Ok, so seeing as the first weekend of Invasion and Westwall has wrapped up (and the rest of the forum has descended into flaming over the event rewards), I think I'm just going to plop all my thoughts into this thread:
Game Mode: Invasion
The Good
Anyone who's been reading my posts will know I like this game mode.
It's a nice change of pace - one of the clear differences between Invasion and Conquest is that I don't feel pulled in multiple directions and have to constantly go through the decision-making process of deciding which cap is most critical to defend. Do I defend the Rocket Base or try to capture the Airbase? Do I try to intercept the bomber formation or push to capture the enemy Command Center? Invasion has very clear schwerpunkt and there's a fluid nature to the battles as the Attacking team rolls over one cap after another. It also helps that there are very few "special" capture points, at least on the good Invasion maps - and by "special" I mean caps that ratchet up the pressure in ways that are hard to counter (bomber formations, missile strikes). Because of this, I can focus on the meat of the game - dogfighting. There's less "dead" time of people scurrying across the map to try and defend different sectors from attack. There's less frustration of losing a game just because the bots you were expecting to defend a cap suddenly decided to all suicide into the enemy's face. In invasion, you lose a cap, its done. No counterattacking, no juggling chainsaws bouncing around defensive points. Its done. The defenders get compacted as they're pushed back and the Attackers push harder against them, usually ending in one climactic battle where one side crushes the last survivors or takes the last cap. Ideally at least.
This mode also feels like it REALLY rewards staying alive. You stay alive, you're conserving resources as the fight drags on. I didn't feel like the bots were overly profligate with respawns... at least not without direct human input (in the form of enemy humans swatting bots out of the sky). No lawndart teleportation (just isn't worth it) and even killing yourself when your HP is low takes a lot of risk and calculation - are you really going to do that much better at 100% HP? What if someone dies right before you do and takes the last spawn? Personally, I've fought more battles on a single sortie than I ever have in Conquest: there just feels like there's fewer things to slowly grind you down in Invasion, compared with Conquest. Or maybe the games just end faster, before these things start becoming important.
A special mention about the bots - I have not seen a single Attacker fly into a rock all event long. Congrats on meeting the basic requirements of airmanship, bots!
Dogfighting skills seems to make a huge difference now - a good pilot or two can swing the battle wildly simply by mowing down the opposition so fast, they cannot make enough headway on the cap to either capture or defend it. A good pilot or two can build up such a large respawn advantage that victory becomes almost assured. At the same time, it never felt like I was unfairly being ganked by superior pilots/numbers and being constantly sent to the hanger unlike in Conquest where whole conga lines of bots would form to feast on me and consequences be damned. Overall, I never experienced many moments where I'm raging at the bots for losing the game for me - I always felt I had the agency to move the needle in a match: even the losses on the Attacking side - if I had just shot straighter or picked the Spitfire instead of the Beaufighter to kill first, I might've turned the game around. Never felt like "FREAKIN' BOTS WHY DON'T YOU DEFEND THE COMMAND CENTER INSTEAD OF MILLING AROUND USELESSLY OVER A GARRISON!?"
The Bad
Attackers are still handicapped. I think this is as much a matter of Map as anything to do with the basic balance of the mode - specifically, the new river map with its central airbase and the black mesa map with the three Garrisons seem to actually give the Attackers a fair shake; every game I've won as an Attacker or lost as a Defender have been on those two maps; the key being that on the Mesa map, the three forward Garrisons are easy flips that immediately grant the Attacker some breathing room in the form of additional time. What's more, they can be flipped so fast, the dogfight becomes much more even much more quickly, which is bad for the Defender, especially if they don't have the wherewithal to withdraw to their next line of defense. The river estuary map has the Airbase as a pivot - seizing it gives the Attackers a vital staging point and a place to retreat to for repairs in the heart of the defender's territory. And its relatively easy to swamp early on. Other maps like Archipelago and Asian Border are too fragmented, with Airbases flanking a central Garrison; capping the Garrison buys you 90 seconds but leaves the Attackers sandwiched between two fresh forces while themselves being depleted. I haven't beat either of those maps as an Attacker.
Ground Attackers and Bombers have is really bad in this game mode. There's something to be said about the Defending team having all the fighters in the world to go hunting these lumbering behemoths. In the past, with both sides more or less equal, teams had to choose between bomber hunting or taking out enemy fighters. And since fighters capped faster, they were the bigger threat and so the bombers and attackers were mostly left alone until the fighters were quite done. Here, there're enough fighters to deal with the clouds of lumbering death while simultaneously fighting off Attacking fighters. Ground Pounders in Invasion are free kills to eat into the enemy's limited respawns. They can be surprisingly dangerous when all of them hit a target at once but because of the limitations of ground kills vs. air kills, so long as the Defenders focus down the attacking fighters during the assault, they can weather the storm. Bombers in particular are hopelessly vulnerable in this mode and need either buffs to improve effectiveness (survivability, lethality) or have ground targets rebalanced to be worth more combat, capture and mastery points than they currently are. The latter is something to consider for Ground Attackers too.
This mode is NOT newbie friendly. The limited respawns and the compacting of the battlefield means that weaker pilots will quickly get sidelined in a fight. Even worse if they're on the Attacking side which requires players of a skill level considerably exceeding that of the Defenders. So overall, the experience for those pilots is probably reeeeal [edited]. They spawn in without a clue of what they should be doing and quickly get shat on by every member of the opposing team, because they're an easy kill and an easy way to rapidly deplete the enemy's respawns. The game mode is jarring for newcomers (I had a guy load in and go "wthwhy do they control all the points?") and if they're on the Attacking team... well, they're going to get shat on.
The Invasion meta seems to be really hard on less agile/lower endurance airplanes like the 190s, Republics and Heavy Fighters in general. Because the battles are faster paced than before AND, capture is permanent, it puts the airplanes that require considerable winding up for their success at a disadvantage. Of course, especially as a defender, lightly armed airplanes will never do either and so I do feel that the Spitfire meta is simply reinforced in this mode - fast, maneuvreable, able to take a hit and able to do the hitting itself. The only difference is in the vertical - because of all the bombers around, airplanes that can go high are valuable. The altitude advantage is also more valuable than before because of the increased focus on PvP dogfighting. Overall, planes I enjoyed all weekend: 109E, P-40, BV210, BV212.03 (this thing is hilariously OP in Invasion mode). Planes I did well in but didn't particularly enjoy: Mosquito, Spitfire IX, P-51K. Planes I hated: Fw190 A-5 (my favorite conquest plane!), Do217M (got shat on).