Improvement: Tank destroyers - Page 2

Sirisian · 2012-01-25, 02:46 PM

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

You mean a bunch of tanks with just drivers. Which means they have no gunner. Which means they will be incredibly vulnerable to air, and which ultimately means Liberators would chew them to pieces.

From the gameplay video it also looks like they will be severely weak against infantry. The shells move slowly and look very easy to dodge. Not sure if anyone picked up on that. The main cannon is a purely AV weapon it looked like. Maybe at close range it can kill infantry easier. Link. Also players can sprint making it even easier to dodge.

More on topic I don't think there should be a better AV weapon in the game. Tanks should have the strongest AV cannon. Infantry with AV and other tanks can kill tanks. Or gunships or pretty much anything. The devs need to focus on making unique vehicles with fun gameplay in mind, not creating one-off counters for a problem that can be balanced away if it even exists.

Metalsheep · 2012-01-25, 08:17 PM

They made a "Tank Destroyer" vehicle in Planetside. It was the BFR, and we saw how much the community loved those things. :/

They had immense armor and a recharging shield. To boost their defense they could crouch and become immobile, and their default weapon was Tank destroying weaponry. A single BFR could wreck an armor push, let alone multiple BFRs.

Once they were nerfed, they still function as an Anti-Tank platform, they can handle two or three if the pilot is good.

They were incredibly weak to infantry, in fact, one infantry with a Jammer and Decimators could solo one. They used to be good against anything if they had the right gun equipped, but since they got nerfed they are only truly useful against Tanks. Weak to Air, Infantry, MAXs and slow moving.

It did not work well in PS1. (Though i do enjoy the current iteration of the BFR, though its actually horribly weak now.) I don't think a vehicle with similar function will go over well.

Tanks are already vulnerable to Air, even with AA I'm sure Air can keep the Tank population in check, especially the new Liberator. Lets also not forget about AV MAXs and Infantry.

Warborn · 2012-01-25, 08:27 PM

Mechs will not be in Planetside 2 at release, so there is no sense in discussing them in this thread.

Tank destroyers should be tanks armed with anti-armor cannons (do away with tank cannons that have a huge blast radius and are good against armor and infantry) and fighters armed with air-to-ground rockets (which should, similarly, have a small explosive radius to make them weaker against infantry). Synergy is what is needed. Combined arms. You don't need to make a new vehicle to accomplish the task of having something designed to kill armor, because the game should already have been designed with the vehicles given roles which depend upon the weapon(s) they are outfitted with.

Metalsheep · 2012-01-25, 08:31 PM

Well, i wasn't aiming to turn this into an Anti-BFR/Pro-BFR thread. But that's what their intended function was in Planetside, and they pretty much wrecked the games flow. They nerfed them way too late, and they still destroy tank combat.

I think PS2 should be fine at release with enough Anti Tank capabilities. The Lib Gunship makes me pretty comfortable that Tanks can be kept in check. I'm just not sure about Air being kept in check.

VioletZero · 2012-01-25, 08:36 PM

Well, let me make one thing clear.

In my intended design, two tanks would beat one tank destroyer most often(most often meaning if the tank drivers aren't COMPLETE buffoons.) But, if facing forward, one tank destroyer would beat one tank.

Warborn · 2012-01-25, 08:40 PM

Air will keep air in check. That's really the way it always should have been and why I'm now fine with fighters being single-person vehicles. With fighters being given air-to-air capability at the expense of air-to-ground, you can count on there to be serious dogfights to determine which side is able to start bringing out aircraft which pose a serious threat to ground targets. Logically it just seems to follow that if one side simply rolls a bunch of liberators and reaver whores like they did in PS1, the other side which instead brings in a bunch of air-to-air fighters will rip them to shreds.

And that's the way it ought to be. With that, you can seriously scale back ground-to-air weaponry and make air superiority be very important and the source of effective anti-air measures.

Originally Posted by VioletZero

Well, let me make one thing clear.

In my intended design, two tanks would beat one tank destroyer most often(most often meaning if the tank drivers aren't COMPLETE buffoons.) But, if facing forward, one tank destroyer would beat one tank.

The problem you've identified is armor being too effective en masse. People in this thread have identified something in the game already (air power) which would serve to mitigate the potency of armor, while also pointing out that if tanks have to choose between either anti-infantry or anti-armor guns they will not necessarily be "a problem" if they are seen in larger numbers, as unlike PS1 it will not mean "every single ground target in front of them is about to die".

aleksandrgrc · 2012-04-09, 04:08 AM

only thing id like to say is
in one interview i heard / read that a reason classes where created was to make it easier to know what can that guy do to me at a glance. reading this thread made me realize that cannot be true. because all the tweeks u can give to everything in this game but have it look probably very similar at a distance.
is the exact opposite phillosophy.

that said i like the customization. i hope that a super power gun with very little travers speed slow reload and high but familiar recoil so we can have our TD's on the slow front armored como electronics masking ambush duty. with the mind field to our flank and a path in the woods to retreat. when those two vanguards come chasing the bait they wont know what hit them.

we r going to have alot of fun in this game

metziih · 2012-04-22, 04:36 PM

I don't really see the point behind dedicated TD ground vehicle. I mean, in the same ammount of time wouldn't it be easier to just call in the lol-airforce and bomb/liberate the hell out of the armoured push? Besides, if TD's are slower than "normal" tanks, wouldn't they be quite pointless when enemy goes full Erwin Rommel mode and just drives around your TD's and starts ravaging behind the front lines?

