ANT Self Defense Options are weak AF

My current state of mind: extremely annoyed.

Look, sometimes all I wanna do is mine some cortium and stick it in a silo for some easy stress free XP. Then comes along some idiot in a Harasser with an over powered top gun, that outclasses my ANT's top gun, and kills me.

It COMPLETELY KILLS the stress free vibe

And keep in mind, I'm not even in enemy territory or contested territory. These harasser bastards are coming into my faction's territory with the express intent of harassing ANTs.


The ANT can't effectively 1v1 a harasser. Why does the bulkier ANT not have enough HP to outlast the Harasser?

I can get that the harasser has to have a powerful top gun to do its job. But why does it take so long to kill with any ANT top gun?

I think the ANT's top guns should be buffed or it should be given more HP or something to de-stupify this situation.

I agree with you in general, but I will say this: Nothing can really 1v1 a harasser and win. They are extremely unbalanced and not even heavy tanks can take them out unless the driver/gunner of the harasser are really bad.

My suggestion: Equip the ANT cloaking module and put a Ranger or Walker on the roof. That way you have a powerful AA weapon (the Ranger especially is great at popping ESFs) and you can cloak instantly if you hear/see an enemy vehicle approaching. You'll have to keep at least 2000 Cortium in your ANT at all times to make sure you have enough to escape, but it does work.

It's a design problem that has made the Harassers OP against almost everything.

Harassers have speed and agility to avoid shots, it also allows them to dictate the fight. If they are caught in surprise they can escape. Their speed and agility allows them to go over rough terrain and attack vehicles from many directions. Then when you do score a hit and the fight goes badly they can escape you. On the other hand if the fight goes badly for you then you cannot outrun them, you cannot outmaneuver them and you cannot hide from them.
This would have been OK if we had the old resistances of the Harassers back. Harassers could avoid shots and dictate the fight, but they needed that to compensate for their relative weakness against enemy fire. Even if the Harasser tried to escape there was a good chance that you could still kill them before they got too far. This was balanced until the devs decided to buff Harassers for no reason at all, making them both tankier and at the same time boosting the backseat repair rate.

The first solution is to bring back Harassers to their old health level, alongside their old nanite cost of 150 (although that could still be increased to +/-200 or 250 nanites without making the old-style Harasser useless).

The second solution for the ANT is to increase the roles it plays. The ANT would be a prime candidate to fulfill the role of IFV, where it carries a small auto-canon designed to deal with small lightly armored targets like infantry, aircraft and Harassers (which are supposed to be lightly armored but aren't right now). Additionally infantry in or nearby the ANT could receive buffs to encourage players to stick around the ANT and fight alongside it as you would with a real IFV. The ANT could also allow up to 4 infantry buy high-power weapons that are powered by the ANT's ability energy and cortium, but these weapons only work in close proximity to the ANT. That way the ANT would again perform a powerful IFV role in tandem with infantry where both rely on each other.

ANT's could get another tool to become more valuable, which increases the chances of players actually going out of their way to protect it. If an ANT deploys you could allow players in vehicles to adjust their vehicle loadout for a small cortium cost (and a cooldown so you don't suck away cortium). This means vehicles can more easily adapt to the situation when an ANT is nearby.

I am not so sure that the problem is the weakness of the ANT so much as the OP'ness of the Harasser. If we start to buff everything to keep up with everything else that could end up in a never ending buff cycle arms race. I rather see things brought down to level vs. raising everything else up.

To be fair, ants cost 200 nanites, even as a free player you could chain pull 4 of them (by the time you're around to the 4th you'd have the extra 50 nanites)
So they should be fairly weak, that said, they can still be a strong vehicle,
if harassers are giving you a hard time don't bother with weapons, ram em!
If you're using stealth you'll need a head on collision to instakill them, if you're using boost then side collisions work too.

And even if the collision doesn't kill them, it should knock off a huge chunk allowing you to win the dakka trade,
Unless you're using ranger.

Totally.

At the time I do not recall anyone moaning about the relative 'weakness' of the Harasser - the buff came as a bolt out of the blue and a surprise to everyone.
A pleasant surprise to the dedicated Harasser crews - especially Vulcan where the buff just amplified the relative strength - a most unwelcome surprise to everyone else. A strange decision indeed.


In fact I would be very interested to see if anyone thinks that Harassers (in general) are in a 'good position' right now - I see very few if any openly defending them. (Leaves door wide open )

I see it has already been said by many, but I concur that the ant is not the problem here. If anything, the ant has too much combat application for a logistics vehicle, and the same is true of the sundy. For example, if you get 2 cobalt ants into the auger, 1 for each bridge, defending that base becomes pretty much unmanageable. And many players have a lot to say on the topic of cloak ants in infantry fights.

At this point however, I think that asking for the harasser to be balanced is a horse that has been beaten into hamburger. The harasser is OP because for some reason the dev team like it to be OP. So instead, I think there should be a cosmetic change to the harasser. It should be cosmetically changed to be a flying tank to better represent its stats.

Cloak ANT?

