[Vehicle] What is your idea of 'tanky'

I've seen the argument that tanks should be 'tanky' often on the forum and they often refer to RL tanks in the process. This is a foolish notion, as RL tanks are less tanky than they might think. In their comparisons they often compare modern tanks with outdated weaponary. Most modern AT weapons, even handheld by infantry, will completely destroy a tank, or severely damage them with a single hit. The tanks in PS2 do not share this weakness, but on the other hand have their damage severely nerfed compared to RL counterparts.

As we are talking about games, it isn't weird to have different stats compared to RL tanks, like surviving multiple hits from dedicated AT. What is your idea of 'tanky' in games and how would you want to see 'tanky' in PS2?

I think they could get away with being beefier, but only if we had some way of regulating them(for example with nanite recovery rates). In ideal PS2, we shouldn't be spamming vehicles by the metric tons and instead spread them equally across the map


In real life AT weapons are not so easy to come by as they are in PS2 anyway. We currently have more infantry units that possess a rocket launcher than those who don't so it makes sense for our tanks to take a good whacking

If they limited vehicle pulling then there wouldn't be people learning to tank as much as they could. However I'd still like the timer system over the nanite system, simply because if you kill a vehicle and it's beefed to hell and back, it suddenly feels like an accomplishment of teamwork. Not "oh that lib killed me, I'll just get another and try again x8" you'd actually have to care about what you pull because you weren't getting another anytime soon.

In regards to tanky and it's definition, tanky does not mean being able to resist specialized ammunition to counter it. Take a max, being able to withstand bullets and....bullets...but then an archer comes along and decks him hard, because it's a specialized weapon to counter the max. Rockets on the otherhand are used on basically anything because they don't specialize that hard, you can aoe down a group of people, down a max, kill armor, auto win a 1v1 with moderate aim.

Tanky however does mean you can take no damage from either unconventional arms, a lot of damage from conventional arms and moderate damage from your anti. But just because your anti exists doesn't mean you can't counter it, maxes unfortunately can't stop an archer, but tanks or ESFs can use IR smoke or have extra plating, like how ESF has comp armor to mitigate flak, flak still hurts a ton but it mitigates the damage.

The thing about tanks in PS2 is that counters, a lot of the time unstoppable counters exist to kill them.
C4 being one of the top killers of tanks but so bloody underplayed because no one wants their win neafed. Libs being able to kill tanks and tanks being completely unable to respond to many lib attacks, ESFs being another but less so because the topgun can actually stop them. (I find this hilarious because wrel said he doesn't like that feeling of helplessness in players regarding max balance, funny how tanks are left in the rain)
Tanks in this game also have a lot of conventional munitions thrown at them, rocklet, c4, rockets, bassys on anything, AV turrets, mines, all lib guns, all air guns, all valk guns, all gal guns, all tank guns (except ranger), etc, people do not think ESF noses are a threat because they simply peck, thing is people really underestimate peck. There is a massive difference between never and eventually, like never being able to find that one person for you verses being able to meet them 7 months from now, and instead of waiting several months to kill a tank you just need about 10 seconds or 15 or etc, I've killed plenty of ESFs with the archer to know that eventually can come a lot sooner than people expect.

In regards to making tanks tanky, I'd just want everything to specialize harder. Like why pods do as much damage to hornets when they are the AI wingmounts, or duster killing armor incredibly well at point blank better than dalton DPS, why do AI weapons need this pseudo-armor killing component? Why not just make it deck what it's supposed to deck incredibly hard? I get people want versatility but the idea of being a team is one covers armor, one covers infantry and one covers air, not inbetweens. I mean sure, tomcats and coyotes both hit air (both bad mind you) but an ESF is not a lib or gal, this makes sense, same way a harasser is not a tank (or at least shouldn't be one) and is countered relatively well with ground locks.

There's a lot of opinions on what would be compensated for killing x harder because it lost x but problem with tanks IMO is they just aren't needed.

There are of course a few problems with your view on tankiness.

1) In PS2, everything is extraordinarily tanky... except tanks. Infantry can soak up hits from 20mm weapons, or even direct hits from 75mm shells! Aircraft can take multiple 150mm rounds to the cockpit and continue to fly. Even a little dune buggy can soak up several 100mm shells. So naturally tanks ought to be even tankier than their IRL counterparts.

