[Vehicle] When are the promised infantry AV nerfs coming?

True, although now that we have some weird dynamic rendering thing going on we might need to reconsider how range and rendering is done.

I thought "combined arms" meant 1 light assault carrying 2 C4. He combines them and blows up pretty much anything!


....that's not what you meant?

No I doubt thats what he meant.
But I must admit that this is a rather witty response to SOEs apparent cluelessness regarding that term.

You can have your infantry AV nerfs when they remove the ability to repair a burning tank to full health in 10 seconds. I don't care about armor lethality to infantry, it's a tank and should be a fearsome opponent on the battlefield. But if it does get damaged, you shouldn't be able to magic away the damage out in the field in seconds. One engineer or repair sundy shouldn't be able able to offset damage from one AV unit pounding away at it as fast as they can reload. At the very least, any damage should prevent any repairs being done out in the field for five minutes or some adequate amount of time to make the armor completely disengage from combat and find a safe spot to repair, far from the combat zone.

Two other options to make armor more interesting is to:

1) Have locational systems that can be taken down with damage that affect how the tank performs. Systems such as engine damage that affect the tanks top speed(can be divided into levels of damage depending either on how many times the engine was damaged or the severity of the damage), sensors that affect their radar range, turn speed, reload speed, special abilities(mag boost, lockdown, vanguard shield), etc. Armor should be able to be repaired out in the field, but systems should only be repairable at repair bays at friendly bases and perhaps with a Sunderer spec'd to do such, though the Sunderer should only be able to repair one or two such vehicles at a time and at a reduced rate.

2) If that is too hard for the game engine, they can have armor health be separated into multiple health bars. When one of those health bars are depleted, you should only be able to repair to the nearest non completely depleted health bar. This system is seen in games like Resistance: Fall of Man. To repair completely, the armor would also need to return to a repair bay at a friendly base.

The health bars or system damage should be set so that a single AV unit can reliably take down a system or health bar with continuous fire. However, the number of health bars or amount of health at tank has a full health should make it so the tank should have no fear of actually dying to a single AV infantry, possibly temporarily weakened, but nothing a trip to a friendly repair base or sundered can't fix (though the Sunderer would of course repair much slower than a bases repair facility)

Make tanks more like tanks and less like paper.

I'm actually a pretty big fan of more interesting locational damage. As applied to tanks, look no further than one of the best arcade tank games around, World of Tanks. Each subcomponent of the tank can be targeted and possibly damaged, resulting in loss of functionality.



Would this be a "nerf" to tanks? Sure. But I'd be okay with it so long as damage was handled realistically (infantry AV weapons and even some tank cannons firing at the front and sides of an MBT would be relatively ineffective), but also because it makes fighting much more dynamic and interesting.

In WarThunder, for example, it is quite possible to damage the subcomponents of your aircraft. Having your elevators or flaps shot out will introduce new challenges to a dogfight. One time I even had my engine shot, meaning that my Yak turned into a glorified glider. Was it "harder" to fight with disabled parts? Sure. But because it applied to everyone it was fair and interesting. I would be very sad if they took out locational damage from WarThunder, and the game would be much worse if they just simplified damage into a matter of HP.



Of course locational damage should be applied to aircraft (WarThunder), but also should most definitely apply to infantry as well. Just like in the newer Fallout games, if you're caught in a massive HE explosion you shouldn't be walking out of that as fit as a fiddle. Infantry should feature locational damage to their arms and legs. If any of their arms are crippled by an explosion or bullets, then they should not be allowed to use any two-handed weapon (pretty much just pistols). If any of their legs are crippled, they should not be allowed to run or jump.

Again, I agree with this suggestion, and I also think it should apply to infantry. It makes no more sense that a tank can magically repair itself from the brink of death than an infantryman can pop back up from having 95% of their body incinerated.

Let infantry heal themselves from small wounds (going with your block health system), but if a bar of health is depleted then they need to return to a friendly base. Not sure if they should be allowed to redeploy to a friendly base or not... making them do medevac missions has a certain charm to it.

If infantry are revived, then they are also stuck with only a single bar of health until they can make it back to a friendly base.

Medics and medical kits can only refill partially depleted bars of health, but should not be able to completely restore all of the health bars. A Medic inside a Sunderer, however, could restore fully depleted health bars (though quite slowly), acting as a sort of field hospital or ambulance.

As for vehicles, I've long advocated an actual armor system instead of the percent-decrease system that we have now. Most of the time, a glancing blow or a shot that fails to penetrate armor should have a negligible effect, but a shot that does penetrate ought to be more catastrophic. If that's too hard, here's a simple alternative that might actually be somewhat useful (based on the system that we currently have):



In this way we can "simulate" glancing shots. In other words if you fire a rocket at a tank, that rocket will do the most damage if it hits the tank straight-on. If the projectile hits the tank at an angle, then you will have to burn through more armor and as a result do less damage. If the projectile hits at a very large angle, this is a "glancing" blow and most likely the projectile should just ricochet off.