And also the fact that every other vehicle will poop their pants if you get near them because just a touch of your ANT and they suddenly explode.

Besides changing the resists again, I keep saying that an easy way to fix Harassers and Liberators is just to move the boost back from Passive to Utility. having boost OR FSS means they loose one of their 'get-out-of-jail free cards' and have to choose one that suits them.

And I see a handful of heroes that slap radar on ants and drive them around bases. I double up on the idea of giving the ANT either a combat variant or a dedicated AV or general purpose top gun, like the new lightning turret that should be coming soon.

yea a deployable Loadoutterminal were you would also be able to spawn Maxes for cortium would be quite intresting indeed

PMBs to my knowledge without a bunker (which are hackable) or sundy don´t allow to spawn Maxes and on a Sundy it still costs nanites intead of cortium ...

An ATV would kill the ANT too if he doesn't fight back correctly, or cloaks and run instead. Since when are lone wolves expected to win with any vehicle in any situation against 2-3 players in a team oriented vehicle? Next complain is going to be that Galaxies are op, they shot me with 4 different guns and 8 guys jumped out of it with C4, how come.

the ANT is not a lonewolf vehicle, it requires a gunner or else be stationary

so what about a 2 man harrasser vs a 2 man ant?

otherwise the only groundvehicle to be fully lonewolf is the lightning .. every other like MBT or even flash can have a second man for more DPS .. heck even the harrasse can have a exposed 3 man or MAX even ...


also at the very least LIBERATORS are effin OP ... seriously screw daltonlibs ...

I think that we should keep the passive boosts for Liberators and Harassers. Removing them just dumbs down the game. Instead I would favor giving passives to vehicles to counter such tactics. The crouch key on non-aircraft is unused, we can easily fit a variety of abilities on there specifically aimed at stopping quick and easy escapes. A simple AOE EMP strike that disables any nearby vehicular abilities for X seconds, or a variant that you fire so you can more easily hit them at range or hit aircraft that stay at longer ranges. Both could work and help solve this issue. We can expand that even further by using other unused buttons for other abilities that allow vehicles to actually escape aircraft and Harassers despite their lower speed and agility, for example by nerfing the steering capabilities of Harassers and aircraft when hit so they can't easily engage or escape.

We've been nerfing things since the game began, I think it's time to start looking into buffing and adding things to balance out other vehicles instead.

What you can expect however is that you get a decent chance to defend yourself, either by escaping or fighting back.

The biggest issues with the game right now are because we don't have that in some cases. Infantry and vehicles that don't carry AA and faced with an aircraft are virtually helpless with no way to escape, virtually no way to hide and little to fight back. Then when the tables are turned and the aircraft, say a lonewolf ESF, doesn't have a loadout to deal with a dedicated G2A unit they can escape with virtually no skill required other than "don't point your nose at the ground or the roof of the skybox, fly away". This even works in situations like 2 Skyguard Lightnings versus 1 unprepared ESF (and arguably even 3 Skyguard lightnings). Even fi the Skyguard lightnings are the top best players in the game the unprepared ESF has a massive chance of surviving unless it flies low and directly over them even if the pilot isn't very skilled.

We see the same with Harasser crews. Yes it takes two people, but the skill required to drive one isn't that high. And like the aircraft the Harasser has almost full control of the entire situation: When they attack, where they attack, the ability to retreat while their opponent cannot retreat, the ability to escape should the battle go badly, the ability to escape if they are ambushed etc.


So the solution, like I said against Foxassassin, is to start adding ways for these groups to actually control some parts of the combat. Allow them to stop a Harasser or aircraft from getting a (relatively) low-skill escape by hitting them at the right time, give the non-Harasser/aircraft players a chance to escape by using abilities or nerfing their enemies so they can't chase them as easily. Give them something to even the odds even if they don't have the correct loadout, because at no point should you be helpless especially when your enemy is never as helpless as you are.

Just got killed again by some harasser bastards. TR. TR's top guns are OP - they kill my ANT so ***** fast.

I dunno, seems balanced. My stealth ANT is completely invulnerable to aircrafts as long as i have cortium in tank. It also helps to run from slow MBTs if youre sitting on Racer chasis (which you should do because Rival combat is pure trash). ANT doesn't supposed to 1v1 against combat vehicles but after some practice i managed to fight some harrasers and lightnings with my Buldog. The Buldog is really strong weapon that does good job against infantry and light vehicles. Transport cloak is really good for getting road kills.

Resuming what i said: best way to fight inside your ANT is trying to not attract attention to yourself. I use transport cloak to get road kills or to get into good position against already busy target to help secure a kill. I can 1v1 against harasser if it has no gunner so 2 vehicles will fight each other standing still and i will win all trades because i have 4000hp over 2500hp. Lightning is a different story. Basically, i can win a fight with lightning if i caught him from behind using transport cloak and managed to hit him from behind few times until he turns to fight me. Its really depend from my Buldog accuracy i have no right to miss my shots at all if i wanna win this duel. If you have no advantage of first strike - you will gonna loose duel with Lightning... Also, its almost impossible to win a fight if you being attacked by harasser with 2 passengers. I drive inside my ANT usually using Stalker cloak Infiltrator loadout so i just leave vehicle and while enemy busy blowing it i just crouchwalking away with Redeploy timer going on. As mentioned above ANT is really cheap so you don't have to worry about loosing it. Especially if you have a base with light vechicle spawn terminal...