Flying/VTOL Hunter-killer patrols, if somewhat decently organized could;

a) react faster to enemy armored spearheads than TD's.
b) cover more ground when searching for the enemy tank-formations

Basically, only use I see for TD's would be;

a) Siege-weapons / infantry direct fire-support vehicle
Slow speed, big gun, high armour. But then again, I see no reason why the regular tank(s) couldn't fulfil the same role while being more mobile.

b) Opportunistic tank-destoyer
And this would only work when and if enemy was being a silly, and didn't either see your big TD in time, or decided to launch a frontal attack against your TD with a tank.

Figment · 2012-04-22, 06:43 PM

TD's tend to have a lower profile than a tank. Dedicated platforms >>>>>> tank modification.

metziih · 2012-04-23, 05:53 AM

Originally Posted by Figment

TD's tend to have a lower profile than a tank. Dedicated platforms >>>>>> tank modification.

Occasionally, but there is a good reason why TD's are not in use anymore.(Or mostly just are IFV's with ATGM's slapped on to them.)

TD's without a turret are extremely dependant on the terrain, you can basically only use them in places where enemy can come from only one direction.

Ref;
However, there are "light" TD's. Big gun, high speed, no armour.

Ref;
But again, the reason why there is no "dedicated" TD's anymore simply is, tactical versatility > too high specialization

Marinealver · 2012-04-23, 08:51 AM

If they bring back BFRs, then they should add a tank destroyer (lightning fwd fixed gun varient). High anti armor damage, little to no splash, and ignores shields.

Marinealver · 2012-04-23, 09:16 AM

Originally Posted by metziih

Occasionally, but there is a good reason why TD's are not in use anymore.(Or mostly just are IFV's with ATGM's slapped on to them.)

But again, the reason why there is no "dedicated" TD's anymore simply is, tactical versatility > too high specialization

Well it isn't just the overspecialization but the fact that todays battlefield has changed. Those videos were made in the 70s and 80s which was the end of the cold war erra also know as the post (world) war (2) era. Back then armored vehicles such as tanks still played a major war between military conflicts.

Today war has gone compleetly asymetrical, non governmental orginizations can now have access to war funding as easy or even easier as any nation, you might even start to see some corperations carrying private security forces. Home-made explosive devices can now be manufactured with anti-tank capacity. Also the proliferation of military aircraft can outmanuver any ground vehicles on the battlefield. Even some terrorist orginizations have begun to develop tactics using aircraft in terrorist and insurgent attacks. Putting more emphesis on boots on the ground patroling instead of powerful vehicles and big gun artellery that once dominated the battlefields of the 20th centuary.

Figment · 2012-04-23, 09:17 AM

There will be plenty of chokepoints to consider one directional.

They are very ambush and defensive oriented vehicle type, they have a completely different gameplay from other tanks and as such and I like having different options.

Like dedicated AA units should be designed to fight ground to skies at their core, I find the idea of putting everything on the same tank chassis utterly ludicrous, tasteless and completely lacking imagination. It would really hurt my in-game emersion experience to get the cheap art-redo instead of niche and specialist vehicles.

Using the same chassis and basic gameplay for everything is like using stock animation and footage in series and movies: it becomes VERY noticable and will be explained as a lack of budget and that will be interpreted as lack of quality: cheap.

cryosin · 2012-04-23, 09:49 PM

Rolling armor was a big part of planetside 1. If you ever witnessed 20 on 20 tank fights, you know how awesome they really are. There is a huge sky battle going on in the skies, flak everywhere, and you have 20 tanks shelling at each other across a vast landscape. When these moments happen, no other game comes close to delivering the awesomeness that it does.

Rolling armor is a great strategy for open world combat.

Here is the counter system:
Tanks = Tanks( DUH)
Reavers > Tanks
Ground AA > Reavers
Tanks > Ground AA

Replace reaver with any Air2Ground vehicle and you have the same idea. Also, AA air counters A2G air.
Its actually very well balanced. I would only have to say that Ground AA in planetside 1 was a bit too powerful, but outside of that the concept works fine.

Infantry are suppose to be effective when they can hide. If you are out in the open trying to kill a tank or a reaver, you won't succeed unless you outnumber the tank significantly. This is how it is in real life and planetside 1.

This is actually fairly similar to battlefield. In battlefield you need to be an engineer to have a good chance of killing a tank. Air is also a great counter to tanks. AA is a good counter to air and so on and so forth.

Darkace · 2012-04-25, 11:19 PM

As stated before there are many reasons why tanks destroyers are not around anymore. One solution to balance out tanks & making them more powerful but still balanced would to give them different main gun ammo like in real tanks. Such as sabot (giant metal dart) for defeating armor, HEAT (what most gamers think of as main gun rounds) rounds that explode on contact for defeating light armor. Heat rounds would have much lower damage but would have splash damage. If the debs want to get really creative also through in a canister round (giant shotgun shell) or even mpat rounds for defeating air targets