2) Tank weapons are incredibly weak against infantry. A 150mm HE shell apparently has less explosive strength than a hand-held fragmentation grenade. A soldier can literally stand centimetres from the explosion of a 120mm HE shell and not be dead. And of course the above-mentioned weaknesses of 12.7mm or 20mm shells against infantry armour (20mm shells that, I might add, can somehow damage a MBT). Thus to make up for their lack of punch, at the very least tanks should have supernaturally strong armour to compensate.

3) Although tanks are "inexpensive", infantry AV and infantry in general are free and considerably more abundant. Even if tanks had good AI weapons (which they don't) and killed infantry in droves (which they never did), the fact is that the enemy will never run out of infantry. More than that, infantry AV is infinite. A rocket launcher can't be permanently "destroyed", even for a minor cost. And instead of having a pair of rocket launchers for ~50 people (the normal distribution in an infantry platoon), you can pretty much have every infantryman run around with rocket launchers for free. Because the threats to tanks are far more numerous than is remotely reasonable, tanks need to be much stronger to balance out the infinite infantry.

4) Some infantry players complain that tanks can be repaired unrealistically quick, which is true. Repairs that can take hours or days are done in seconds. At the same time though, an infantryman who has been killed by a 150mm dart to the chest can be revived just as quickly, or a soldier who was probably missing limbs from 20mm cannon fire can be fixed up in no time at all. The same is true of tanks not requiring fuel... neither do infantry in the form of food. So even though tank logistics are simplified, that is fair to do because all logistics in PS2 are simplified. It is no excuse to have weak tanks simply because they don't take days to repair.

5) Finally, your knowledge of modern tanks and rocket launchers seems a bit lacking. In combat, we see that modern tanks can emerge unscathed from modern AT weapons. Modern tanks are equipped with Active Protection Systems, in addition to many forms of passive armour, that allow them to achieve superiority against infantry fielding modern AT rockets and guided missiles.

The 2014 "Operation Protective Edge" is probably the best example of modern tanks against modern AT weapons. You had various Israeli Merkava tanks (including older generations from the 1970s) against Kornets and RPG-29s (pretty much some of the most advanced Russian handheld AT weapons). And the result was that not a single tank was hit. Not a single one, despite quite a few launches.

Even when tanks do get hit it often results in failures to penetrate. The frontal arc of most MBTs are extremely well protected. New concepts like Explosive Reactive Armour can render single-warhead weapons virtually useless, as well as heavy underlying armour. Prior to getting APSs, Merkava IV tanks in 2006 only had a 34% penetration rate when being hit by ATGMs (so not counting more basic RPG-7s and such). It's also important to mention that penetrations are not necessarily kills.

Data from the 2006 conflict suggests the following ratio:
"Hundreds" of ATGMs fired : 18 tanks damaged : 5-6 tanks penetrated : 2 tanks destroyed (by large IEDs, not ATGMs)

The Iraqi army running around with extremely poor "monkey model" M1 tanks show that:
28 tanks damaged : 5 tanks penetrated : unknown number destroyed

I wouldn't even call those Iraqi tanks as "modern", as they lacked the standard armouring of American M1 tanks. American M1 tanks, in turn, lack the APSs of Israeli and Russian tanks.

At any rate, infantry-carried AT weapons are currently at a low point. Already most infantry-carried AT weapons are so heavy that they certainly cross the line of being "carried" and generally exceed combat weight allowances.

PS2 tanks should be tough because modern IRL tanks are essentially untouchable by infantry-carried AT weapons and have a decent survival rate if hit or even penetrated.

This is pretty much the MOST biased thing I have ever read in my life on these forums.

I'll grant chingles post was a bit over the top, we don't need tanks to be ungodly, just feel better.
But you calling chingles biased well, Mr.Kettle, Mr.Pot called, he says you're black.

It neither surprises me nor causes me to care whether you think I'm biased or not.

But if you want to find problems with my facts or analysis, by all means go ahead. I think most of what I claimed is essentially correct factually.

