MBTs - 3-man or 2-man - Discuss! - Page 9

sylphaen · 2012-03-18, 02:52 PM

What's the point of a driver if the tank is slow as a snail ? Vehicles for which speed does not matter could have the driver with a canon for all I care (e.g. Flail).

OP canon on a near static OP armored vehicle is a akin to PS1 BFRs, though.

Figment · 2012-03-18, 03:03 PM

Originally Posted by sylphaen

What's the point of a driver if the tank is slow as a snail ?

...there are more options. Speed in World of Tanks ranges from 7km/h (uphill) to around 32km/h top speed for very heavy tanks, where french tanks have very light armour and can go up to 65 km/h.

They play completely differently, but one would be a fool to underestimate the slower, much more heavily armoured tanks. Of course, in WoT there's an armour system with weakspots. We don't know what the armour systm in PS2 will be (aside from apparently there being some armour adjustments) and whether shots (like in WoT) are deflected or simply damage is absorbed.

In case of the latter, speedy tanks will have it a lot easier than if they also can only hurt certain sides. It would be interesting in terms of gameplay (circling vs frontal assault) to have Tank Destroyers with high frontal armour and weaker rear and side armour in such a system though.

ThGlump · 2012-03-18, 03:50 PM

If tank is slow you can manage to drive and gun and you dont need someone to drive. If anything then tank with dedicated driver should be faster than others, to benefit from that third person inside as pure driver.

Figment · 2012-03-18, 04:18 PM

Hmm, has some truth to it, but a good driver can drive at any speed. More speed would just give him more power to circle targets as well and do hit and run attacks.

However, less speed would make him more vulnerable as less leading and turret rotation is required to keep up.

I'd focus more on using speed as a way of balancing tanks towards each other (in terms of power), then to use it as an argument or design balance for driver/gunner or driver+gunner. Everyone benefits from speed.

On the other hand, having reduced agility if there's no dedicated driver (lore explanation: because of double tasking and "being semi-preoccupied with turret and gun") could be an incentive in an assigned system to get gunners. Again, I would like to point out the mechanic in WoT where the tanks abilities are reduced when a crew member dies, is hurt or is knocked unconscious.

Chrispin · 2012-03-19, 01:34 AM

Since you guys are so worried about the manpower issue we should just have resource costs for spawning vehicles or using infantry equipment. This way every player could buy a 2-man tank a 3-man option if they wanted to, but they would be sacrificing resources that could otherwise be used for effective infantry combat equipment like a powerful anti-tank weapon. This way it's more efficient to just hitch a ride with someone else rather than making your own tank.

This makes things much easier to balance. Diminish the sheer power of quantity by tacking on an adjustable cost for it.

Sirisian · 2012-03-19, 02:56 AM

Originally Posted by Chrispin

Since you guys are so worried about the manpower issue we should just have resource costs for spawning vehicles or using infantry equipment. This way every player could buy a 2-man tank a 3-man option if they wanted to, but they would be sacrificing resources that could otherwise be used for effective infantry combat equipment like a powerful anti-tank weapon. This way it's more efficient to just hitch a ride with someone else rather than making your own tank.

This makes things much easier to balance. Diminish the sheer power of quantity by tacking on an adjustable cost for it.

We have a thread on that exact topic. I brought it up earlier in the thread. If people are up for it they need to let the developers know. Higby already saw and commented on it to a degree.

Basically the thread summarizes a lot of views toward balancing multiple people in a vehicle by utilizing the resource system. Allowing people to upgrade tanks so 3 people investing in a single tank can make the most out of things without hurting 2 people that choose to invest in a tank for the purpose of driving it by themselves. I'm big fan of keeping the driver busy so even in a 3 person tank allowing them to buy and control abilities is a huge plus. (I'm trying to think of what I'd want to do if I was driving a tank without having any weapons). You have to look at it from the perspective of someone investing resources in a vehicle to have a good time. You'll see more people pulling say a decently upgraded tank for two people than a 3 person tank if it's boring for the driver.

sylphaen · 2012-03-19, 05:46 AM

TLDR: Static tanks decrease the quality of combat for everyone.

