The Ultimate Combined Arms Thread (Tanks vs Infantry)

This is an awesome idea!

Because driving Harassers is fun. If we wanted to kill your Sunderer and were playing more seriously we would have flown a squad leader in a Scythe over it and then had a few LAs squad deploy onto it to blow it up. That's the way we normally deal with them - just have LAs drop pod on top.

Also, I doubt SOE will ever ditch the lone wolf quality of life features because a significant amount of players in this game are not in outfits, and refuse to ever be in/work with outfits. Lvlcap, the dear leader of the VS, quit the game just because he didn't want to play Planetside, and instead just wanted to shoot guys without having to worry about things like teams and spawns. I don't think most of these people are going to drop any money on the game, but who knows.

There is no splash loadout for Tanks, what are you talking about? HE is worse than throwing a Grenade and only the Lightning is somewhat decent at splashing Infantry, but it's nowhere nearly as good as running a Harasser with a Fury.

Tanks do no splash damage anymore, throwing grenades is probably more efficient. In fact everything that can mount Fury's or Bulldogs can actually splash Infantry better than MBTs do right now. Yes I called it, Cloak Flash with Fury is probably better at killing Infantry than Vanguards.

I would argue that it is harder to kill Infantry in a Vanguard than running around as Infantry! Given, the Vanguard is the worst AI Tank and the best AV Tank. You should get your facts together, Tanks splash is dead since half a year now and you still say Tanks can splash?!

Splash loadout is the weapons designed for AI work, with the largest and widest splash damage. You're doing the same as Eskimo was and making poor exaggerations, tanks still do splash damage and there is enough of it that the hitting shield spawn exits on an angle exploit is such.

Maybe NC is lacking in that dept (I would probably consider that to be the case), but that just means that is what you should ask for, a balance to AI weapons, not nerfs to infantry so they can't effectively fight back against NC tanks and get absolutely massacred by the other tanks with better AI weapons.

Actually Holyone what he means is that there is no splash loadout that is useful enough to pull, on the Vanguard in particular, since the multiple array of significant nerfs HE have gotten. This is especially the case for the Vanguard in which pulling HE is a complete waste of time and takes away all the Vanguard's strengths is exchange for almost no real AI power. It's somewhat okay on the Prowler, not really, but leaves a lot to be desired because of the insanely long reload. His "exaggerations" are merely expressing the frustration with something that is no realistic choice which is an AI loadlout for MBT's. Try not to stir up trouble when you were on a roll with being constructive and not condescending.

I know that is what he meant (hence the second part of my post), just as you know I disapprove of false exaggerations. One finds it difficult to continue a constructive discussion when the other side insists on blowing things out of proportion.

I might be exaggerating a little, but HEAT is better against Infantry than HE on the Vanguard. It is plainly no option to use it over HEAT.

Less damage to Vehicles(which should be it's down side), harder to hit Infantry with(very slow projectile compared), same splash damage as HEAT, very slow reload compared to AP and HEAT(4s vs 4,75s). While only having 4m more maximum splash radius.

If you take all those things together, HEAT is the way better choice, even if you want to setup your tank purely against Infantry. If you want to use splash, it's either about the big indirect chunk or about the spam. Both currently are not present on MBT HE mainguns, they are the least used mainguns on every MBT with a very big difference.

And I'm actually against revitalizing the old splash spam of HEAT, what I'm for is making HE actually viable again by rerolling most of the nerfs it received. Or by changing how HE works entirely.

Infantry will never get massacred by Vehicles, this never happens since the base design changed and the power of current Infantry based Vehicle counters, atleast in a fair encounter ... In open field it should be the case that Infantry is at a disadvantage, which currently is not the case.

There are no changes currently planed or announced that will change that. Seeing Infantry at 400-500m will not change the fact that Vehicles can not effectively engage them at that distance. Base design still allows for camping of the spawn in most cases once the enemy has been pushed into it, while there should be the options to deny the enemy spawning at this point of battle.

Currently nothing is happening to address the elephant in the room that Infantry is to strong in this game and most Vehicles lack an actual purpose. That the current resource system hurts dedicated Vehicle users, while SOE clearly advertised that Vehicles are a dedicated thing of their own.

Optimization has been announced as a very important thing they wanted to address, dating back to the tech tests. And it did improve until mid beta where all the rendering and Infantry outranging stuff with lock ons began ... gradually it became worse and worse as they tried to make Infantry render at greater ranges ... without even wasting a thought about re-balancing the whole AV vs AI issue, which already was present in beta ...

It regularly happens on my server. Infantry is at a disadvantage in the open, but one which they make up for with superior numbers.

There is a few valid points about balancing some infantry weapons and increasing the requisite skill, but I disagree about tanks being inferior to infantry as a wider issue. I still regular pull vehicles of all types and my K/D goes up a lot, and it creates a bit of fun variation to the gameplay.

Not really, Infantry is just not interested in keeping AV nests up nonstop. You can clearly see this process on my Server, at first a huge armor column will dominate Infantry for like 2 minutes, than Infantry is kinda sick of it and everybody pulls his AV loadout until all Tanks have been vaporized. Same happens to air.

