he shoots me down.
I still have fun, though.
A few new videos. Please thumbs up and/or comment if you like them, because I can’t figure out how to get a lot of views and it’s frustrating, but I figure that helps.
[Hovercap fails catastrophically](Hovercap fails catastrophically) when my helicopter… I … actually don’t know wtf happened.
Helicopter vs Jeep - I was fooling around with Captain C, ending is funny.
Helicopter Goomba stomps infantry - I crushed 2 guys by slamming on them with the bottom of my helicopter
Crash compilation - there are constantly aircraft falling out of the sky or crashing in the background in BF3, and I compiled a bunch of clips that I caught while recording other stuff
Jet rams helicopter twice - we were goofing around on the SDMB server with just a few of us and some aircraft.
I like that the helicopters fly more realitically so you can’t just orbit an enemy spawn point and go to town.
Not so crazy about each base being outside of the other team’s combat area. Sure it takes away base camping, but part of the fun of Bad Company 2 IMHO was being able to get all up in each others base and wreck havok.
Turns out dogfighting other jets with just the gun is hard as shit.
Nothing realistic about being unable to circle a base. The helicopters are unrealistically gimped in lateral acceleration and speed to prevent that.
No idea why you’d praise them for gimping helicopters so that they can’t spawn rape, but then complain that you can’t go in and spawn rape as infantry.
I only use guns when fighting other jets. If you can gain position on them while they are unawares you can drop them quickly. The AA missle is a large announcement that someone is there. Also with flares and good evasive manuvering it can be impossible to shoot down an enemy jet. My current loadout is
Air radar
Flares
Missle pods
The air radar prevents enemy jets from from taking your 6 unawares.
And the missle pods make your job of tank busting easier.
I haven’t leveled up that far yet. I just have flares for now. Although figuring out how to use the “look around” feature was a huge game changer in terms of gaining operational awareness of the battle space.
I’ll probably save the air-to-ground game for the helicopters. Although they should give the jet a massive napalm strike or 2000lb cluster bomb or something. You know, just let you fuck up an entire area once every few minutes.
Before I got air radar I would switch to 3rd person view alot to check for enemy planes. It lets you scan a lot more of the sky then cockpit view. I have also found that spotting is very easy to do in a plane. If just aim at a checkpoint and hit it you will mark multiple people or tanks.
I haven’t gotten a single good game the last 3 days I have tried to spend a few hours playing. Do you guys know if the game tries to balance out the lobbies based on the “skill” rating? I swear me and my squadmates always get stuck with the WORST teams ever that don’t even attempt to capture any objectives, and there are only 4 of us good players, we can’t win the game ourselves.
It’s very, very frustrating to keep losing when you’re stuck with a godawful team, yet lately it seems like MUCH worse than random chance we are always getting stuck with awful players.
You’re doing quick match? Try to find a server with the server browser. I only occasionally get really bad teams that way. And within a round or two the tide will end up changing due to people quitting / different people joining.
Either way, it hasn’t mattered. Maybe we’re just having bad luck, but considering WAY more than 50% of the time we have been one absolutely garbage teams the last few days, I suspect that in a half full game, it is going to put your squad on the team losing 50-200 in conquest if your skill is higher.
I have a win:loss ratio of 1.52:1 , so my teams win more than we lose, and since the last few days we NEVER get on a decent team I am suspecting the system is working against us, I have a hard time believing we ALWAYS get put on AWFUL teams just by chance. LOL
Hmm, maybe our squads should team up. 
Although I admit, lately I’ve been more interested in trying things out than winning, and my friend is a suicidal knife addict. . .
ETA: You could always try Squad Rush or Squad Deathmatch?
I have a garbage PC so I only can play on xbox, I prefer conquedt to all other modes but when I get dragged into squad deathmatch we do pretty good. 
you guys still have an SDMB server? I searched for the 1920’s Death Ray one and couldn’t find it…does it have a different name now?