@Figment: there is a huge risk about balancing increasing firepower by lower speed. Let's call it the "BFR syndrom".

IMO, what made PS and it's tank play fun was the mobility of vehicles and the resulting dynamic flow of frontlines.

Tanks had decent speed and decent health to push into a zone but could not overpower it against a similar force. Buggies had great speed and could push very fast but could hold ground even less. Once slow vehicles with strong armor and strong canons are added, the battle becomes stale because frontlines get settled, those vehicles hold ground so well that other vehicles are effectively denied a whole area to fight in.

Yes, BFRs could be destroyed but it destroyed the flow of combat. If you ever played in a mag and faced particle canons, you will understand what I mean by whole areas being denied zones.

Similarly, glass canon vehicles would also be a bad design because it changes the game into a who-shot-first or who-hides-best and this kills the flow and movement of battles. Who would ever try to charge if you know this behavior gets you wasted ?

My point is that to keep a dynamic and enjoyable ground vehicle battles, there are limits to how vehicles can be balanced and designed. Of course, I am biased in my belief that movement and dynamic battles are more fun than a camp/snipe tank gameplay (which some people may like). With mobile combat, situations change more rapidly, you can get surrounded, overextend yourself, make more mistakes, outmaneuver the enemy, etc...

I think dynamic tanks also makes it more fun for our hunters (aircav) since it will be more challenging for them to line up a moving target with their rockets.

If you found tower camping was the worst of PS combat, you should be against slow and powerful vehicles since camping a tower or a field area is about the same: lie in wait, aim at a spot, fire when anything crosses the area.

Figment · 2012-03-19, 06:50 AM

Originally Posted by sylphaen

TLDR: Static tanks decrease the quality of combat for everyone.

@Figment: there is a huge risk about balancing increasing firepower by lower speed. Let's call it the "BFR syndrom".

BFRs are an extremity in both speed and power distance, but worse, they took endurance WAY too far and instead of reducing the individual power, they increased that too. Had the shield been pure armour, it'd been far less worse. Instead though, its shield recharged faster than a Magrider could damage it. Its design was in no way balanced towards other, existing units in terms of power and endurance. A BFR was more like the Mammoth MkII in C&C: domination units. BFRs are therefore not a good example of how to balance with speed and firepower and should be ignored (aside from being a warning to always balance towards existing units).

It was and IMO still is an awful design to give recharging shields to a tank unit of any kind.

Recharging shields (and even then not too strong ones) is only fair for stationary targets like the field turrets since they cannot dodge any incoming fire at all.

Again though, I would like to point towards how a medium tank in World of Tanks can easily kill a heavy if it can outmaneuvre it. I'll probably keep pointing at WoT because it's got such a huge pool of tank characteristic diversity. I would advice anyone to play some f2p WoT combat at least up to tier 5, preferably up to tier 8 with several types of units to learn and appreciate the different playstyles and qualities of tanks. Should be able to get to tier 5 on a few units within a week or two.

The gameplay differs only per unit type, but this provides the only replayability where the game itself is a bit bland due to the repetitiveness and grind and lacks options that you do get in PlanetSide's scale and design.

EDIT: also note that WoT does not apply the PlanetSide philosophy of equals between players and will put tanks in matches where they can not damage higher tier tanks at all. A tier 2 TD will face a tier 5 heavy and a tier 6 will face a tier 10, which is like pitching a Lightning against a BFR. Therefore, with respect to my point, look at balancing within same tier units and at most one tier difference (in some cases one tier already creates a severe discrepency and IMO reason to require more players to control had they been PlanetSide tanks as it provides more total power). You can find the characteristics of these tanks here:

http://www.wotdb.info/

CutterJohn · 2012-03-19, 07:49 AM

I had a thought about the tank issue, specifically balance between 1, 2, and 3 man varieties.