If you've got nothing else to say other than "Chingles thinks tanks need to be much more powerful and should stomp masses of infantry", I'd be the first to agree with you, though I'd still add that you're worthless to this discussion.

i think tanks are fairly tanky,
if they can survive a couple of rockets or a brick of C4 they are tanky imho.
unlike a certain 450 resource unit.

compared to other units tanks are UP, doesn't stop people whining about them as squishes when aircraft have been a worse problem.

i agree tanks should be more tanky as they are heavy armor (libs and gals are NOT heavy armor and they have a crap ton of tankiness)

tanks should be more resistant to basilisks and furies, C4 should not do as much damage as it does (without needing a specialized defense slot item), tanks need a co-axial kobalt and need to get back the old thermals even if infantry are only highlighted at 150m.

tanks need to be tanky and libs and gals need more vulnerability to AA.

if libs and gals were designed around they way they are used in real life (because people will not use them the way they are used in real life) no gal would survive a drop, no liberator would last very long for a simple reason.

heavy transport aircraft are not flown into hot zones, if personnel need extraction or insertion in a hot zone by air they send in small transport aircraft (chinooks) they can afford to loose more then heavy transports (AC-130s), gunships are only committed when the local AA is ether knocked out/crippled or can be engaged outside the AA's range.

AC130's in the transport role are the supply lines of the armed forces, they will not risk them in hot zones.

Of the new modern series of abrams 1 has never been outright destroyed by an opposing force, they have been disabled but never destroyed.

I would like to point out that a lot of the 'power' from real world, modern day anti-tank tactics also focuses on 'mobility kills', or disabling tanks. It's extremely inefficient to try and outright demolish a modern main battle tank, but it's a lot easier going to take out a tread, shoot out an optic, or damage the main gun's barrel.

Planetside 2 doesn't have that form of modular damage, so, tanks are in a fairly decent spot, in my opinion. They're not meant to be the end-all be-all, and usually, if you're dying too quickly, you've either over-extended and are in a lost cause scenario, or you were entirely overrun and are making a last stand.

That's also true of infantry. IRL if you damage but do not kill an infantryman, that soldier's combat capabilities are shot. For example, say that a soldier somehow lived through direct HE bombardment... they would probably not be in any condition to fight afterwards.

But in PS2 I can land a 120mm HE shell right next to an infantryman who not only is still alive, but who can return fire using pristine equipment as if he had not been hit at all!

That's why the argument of "modular damage" doesn't work. It doesn't apply to infantry, so why should it apply to tanks? Until I can "disable" infantry and their weapons, the fact that I cannot "disable" a tank should have no bearing on how powerful a tank ought to be.

Although I'd like it if I could shoot a topgun with a rocket and disable it, because topgunning people is often just ********. Like headglitching in other FPS where bullets come out of the mouth instead of the gun.

There is no real way to compare anything in this game to its real life counterpart... Infantry can get shot to an inch from death and function like they were never in an encounter, tanks can repair in seconds and reload while in full use just by being in proximity of a tower, and the foundation to all of this is that no one takes orders from anyone!

RL is nothing like any of this WW2 Normandy stuff, everyone just jockies for a position where they are undetected and one shots the other guy, it really doesn't matter what you've got when everyone has access to a radio. No building/vehicle/unit is safe from a jdam or HE delay or whatever and all units are able to do it.

no one wants to play a game where you drive or fly around in circles until a forward observer tells you where to shoot and lets you know if you got a kill or not... likewise infantry gameplay would be lame af if it was just chilling in a hide, jacking off while u wait for the enemy to poke their heads out.

There's incentive to follow orders and stuff in games like ARMA cause u can win. in planetside, it's just a frag fest with no clear objective that can reliably be reached in a play session so people just kind of do what they want, and balance goes right out the window in a traditional sense. Right now, a player who exclusively drives around tanks and acts independently gets a higher KD than someone who plays infantry exclusively at the same skill level, and that player pays for it in having to sit around waiting for nanites (or pay for membership/boosts) and in having less fights to choose from. There isn't anything else to this game as of yet, so for now it seems balanced fine to me.

There are a few minor gripes I have with tanks, such as:

-Vanguards tend to loose any engagement that gets bigger than 1v1
-Vanguards nearly NEVER loose any engagement that is 1v1

-Prowlers have obscene degrees of suppression and flexibility of application with their siege mode. (Ever tried to defend the Crown from the TR while they have Crossroads? Yeah, ALWAYS 5+ lock down Prowlers on the hill to the south.)

- Magriders unique ability I find to be significantly less helpful in most situations.
-Mags provide what is (in my opinion) one of, if not THE, worst driving experiences I've ever seen in any game I've ever played. The fixed forward gun combined with the handing of the tank makes the thing feel beyond awkward. It's like trying to stargaze with an anvil bolted to your skull.

- And finally, I really hate how slow tank rounds move. Feels like slow motion sometimes.

Tanky is a combination of factors.