Saying it's balanced because there's one single loadout that can work if you have a single resource (that the guy is collecting and dumping into a silo) isn't exactly a great solution. The ANT should be balanced no matter what it equips or how much cortium it has, and having it die without being really able to fight back unless you have one or two loadouts and happen to have cortium with you is not acceptable.

The thing is though, the passive boosts -were not- baseline. (Edit: Partially incorrect. The Harassers had their boost moved up a -long- time ago, Wiki says between 2013-2014 while Liberators were done in 2018 But both were utility at one point.)

I have spoken with several older Lib pilots who had stories about coming back to the game and still having afterburner pods on Liberators's utility slot. That they flew for weeks on months of not realizing that they could've been using something else entirely, only for a squadmate to ask them what utility they were using and finding it out.

Most of them have said that it's overkill. That there's no need for those vehicles to have that much in every aspect of the power triangle (Power/defense/mobility).

Adding too many RPG-esque mechanics in a wildly chaotic game like this will even more unbalanced. That in your example people would have to make a loadout to combat a -specific- type of enemy, in this case an EMP like ability.

We already have an ingame equivalent; the skyguard. It's sole existance is for aircraft and completely useless against everything else in 90% of situations. People have been upset about them for quite awhile now, that once you pull one you pretty much need to abandon it, or be a liability for your team. The same kind of thing applies here, and that's not even factoring in how to even balance something like that, as it could easily cause a butterfly effect and ruin combat for ALL vehicles, not just the ones it was intended to combat;

double up on your EMP example. You would need to get close to vehicles to use it. Getting close to a Lib is certain death if the pilot and gunner are even halfway decent, and getting close to Harassers is nearly impossible except for OTHER Harassers, which would only encourage people to only use Harassers over any other vehicle type, especially if the EMP worked on any other vehicle, because Harasser ganks would become that much more powerful being able to shutdown any vehicle, especially slow ones like MBT's or Sunderers.

And if it was an infantry weapon, that would pretty much kill ground and air vehicle play period. It would only take one or two soldiers with EMP gear to competely shut down anything around them.

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I'm all for having more abilities and options, but the less niche or more ubiquitous they are, the more careful forethought will need to be done on them, and that's not something I see with this development cycle.

But the Liberators and Harassers worked fine before they got passive boosts, and they've been crutching on it since. Having boost and FFS/Smoke gives them too many safety nets. This is partially why Havoc rockets were even added, because Libs were unstopable by everything unless they got careless. This would be the same type of band-aid fix.

Cloaked ant outside of 10M is impossible to spot.

The turbo ram is the best weapon ants have against all vehicles below & including the lightning.

I agree that adding niche abilities would be a bad idea. This is why I would want these to be more general-purpose and give players a choice. An AOE EMP attack would be a more niche choice for people wanting to get up close and personal to several vehicles at once (or disable mines and C4 nearby, or instantly sap infantry shield and ability energy etc), but for those who want to more accurately tag a Harasser or LIberator I already mentioned the option of a small gun firing a debilitating EMP shot against the target instead (or alternatively a concussive shot, you can have both).

The RPG-esque part is actually the genius part. In PS2 vehicle combat movement is key, but most vehicles are barely able to use movement in their combat tactics, which is one reason the Harasser is so powerful. Most vehicle combat is fairly stationary, pop up behind cover, fire a few rounds, go back into cover.
RPG's are also very stationary, you rarely are able to dodge and weave in them. The developers still need to give you meaningful decisions and abilities while staring at your almost stationary character, so they give you abilities to use with timing and tactical implications. That is exactly what PS2's vehicle combat also needs, as a straight up slugfest isn't interesting and just becomes a DPS race.

You don't need many abilities, and you can tie them to specific keys that have commonalities with those for infantry. For example:

Shift is for movement related abilities. Turbo is an easy one, but you could imagine abilities that temporarily increase traction, turning ratio's, reverse speed, acceleration etc.

C can be used for cover and camouflage like smoke screens, distortion fields (a more visible one like seen on the stealth field of the Sunderer), false signals on the radar, activating holograms etc.

X can be used to switch to a special firing modes and ammo types (or fire it instantly). This could be things like turning your HEAT/HESH/AP round into a canister shrapnel shot or having a small control over the shell while in flight like a weak version of the AV turret missile.

G can be repurposed from turning the lights on your vehicle on/off to firing off secondary special abilities like the aforementioned EMP attacks or concussion shots.

F is for your run-of-the-mill abilities like shield and barrage.


You don't need to start adding all these abilities at once, you can add one button at a time with a few NS choices and faction-specific choices then see how they work out. The first thing they should do is simply try to fix the blatant problem of most vehicles being sitting ducks against faster, more maneuverable vehicles by actively being able to diminish those advantages.