1 man tank - 1000 hitpoints.

2 man tank - 1000 armor, 250-500 shield hitpoints

3 man tank - 1000 armore, 500-1000 shield hitpoints.

The shields, of course, do not recharge under fire, and recharge slowly enough that you've retreated from battle, repaired, and they are only near full by the time you've returned. So something like 2-3 minutes. Doing this would fix some issues(or perceived issues) with the relative strength between taking it out solo and taking it out with extra gunners.

I suggest shields for this rather than armor hitpoints because it is something that logically could be turned on and off as players entered and exited the vehicle, under the RP that the gunners are controlling the secondary defensive systems.

PredatorFour · 2012-03-19, 08:17 AM

I like the shield idea but also we dont know how the power of the secondary/ third guns will be. Maybe my mag gunner will have an equally powerful gun as to what i have being the driver. So against a 1 mbt we`d have twice as much firepower. This would definately encourage people to hop in and gun.

Also i gave a thought to people playing solo in tanks.... they are going to be easy pickings for reavers for sure!

Gandhi · 2012-03-19, 08:28 AM

Originally Posted by PredatorFour

Also i gave a thought to people playing solo in tanks.... they are going to be easy pickings for reavers for sure!

If they're totally alone yeah, but most of the time they'll be surrounded by hundreds of other players many of whom will be in AA Lightnings and what have you. Also depends on whether the primary gun can be changed to an AA or AI variant, maybe this was answered already?

CollinBRTD · 2012-03-19, 08:30 AM

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

I had a thought about the tank issue, specifically balance between 1, 2, and 3 man varieties.

1 man tank - 1000 hitpoints.

2 man tank - 1000 armor, 250-500 shield hitpoints

3 man tank - 1000 armore, 500-1000 shield hitpoints.

The shields, of course, do not recharge under fire, and recharge slowly enough that you've retreated from battle, repaired, and they are only near full by the time you've returned. So something like 2-3 minutes. Doing this would fix some issues(or perceived issues) with the relative strength between taking it out solo and taking it out with extra gunners.

I suggest shields for this rather than armor hitpoints because it is something that logically could be turned on and off as players entered and exited the vehicle, under the RP that the gunners are controlling the secondary defensive systems.

So why would you pull one instead of 3 tanks again?

3 tanks 3000 hp
2 tanks 2000 hp with one AA turret

This concept is broken see Raider

Coreldan · 2012-03-19, 08:58 AM

Something I've been thinking for a while. Many players suggest as well as devs have sort of hinted towards the resources being a limiting factor. Like in this case pulling one tank with 3 guys inside is far more resource friendly than 3 tanks with 1 guy. Most certainly yes, but does it matter anything?

1) Who's resources are we using when pulling a tank? If it's empire's resources, then these actions may actually add up. If it's the individuals, then pulling 1 tank instead of 3 barely makes any difference. I think they did talk about there being perhaps empire, outfit and indiviual resources, but anything more confirmed on this? In GDC footage we did see resources in Higlos character stat page thingie

2) Will the resources actually be scarce? If not, once again pulling 3 tanks instead of 1 makes no difference. If yes, it can have a huge impact in the game (duh): It might get REALLY hard for the empire that is losing to get back on tracks cos it all adds up. Lets say NC owns 90% continent while TR has the remaining 10%. NC keeps getting more and more resources and they can basically waste it for ridicilous stuff to keep TR down. TR then again lacks territory to gain resources from, thus they struggle to get enough armor and other necessities to be able to take the territory back from NC.

3) Listing things with numbers just looks cool.

sylphaen · 2012-03-19, 08:59 AM

Originally Posted by Figment

BFRs are an extremity in both speed and power distance, but worse, they took endurance WAY too far and instead of reducing the individual power, they increased that too. Had the shield been pure armour, it'd been far less worse. Instead though, its shield recharged faster than a Magrider could damage it. Its design was in no way balanced towards other, existing units in terms of power and endurance. A BFR was more like the Mammoth MkII in C&C: domination units. BFRs are therefore not a good example of how to balance with speed and firepower and should be ignored (aside from being a warning to always balance towards existing units).