Which is why my Outfit is going away from the idea of big organized Armor squads and splits them into smaller chunks to spread them out further, while also avoiding the friendly Armor zerg. Minimizing the risk of enemy AV nests building up. So far this has been working with a few bases being the exception were you can not avoid the friendly Armor zerg and you sit back and wait.

Vehicle users can feature high K/Ds if you play them careful, which was the case before the medic revive K/D change. But since than Infantry can get just as, if not even higher than Vehicle users. The only exception here would be elite pilots and super elite Lib crews.

My K/D is very low if you look at it, but I got a very high Vehicle destroy ratio. Mainly because I do not like camping spawns, I rather patrol the outside and hunt down Vehicles. I also don't care about bailers, me just ignoring them and driving off costs them more time than I would gain from that single kill.

I said it time and again, Vehicles feel like a consumable instead of a dedicated role. An afterthought, something added to keep those Vehicle loving PS1 vets busy for a few months until other changes could be done, problem is, those changes never happened, nor will they ever happen if the game continues to follow it's current path.

They might as well advertise it as Infantry combat with Vehicles, instead of combined arms ...

And compared to the tankers, how many infantry are there?

Some times the Tank Zergs are bigger than the Infantry ... they will still lose to AV nests big time

Sounds like your AI loadouts could use a buff then, or you need more AI harassers in support.

As long as you have a medic to revive your HA's and a vantage point infantry don't even have to outnumber tanks, and as Aesir has pointed out tanks don't stack well since they need room to move around while infantry stack nicely because the splash requires 2-3 close proximity splashes after which the infantry can simply move down to get healed or move to a different part of the hill they are using. Oversheilded HA"s can already take a direct hit from a Prowler HEAT Shell and survive, which is broken considering splash does as little damage and has as small AOE as it does now.

The fact that infantry are at a disadvantage on your server leads me to believe they don't know how to get organized or work together very well. On Mattherson the major outfits work together to take down tanks like a well oiled machine with AV nests popping up everywhere and then the pubbies put their two cents in. Mattherson highlights the issues between tanks and infantry because the infantry actually choose to make use of the AV tools at their disposal on a regular basis. Armor is quickly vaporized unless it is constantly moving and making heavy use of cover and only Harassers with their speed and mobility can afford to play like tanks in the open field. Often times the Armor force that Aesir rolls with on SG doesn't get to bump heads with BWC's Armor force because we're constantly being targeted by each others infantry task forces from a distance. The people who call themselves dedicated tankers will tell you they don't have a definite advantage in the open field if they are up against any sort of organized force that can be bothered to pull infantry AV counters.

Already using them, but this does not allow to bust through a AV nest, it only allows to harass enemy Infantry and than get the hell out. Meanwhile the entire AV nest gets rezzed by a single rezz grenade ...

Also we are mixing up Tank loadouts and often get a Kobalt on one of our Tanks for close support/defense, the NC specific AI weapon is not worth it since it's a shotgun mounted on the Vanguard that is worse than most Infantry shotguns since they nerfed it.

Yes, the change to all AI secondaries which were meant as a buff to them was actually a nerf for the NC C85modified, they upped mag size by a few rounds but cut the number of pellets in half. It actually was decent at 0m-80m. Now it's less useful than running around with a pump action shotgun as a Gunner and hop out to OHK the guy that wants to C4 you ... a tactic that actually works ...

Still seems a bit situational, my stance remains unchanged. Small balance changes, make infantry AV more skill dependant, plus ANTs and I think the balance may well shift for the betterment of tankers.

I will predict it different, Tanks will be even more useless because of the reason to have more AV out to get those ANTs. The small balance changes will not affect the entire system and design that much as long Infantry can still hit on those ranges and Tanks are still being limited by the fact that the driver has to have the maingun ...

More skill dependent AV would help if Tanks could fire on the move more effectively ...

Big fact untouched, 1/2 MBTs farming Infantry once a base has been pushed to the spawns. No actual role for Tanks, ANTs unless designed to counter Infantry or be moved outside the reach of Infantry will get intercepted by Infantry, making Tanks again useless.

Mark this words, they will come to pass ...

Giggily is right.

There is almost no reason to pull a tank. If you want something blown up ESF -> Squad Deploy will get you there faster and with more firepower than a tank has. By the time you have rolled off 5 tanks and got them gunned ESF -> Squad Deploy is already at the fight and dropping targets.

Armor is useful for supporting a particularly difficult push, or clearing a CY, but that is about it. There is a couple of tactical reason to have armor, and 0 strategic reasons. Even the support/CY clear is iffy, because if you just hot dropped on their damn sunderer you wouldn't need to clear the CY.

Tanks vs Infantry and how we should think about it ....



About the topic of reverse maneuver on ESFs and lock ons ... *cough* since some said we should also talk about the Airgame ...



SOE, please watch and learn from those videos ...

I'd spent money on a box price and a sub if required, but otherwise, why the hell would I spend money if I wasn't required to? Just because the gaming industry sells its products like drug dealers to kids, I'm supposed to "support" their perpetual beta projects? Maybe when they actually release complete games and quit with the "We can always fix it later in a patch" attitude (but don't hold your breath).

It's because in order to make more game and run online game companies need a steady supply of money because you can't make games for free!