AV vs AI and the misconception

A lot of peoples opinion:

Anti Vehicle weapons should be best against vehicles and Anti Infantry weapons should be best against infantry.


That is a common misconception in a lot of games. It is like for some reason you think that a weapon powerfull enough to melt through armor should somehow be deflected when it hits what ever suit your infantry wears. Magical garnets of deflection they should be called. Yeah that has a nice ring to it.

No.

Anti infantry weapons should make it easier to take out infantry, thus requireing less skill to actually land a hit. Especially on moving targets far away. What people want though are weapons which have a lower time to kill in addition to being easier to shoot with. What they are forgetting is that it is much more difficult to hit a small moving target with a decimator than what it is with a 500 RPM SAW.

So even though both the decimator and for instance the AV maxes are intended to fight vehicles it doesn't mean that they should be rendered ineffective if they actually hit infantry. It should actually be quite the opposite. If you hit a soft little infantry with your decimator that idiot who didn't seek cover should be blown to pieces.

It's the same with MBT's. If you choose a weapon designed to be AI it does appaling damage against vehicles, but it is really easy to get hits on infantry. However it still does less direct damage than the AP. So a direct AP hit should still do more damage against infantry than a direct AI hit.

I'm just saying that if you face someone with an AV weapon capable of blowing a hole through a MBT, then you had better be prepared to get owned if he actually manage to land a hit on you.

If there is any discussion to be had it is about how easy the AV maxes are to aim with, lower the RPM, buff the damage and increase reload time so you actually have to think twice before shooting.

fracture: the low RPM, Low bullet velocity, low mag count, long reload, low accuracy weapon
edit: forget low dmg that requires you to hit 24 times.. oh sry, thats the vortex

There's also a common misconception that game mechanics in video games need to have anything to do with real life.

I see your point.

IRL examples:
- A minigun (firing 5.56mm rounds) is very effective against infantry (large volume of fire, each round effective at wounding or killing, ammo is cheap and plentiful) but will merely irritate a MBT (rounds will just ping off the armour, maybe scratch the paint).
- A 120mm APFSDS round fired from a smooth-bore tank-mounted cannon will vapourise infantry, no doubt, but it's intended use is to punch through the armour of another MBT. (limited ammo, expensive, slow fire rate).

So, yes AV weapons are also inherently AI.
However, they are fair less effective at it, it's wasteful and it's inefficient to use them as such.

However, in PS2:
- you don't have to worry about wasting ammo, ever.
- You don't have to worry about using proportionate force (IRL you can actually be charged under the Laws of Armed Conflict for this).
- You don't have to worry about collateral damage. (i.e: using a JDAM to kill one dude, standing next a house with a family in it)
So we end up craziness like tanks using their main guns to snipe lone infantry, fighters unloading a salvo of rockets at lone infantry, etc...

I really wish SOE would do an art pass on PS2 to make it look like TF2.
That way players would accept / realise this isn't a 'mil sim' in any way shape or form...

Peace out y'all.

This is always a great scapegoat to use as a counter argument. You just hope that nobody does it to you when you conveniently use a real life example to explain something later on.

One could also argue that the breaking the law of real life physics, real or unreal, will also break the law of immersion unless the game specifically states why it does so.

It's not a scapegoat, it's another way of saying game balance and game design will always trump realism, at least as long as you're not trying to make a realistic simulator. I think we can both agree Planetside 2 is designed to be pretty far from realistic.

Sometimes what's best for the game and what's realistic happen to be the same thing anyway. If you or the OP think this applies to AV weapons then you're free to make an argument about why a realistic approach is good for the game. But when you do try to remember that this game is about far more than isolated 1 vs 1 encounters, which is all the OP considered in his post.

Just before this gets too far down the road of combined arms, I'd love to make a recommendation for anyone looking for an RTS. Check out Wargame: Airland Battle. A great mid-cold-war combat simulator (USSR gets frisky, goes to war with NATO, shenanigans ensue) with a roughly equivalent combat model. True, the aircraft are functionally similar to WW2 aircraft, but if you compare them to the helicopters in W:AB they have very similar tactical models. We don't have true jets in PS2 yet, but implementation for that would be a little tricky.

Anyway, there's a good reference for people who are interested in combined arms. The term gets slung around a lot here without anyone having any clue as to what it means. ("It means tanks stomp infantry""No it means infantry stomps tanks""No, it means airpower beats all"...and I die a little inside.) Yes, AT weaponry can kill infantry...if said infantry are in the open. Entrenched infantry is a completely different matter. A little off-topic, but for anyone interested in the subject of weapon balance in a combined arms environment, give that game a crack. It will give you a little context, and context is always a good thing.