Agreed. I never played WoT so I cannot comment on the gameplay there and I'll take your word for it. I'd just caution that PS has reavers too so the dynamics might be very different.

In general, I'm against gameplay that kills mobility.

By curiosity, are there occurences of walls of slow/high armor/high damage tanks in WoT ? How do lighter vehicles maneuver when they are forced to charge heavy vehicles ? I noticed tanks in WoT had to be static for the cone of fire to be small and accurate (which promotes static firing), is that the case ?

(I'm looking for insight in how balance is designed in WoT to better understand your ideas)

Figment · 2012-03-19, 09:21 AM

Originally Posted by sylphaen

By curiosity, are there occurences of walls of slow/high armor/high damage tanks in WoT ? How do lighter vehicles maneuver when they are forced to charge heavy vehicles ? I noticed tanks in WoT had to be static for the cone of fire to be small and accurate (which promotes static firing), is that the case ?

(I'm looking for insight in how balance is designed in WoT to better understand your ideas)

Yes, there are units with such strong armour you cannot pen them with lower tiers (or not from specific directions anyway). TDs and artillery are in place to take these out if not with a similar unit or one of equal or near equal tier with other advantages over them. These units are not the type of balance I would propose of course, nor would I want light and medium tanks to rely on spotting for artillery units (a very important mechanic in WoT).

For instance, a tank destroyer or Tiger P may have 200mm frontal, even sloped (extra bouncy and effective) armour, but only 80mm side armour. Some tanks have very good sloped armour or spaced armour (extra thick armour underneath as a second layer) such as the tier 9 (soon to betier 10) IS-4 and IS-7. Typically these units have weakspots like hatches where lowered amounts of armour.

The E-100 and Maus are examples of extremely heavy armoured units (170-200mm all sides) with next to no speed and very few weakspots. They are virtually impenetrable unless you got a (fully upgraded) tier 9 or tier 10. At which point you can do 15-50% damage per shot in the right place (typically side or rear, or front weakspot between tracks). Artillery of tier 7-8 have been known to ammorack such tanks in one shot (penetrating shot made the ammunition stored inside the tank explode).

Typically these units are great for moving up a narrow corridor like a city street, but in the open get sniped (long distance flanking from bush cover is very effective) and flanked easily as they are big targets. Another weakness of these units is that their turret moves very, very slowly. So I have actually seen french scout tanks (extremely fast, agile but next to no armour) units tear them apart by simply not allowing the enemy to get a shot on them and using rapid rate of fire to take them out before they can respond.

Personally I've sniped them predominantly with artillery such as the Object 212 and GW Panther and high tier Tank Destroyers such as the Jagdtiger and Object 704. These TDs have very strong, sloped frontal armour (aside from their bottom plate), but no turrets. If flanked by a scout, medium or somewhat speedy heavy, they can't ever turn fast enough to get a shot on target.

Then there are the french higher tier tanks with very rapid rate of fire clip guns (4 to 6 shots) with high speed and damage, good penetration value and long reload (up to a minute reload), but only 30mm of armour so in theory even a tier 3 TD can damage them quite well if they catch them reloading and I have taken such units out with a tier 6 heavy (which is normally dead in seconds would they be reloaded).

Strangely, the french lower tier tanks are the opposite: extremely well armoured, but too heavy for the engine making it both slow and impossible to mount a good gun (would be too heavy), so they just have pea-shooters.

One strategy to take out such strong armour AND speedy units is also to hit the tracks while they are moving. If one set of tracks is taken out, the other continues to move and it makes the tank rotate. This throws of their aim, makes them a stationary target and sitting duck and exposes a weak flank if they were moving in a straight line at or away from you.