The engine should take the weapon that fired at the tank, check the angle of firing, and arrive at a "raw" damage amount. This amount is then checked against the tank's armor in the area that was hit. If the "raw" damage amount is lower than the tank's armor amount, then there was no penetration and the tank should not take any damage. If the "raw" damage amount is higher than the tank's armor amount, then the resulting difference should be deducted from the tank's HP (in other words the tank took damage).

That's not even a very fancy system, but it would be tons better than what we have now.

I would love for there to be a vehicle armor system this complex, but this is a game engine that uses predictive movement to account for latency and can barely handle hit detection as it is. Adding this much of an extra layer to it would strain it to the breaking point.

It's easy enough to avoid mines, and simply drive away from most infantry with AV weapons.
There's only Two really "lethal" AV systems in the game as delivered by infantry.
#1 C4 .... which is used even more against infantry in crampt little pvp-arenas bases
#2 what MqCH does where they have Deci HA's dropping right on lone Tanks from a Skywale

In either case... the "lethality" or Reward is an issue with there being very little risk.... b/c the infantry aren't "standard infantry". They're "flying" infantry who circumvent the conventional standard of having to tread over ground to reach the target with a niche Burst. So the game's natural failing here , is in not having much in the way of counter-play available against these tactics. Or atleast not in empowering solo pubbers to actually do ****-all about it. Buffing prox-radar might help somewhat with the the first problem, but the 2nd is just an example of cheesey Team-work always being overpowered b/c there will always be ways to circumvent conventional limitations with teamwork. -- All the Devs should really do there is try to improve access to "coordination" for Pubbers too.

Yeah, but they are SOE devs.

It's true that any complications to the armor system would create more strain on the system. And really I don't know exactly how much a strain this might be, because I'm not that great with computers.

I will say though that the above diagrammed idea wouldn't really be adding anything new to PS2... it simply builds on what is already there. The current system calculates damage to vehicles based on where the shooter is standing in relation to the target vehicle and the facing of that target vehicle. If you are in the frontal arc of the tank, then it counts as frontal damage (even if you hit the side or top armor, which is weird but that's PS2 for you).

My suggestion would be to add in a second set of calculations on top of this. Once the game has registered a locational hit based on the existing system, it pretty much runs the same thing again, except within that limited arc to determine if the hit penetrated or not. Essentially the process would be:

1) Determine where the hit landed (this already happens in the game)
2) Determine within the area that was hit which "zone" the shot came from (using a repeat of the mechanism in step 1)
3) Modify the weapon damage by both locational and weapon type modifiers (this already happens in the game)
4) Check to see if the resulting damage is higher or lower than the vehicle armor value in that location
5a) If the resulting damage is higher, then subtract the difference from the vehicle's HP (this partially already happens in the game)
5b) If the resulting damage is lower, then nothing happens.

As an example, let's say that someone shot a Vanguard in the front but at a "glancing blow" angle using a default infantry rocket launcher. The rocket launcher does 1,135 raw direct damage, and due to weapon type does an extra 50% damage to MBTs. The Vanguard is assigned a new frontal armor value of 800, which replaces the existing frontal damage reduction of 68%.

The rocket hits the Vanguard, and the game does the old calculation of figuring out if it was a frontal, side, rear, or top hit like it always does. In this case based on the location of the shooter and the facing of the tank, it turns out it was a frontal hit. Then the game looks at it a second time, just focusing on the frontal arcs. Again, the game uses the position of the shooter and the facing of the tank to determine the angle at which the shot hit. In this case the shooter was at an extreme "glancing blow" angle, so the game modifies the shot damage to be 99% resisted. Thus the rocket now does 1,135*1.50*0.01= 17.025 damage. The game now checks this damage amount against the Vanguard's frontal armor value of 800. It finds out that 17.025 is much lower than 800, so it does not do any damage to the Vanguard.

Obviously the numbers and values are subject to change. But that's the basic idea.

Really only steps 2 and 4 are "new" and would require significant calculation. Might it add more strain? Sure. But it really doesn't seem all that difficult to me.

hopefully never.

We need these adjustments NOW,I'm getting so frustrated every time I play. The only thing that really works and is consistent is playing as infantry anything else just results in attempting to dodge 100 players worth of AV spam. The no limit/resource cost and range are the biggest problems with HA rockets and the range of MAX AV but another more player driven factor is that there is no consequence for dying as infantry so they can just keep charging towards your vehicles non-stop until they get close enough to C-4 you....while you're fending off everything else around you and if they DO get killed but they didn't throw their C-4 they will just try again and again because they're probably not going to toss the C-4 unless they are close enough to kill you in the first place. There is not enough REAL risk for what is basically an insta-kill by infantry on tanks,which shouldn't be be possible anyway.

