Infantry vs. Armor/Air

[Chanfan]

In another thread, I got thinking about some old board games - Ogre/G.E.V.

The relevance being, that in those games, units were purchased according to their combat value. Heavy armor cost a bit, Light armor or G.E.V.'s (fast hovercraft) less so, and infantry was very cheap. Things are balanced by point cost.

Certainly in games like BF1942, aircraft and tanks, etc. are generally more effective / desirable than just being a basic grunt. Grunts are needed to capture and defend bases, mind you, but the vehicles are really controlled by scarcity - there's a limited number of them, and they take a while to re-spawn. If there were enough for everyone playing, most likely, everyone would be in a tank or plane (with a few exceptions, of course).

In PS, there is no point cost for vehicles. There's no scarcity, either. It's limited, as far as I can tell, by a few things: Certifications, spawn point locations vs. vehicle purchase locations, and speed/ease of transport.

Certifications aren't terribly limiting, as it looks to be fairly easy to get enough certs from training to get at least one vehicle cert.

Spawn point locations are probably a biggie, as if you spawn at an AMS or other locations not close to a vehicle purchasing point, you just have to make do.

Transport I'm not sure on. A Galaxy can make it easy for a large squad to get from point A to point B, certainly. But why wouldn't the Galaxy just take the squad to a vehicle purchase point, and have them all buy aircraft/tanks/MAX armour? (MAX's seem like mini-vehicles to me, for this purpose).

Obviously, some terrain is restrictive - bases, for instance. And some things - infiltration suits - have special purposes not found in vehicles.

But what is going to prevent, play-balance wise, everyone just getting in their favorite vehicle for most combats? I'm wondering why it would be good to bring a squad of infantry to a tank fight. Will the only time you see infantry in agile armour running around be in bases, or when their vehicle has been destroyed?

It certainly doesn't look that way from the beta - I'm just wondering what the dynamics are in PS that prevent this from happening.

[Edit] - I see in anothe thread there may be a timer on getting another vehichle - any conformation on this? It would add scarcity to vehicles.