All this is irrelevant, stock reckon option that reveal enemy rear with little to no counter play is simply not justified.
Plenty of my AA planes getting shut down after vet0 major called them in says otherwise.
Fun story (lost that game but not because of that, that was just the ice topping on the cake):
Ostwind shut down my plane around the middle of the map and that plane fell on 2 pak howits behind bushes (left side whiteball bottom) and 2 squads of retreating infantry that was running past them to a forward retreat major. Talk about luck.
And now to address your argument about revealing enemy rear.
Let's do a little rundown:
- You know where the enemy base is. You do not know where the forward base is (if there is any).
- Recon-pass plane (USF let's say since I'm most proficient with USF) will reveal (for a very short amount of time) the position of the enemy base IFF (if and only if), the map is elongated (eg. redball, whiteball) due to the recon plane having a certain AOE vision radius.
- In that short amount of time you can call in offmap IFF your doctrine has it or you discuss it with your teammate (as you can see, we are talking about teamgames) that has offmap.
So far we have a 50 muni ability that does something. That something is a quick flyby revealing forward positions for a short amount of time (impossible to scout the whole map as the plane passes, unless you're some savant). That short amount of time can be combined with some other abilities by your allies and have cost [50,300+] munitions altogether (all allies that decide to drop 600 worth of munitions on schwerer or something).
So now we have some general notion of what recon planes are about ==> quick flyby to give a general sense of enemy whereabouts.
To pull it off you need to drop all you're doing, focus on the plane and really pay attention and be fast with the fingers to call in anything offmap before the vision is lost. Or if it's a 2nd flyby where you know the position and you just wait for the vision to call in.
Counter? AA. I've had games where ostwind failed to shut it down but most of the time the plane does get shut down. I've had times where top MG gunners managed to shut it down.
And to address your argument that revealing the enemy rear is important? What can you learn about your enemy by looking at his base for a couple of seconds? You can maybe spot LeFH (which you can also when it's firing from fog of war). You could spot tanks getting repaired which you can deduce if you've had combat and damaged them. Infantry? Duuuh.
What is so important about enemy base that you need to make a pointless thread discussing the OPness of stock recon planes.
There is a thread that's justified about Brit and OKW flares being cheesy (0 counterplay as opposed to little to no), and it's a well thought out thread.
Are you making threads just for the sake of making threads and creating pointless debates with arguments weaker than M.N. Shyamalan's Avatar just so you could be heard or something?
You do know that typing "all this is irrelevant" when making a debate is the sign of wholehearted incompetence and bias? Point out why all that is irrelevant and I'll gladly accept if the argument is sound. Convince me that stock planes are OP. I've had my belief/view challenged many times throughout my studies and scientific/philosophical debates with friends and foes alike. Convince me and I'll gladly accept it.
EDIT: about the "reveal enemy rear". I'd argue that revealing the frontline is much more important due to the position of enemy MGs, ATs, etc. which is the direct "OPness" of flares (discussed in another thread). Unless I am missing something important about the enemy "rear", frontline reveal is indispensable when it comes to pushes and clearing out any enemy encampments (where any recon + stuka shines brilliantly) beforehand.
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