I'm tired of tanks camping on hills farming inf with the ability to go back on the other side of the hill (while taking damage) and magically repair their tank to full health in under 10 seconds. NERF TANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't believe there is a thread about tanks being harassed by infantry. If anything we need better AV. Even with engi turrets the tanks just drive away hide behind a new rock and keep farming.

There is so much wrong with this.

You don't like it when die in your tank and you think it is unfair that it takes multiple infantry deaths in order to kill you. So what should it take to kill a tank. It looks like all the risk and effort and organization is on the infinity side.

What makes your death so much more valuable than the infantry death? Resources? Those fall like rain. Time to get to your farming position? Tanks are much faster than infantry. KDR, tanks win. PPH, tanks win. Fending off attacks? Ya, the only thing that can kill infantry in this game is everything.

Addendum / Footnote to my last post b/c I forgot a really important one:
AV Mana turrets weren't technically an Infantry-unit according to the game's own rendering limits last year. They rendered beyond 300m and therefore would be vehicles. They also resist small arms fire making them a light armored hardpoint. The only caveat is they're harder to see than Phalanx and have a little tiny head on them that some snipers can hit @ 350m & oneshot. Beyond that range it takes 2 hits. And when there's more than 2 Engies doing it, it turns into an outnumbered situation versus a single MBT that probably isn't going to be able to drive out of range in time....



Again: suddenly being outnumbered by Infantry is an intelligence & User-interface issue. There's improvements that SOE could make to fix this. There's tools that LA's could be given making them vital to Squads for Intel. Infiltrators often aren't being employed to their full capacity either in intel-gathering. And some other times, there's ****-all you can do b/c sometimes it's just a Racer-Composite SkyWhale dropping decimators on you and not even ESF's can shoot it down b/c everyone gunning inside it is running a prediction bot while all your allies are too stupid to realize it and mass-ticket that Outfit to support

You shouldn't only do one style of combat.

Vehicles are great in this game but your going to get blown up and have to start fighting on foot at some point.

Vehicles can blow infantry to pieces.
There are lots of infantry
Infantry don't want to die so they are going to target a threat to them first.
When 20 people target you, you are going to explode

There is no real way around this. They can't balance it so tanks can shrug off 20 people shooting at them or there would be no stopping them in small scale battles

I certainly seems that Infantry AV damage saw a setback with the release of Deploy Shield for the Sunder.
Though it did not decrease the amount of AV damage that Infantry to dish-out, it did greatly increase the amount of AV Infantry damage necessary to destroy a sunder when it is equipped with the deployment shield.

The only problem with a similar system with infantry is that infantry are way too squishy to make any locational damage, status debuffs, and max health debuffs feasable. Infantry usually come in two varieties, full health and shields, and dead. Having them have status debuffs as soon as they take a few bullets(it only really takes a few to drain shields and start doing health damage) will pretty much mean they need to redeploy after every skirmish to get their health back. This would slow down the action way too much.

This would definitely make sniping more interesting though. A single body shot would cripple someone assuring that the next skirmish he is in he will die and guarantee an assist to the sniper. On the other hand, snipers are the ones that most make the use of disengaging when injured and healing up. As they take hits their max health will decrease and decrease until a single bullet to the body(most likely from a sniper rifle) will kill them.

Also, coming back with only a single sliver of life after being rezzed would suck. Even now, just coming back without shields and full health runs the risk of you getting killed again even before you can take a few steps, it would be a nightmare if you came back even weaker. Most people wouldn't even accept a revive at that point, just redeploying to the nearest spawn to get full health back.

Taking away your ability to redeploy and have to get medivac'd sounds like it would take you out of the action for way to long. Nobody likes to wait to get back into the action. Though increasing the respawn times and bringing back people in waves on a system managed timer was a cool feature in Planetside 1. Too bad they also required you to give up the ability to get rezzed to get into the respawn queue though, it would have been nice to have both options open to you until you either respawn or get rezzed.

Now that I think about it, there might be something for Planetside 2's paper tanks and squishy infantry. If the main idea is to keep the action going, I do see the logic behind their "live fast, die fast" gameplay model. When you're in a tank, you're more mobile, can kill infantry easily, but you also have to worry about yourself because everything can kill you back pretty easily. Keeps the tension high and forces you to always be aware of your surroundings, because you might not even get a warning shot before you get C4'd or an ESF swoops down to ruin your day. No matter if you are in a tank, Sunderer, Galaxy, or MAX suit, you can't just zone out waiting for a cap because a moment of inattentiveness is all it takes for someone to kill you.