We are not saying that this needs to a 100% simulator. Just apply a little more to the physics of a large object impacting soft tissue.
1v1 encounters has nothing to do with it. A tank can just as easily kill one troop after another on a major battlefield.
And I believe that I already made a point about immersion, as did he. The magic bullet that exits a tank does incredible damage to another tank as it is punching through armor. However that same bullet somehow becomes ineffectual when it hits the armor of a soldier.
This immersion is once again broken when you consider the engineer AV turret. Not only does it do the same as a AV turret on a tank, it does in fact OHK troops. Now why is it that one turret can do this, but a turret that technically has a larger shell can not?

There is a common misconception that video game physics need to be completely surreal. Can you offer an explanation as to why the larger turret shouldn't be able to kill one soldier?

Nanites.

Balance, in a word. If it ruins the experience of a lot of players for the benefit of a few, it should not be able to OHK. OHKs would be fine against infantry, if there were more choices for cover and concealment. As much as I hate to reference it (because it's chronically over- and incorrectly-referenced here...the counter-play episode of Extra Credits sums it up nicely.

You are right! give Comets 10 round magazines and increase rate of fire 4* and missile speed to 400 to bring them up to par with Fractures...

Well at least real life gives you a hint of how things "should" work. Then you can try to apply that to your fictional world. Throwing random numbers into the game based on biased opinions surely isn't better?

Besides, if you "balance" AV weapons to not do damage vs infantry all you've really done is make the infantry happy and pissed off the guys with AV weapons.

AV trumphing AI if you can actually land the hits is balanced. So don't nerf the AV dmg vs infantry, just make it more difficult to hit them. For instance the Fracture, currently 4-6 rockets or 2-3 salvoes is what you need to kill most infantry, which can be fired very fast with good precision and with little concern of reload time. So why not make it double the damage vs vehicles, half the magazine and double the reload? Now all of a sudden it is still deadly if it hits and just as effective against vehicles, but you might want to reconsider spamming it against infantry since if you don't actually hit you will be vulnerable while reloading.

The ZOE max is almost like that, high damage and low magazine, but for some reason they gave it a very fast reload speed so it pretty much negates the point of having a small magazine. Had the Zoe max had 4 shots in the mag and three times the reload it would've been much harder to use.

The great land of Esamir still doesn't provide you with enough cover? There are rocks and trees and gully's; buildings and pylons and razor back peaks; dips and depressions oh my.

Where does the TR's spamminess come into it? Spam, by definition, is the TR way. How do you maintain weight of fire by reducing the sustainability of it? Your suggestion pushes the TR weapon into NC territory.

My suggestion would be to up either COF or COF bloom, so that sustained fire is viable (and awesome) but only against large/area targets. Reduce reload time so that people that pace their shots aren't punished. Voila, a TR-lore consistent Frac with reduced AI effectiveness. I'm a TR player, and while I'd be annoyed about Fracs copping a nerf (seeing as it's pretty much our one viable MAX weapon post-Mercy nerf) I can see why they'd annoy people.

You mean the episode that says that counter-play is more fun when people have a chance to deal with what's attacking them?

You really can't apply that argument to "infantry should be more powerful". Especially since infantry have a vary large number of weapons that can kill a tank from outside render range, and therefore can't be "counterplayed".

would you please tell me which turret doesn't OHK inf? the lowest direct damage tank main weapon (aside from the skyguard, which is not a canon) is the c75 viper which can kill a minimum of 6 inf per reload when every shot hits (+ splash)

Where are the buildings? The dense woods? Trenches? Fortifications? Where is the reduced move speed off-road forcing tanks to decide about safety of travel and speed of travel? Where is the nigh-invulnerability in cover, and vehicle's fear of any built-up areas?

There is not enough cover in this game to justify OHKs. If it were a proper cityfight style shooter, it'd be reasonable...LOS would be short, lines of fire would be impeded. This game is pretty much all open ground though. In order to be fun, you need survivability so that open ground does not equal instant death. (Merely a very quick death, which is a marked improvement.)

I can think of a number of systems I'd love to implement to allow PS2 to flourish, and it would involve making tanks brutal again. I doubt the engine could handle a lot of them. In the meantime, with open ground and a lack of multiple interlocking concealed routes (and I'm not talking tunnels, but they would probably help out), there needs to be baseline survivability so we don't end up with another period of the game like pre-GU02

Congrats for proving my point. When you have a chance, however slim, the game becomes more fun. Hence, HE spam is no fun. It doesn't mean stronger infantry, it means no OHKs. Getting killed from outside render range isn't fun, is it? Then that would be an example of poor counter play. One imbalance doesn't mean they should further imbalance the system. It means they should fix the damn render issue and look at infantry AV range. It doesn't mean that should tanks get to render range, the infantry autolose to OHK weaponry. That just means neither side has a good game, and the zerg gets more powerful. The steamroller gets more powerful, and those attempting to take on superior forces with tactics find themselves weakened.

Clearly you have not tried the vortex. Dual vortex ZOE MAX takes considerably less than 24 shots to melt a tank. Assuming both shots in a volley hit it insta-gibs most infantry too.