A MAX isnt deemed Tanky. But imagine a MAX as fast as a Harasser... Suddenly it becomes nigh impossible to kill them with small-arms or even ap Guns.

But Tanky is more than the resistance and the ability to avoid fire, its also its ability to destroy its enemies before itself dies. If we nerf Harasser damage heavily then suddebly Harassers are a loy less Tanky, but increase their damage a lot and suddenly they are more Tanky than MBT's, as Harassers have an easy time murdering MBT's while MBT's cant murderd them easily.

Tanky means more durable. People like vehicle durability on vehicles in combined arms games. They don't like vehicle weapons.

When was the last time America fought a real war. All their recent wars have been guerrilla wars. I am sure if it had been Russia or China, countries with actual anti-tank weaponry, that America had fought, there would be many dead Abrams. Besides, in combat a disable tank is a dead tank; if it can't move it can't fight.

Oh, I guess those RPG-29s and Kornet ATGMs must be totally different from the ones fielded by Russia, despite having Cyrillic text and all that.

You are technically correct... we would take MBT losses if we were engaged by other world powers.

Just not from infantry. We've seen what the best infantry-carried AT weapons can do, and as I've explained above (which I know you read because you responded to it), advanced infantry AT weapons perform extremely poorly. The evidence is incontrovertible.

What would kill our tanks would be vehicle-mounted weaponry. A 300kg Kh-25 launched from an Su-25 ground attack jet. A 150kg AFT-10 NLOS missile fired from an IFV chassis. A 47kg DPCIM cluster munition artillery round. Any of which would immediately render an infantryman immobile.

Mobility is important, sure. But against infantry who are only lightly armed with weapons that can't get past an APS, that main gun and 4 machineguns would probably still wreck anything at the platoon level. Not to mention you have to deal with the other tanks in the tank platoon or section.

This game does not in any way simulate armor thickness vs armor penetration, so I'll put my opinion down simplified, with visual aids:

Tanky - able to deflect or defeat incoming fire with armor protection:



Not tanky - incoming fire affects fit, form, or function, even if of small caliber:



Durable - can sustain lots of damage and not give a duck about it:



Not durable - stops working after enemy puts only a little effort to stopping it:

If a single player can carry 3 bricks of C4 (or 2 bricks while flying), and a bus on 6 pneumatic tires can withstand more punishment - things are upside down.

The way it should be:

Harasser, ESF, Ant - very not tanky, not durable (i.e. anything would do damage and rip it up quick).
A .50 cal, a 20 mm, grenade launchers, rockets, you name it, it'll do the job.

Sundy, Valkyrie, gunship - not tanky, durable (so it still takes damage from lots of sources - not from as many as buggies or fighters, but can keep going for a while anyways, sundy by virtue of being a rugged vehicle, airplanes thanks to size).
.50 cals and smaller HE rounds would struggle, and all the chainguns and larger would require some time to destroy this category. Only really, really big bullets would defeat their "tough" characteristic.

Galaxy - not tanky, very durable (it has lots of volume and lots of redundancy, so while being thin skinned to allow for load capacity, it could soak incoming fire quite a bit before ceasing to function).
Pretty much the damage sponge it is now - whatever hits it, needs to hit it again, and then again to have any effect on it. Maybe it's a bit over the top in its current form, but not too much.

Lightining, MAX - tanky, not durable (able to stop common projectiles of their own weight class, but they don't have the internal volume for penetrating explosions to disperse or to spread out important subsystems, so something is gonna get hurt when the tankyness fails).
The Max would laugh at shotguns, frag grenades or pistols, to a degree maybe even launcher nades or .50 cal machine guns, but once the caliber is large enough, it cannot continue to function under attack for long.
The Lightning being much bigger would absorb bulldogs, AA missiles, general duty rounds and not complain much (at least frontally), but bazookas or tank rounds should destroy it effectively.

MBT's - very tanky, durable (big vehicles with big armor layers would require big firepower to bring down).
This category would need frontal immunity from anything less than the Dalton or other such monsters, and they'd be able to absorb some damage, similarly to the Sundy, once the damage is being done. This means bazookas, HEAT rounds, large caliber HE or the larger chainguns would take time to destroy these vehicles. The really, really big bullets would do damage in large doses though, as only the Galaxy should be able to stand up to repeated hits by those.

Which can be revived by a medic infinite times at no cost at all, can travel in an airplane and can change loadouts for free.
It also has similar damage output to the MBT while being able to hide in buildings.

mobility kill.
Effectively the tank becomes this: