[Suggestion] Buff Python AP

We could, of course, just make everyone immune to damage and call it a day.

... only a sith deals in absolutes ...

Well, I'd aruge certs aren't free because we have to work to get them. They don't often stretch very far either.

I wouldn't like a CoD-like system either, that'd be worse than everything always for free. But I do think there needs to be some kind of proper restriction on how easily a player can gain raw power through their equipment alone. Either that or an equalization of power regardless of equipment. Ideally skill ought to be the primary deciding factor in most if not all engagements, in my opinion. I'd personally be fine with vehicles being free if infantry had free and realistically powerful AV capabilities. Not just free C4 or current dumbfires.

RPS isn't the best solution, I agree. But there ought to be a good reason to take a specialized loadout, instead of just AP/HE or go home.

That could work. Better to have them explode at their maximum range like the Phoenix than still potentially hit their target anyway. They ought to have a fair amount of ammo though, in my opinion. About the only good thing to come out of the CAI was enough rockets to actually kill a tank from the front if needed. Can't rely on engineers or the rare terminal up a the front lines.

Glad to hear it! Vehicle-infantry balance usually gets heated quite quickly as I'm sure you know.

Cortium aside nanites as free as it can be. They're passively earned just by having an existing character. Other infantry-based OHKs are also quite unfun to be on the receiving end, but they tend to have heavy restrictions. Pump-actions need to be at point blank or 10m(?) with a slugged headshot, sniper rifles are sometimes limited by range (thanks PU02) and require headshots in all cases. The Decimator is slow and heavy, and correct me if I'm wrong but I believe flak also stops the OHK. There are also mines and C4 I suppose, but both are subject to flak and rely on good positioning.

That's fair enough, but flak is currently the one and only defence against tanks shelling from range. Taking direct damage resistance off of it and giving to nanoweave would just lower the low the numbers of flak users and bolster the nanoweave crowd. In my opinion, flak wouldn't be of much use against tanks if it stopped only a single shell's splash.

I wish I knew what you saw in the Annihilator, I don't much care for it. Weaker than my Hawk, defenseless at short range. Least the Decimator can kill somewhat effectively, but I find myself needing to always carry it regardless to deal with all the MAXes! I don't see much room for immersion in PS2 anyway, personally.

Personally I had no issue with nanoweave at the time. I ran it myself and I still killed lots of infantry with my Longshot despite it. But I don't agree, it seems all the two have in common is the potential for a OHK.

That said, I can really see where you're coming from. However, I really don't think it's a major issue. I suppose I've got really no idea but it's considered common knowledge I would think that most players use nanoweave, I can't imagine all that many players are surviving hits with flak to really be a huge deal. Especially with AP shells sacrificing AI capabilities in general for advantages in AV.

But I don't know, how often do you find someone survives an AP shell?

If I can remember rightly it was a little less than 230 HP left, think it was open to single-shot kills at that point. Regardless, I can understand your approach but I must disagree. I personally didn't find it an issue then and I don't really see it as a strong issue now.

The problem with flak making tank shells a 2 hit kill is important when someone tries to c4 you in a closed enviroment (in a base or close to it) placing 2xc4 and detonating takes less than 3 seconds (probably not anymore since patch, not certain) so as a tank user you are pretty limited to kill that infantry guy. As far as a dude managing to shrug it of if he was hit from range is less important I think.

I find the concept of non-MAX infantry surviving direct hits from any tank cannon completely ridiculous and out of place. But, no matter what everyone's opinions are on what balance should be like, the current situation dictates that tanks keep a healthy distance from infantry in order to have time for a second shot in case someone literally jumps at them. This is one of the reasons why I have switched back to HEAT cannons and their shorter reload time.

Just remember to engage enemies on your terms and don't fall for bait.

That's the main reason I want more overlap on top gun and aircraft weapons. HESH could use a little down-tuning regarding anti-infantry, and HEAT could use a small anti-infantry buff, but aside from that I think Lightning tank canons are in a great place. They all have their thing they do best but they all let you somewhat fight back against anything in a pinch. MBT canons are a little more out of whack, but their faction specific traits really throw a wrench in balancing those guns. I'm not nearly experienced enough in MBTs to have much of an opinion on those.

I think I've encountered another instance of this being broken AF, I threw a sticky 'nade and hit an NC guy square in the face just before he killed me.

I smugly waited for the revenge message and my xp... it didn't come.

Now there's a chance he managed to get killed in the second or two before the grenade would have gone off but given the positioning I find that unlikely. He was in a building overrun by NC and he ran away from the window immediately after being stuck.

I'd need to coordinate with someone else on Cobalt to find out if this is actually a thing that's possible, the ingame stats don't seem to provide a damage profile.

You know what breaks immersion? The fact that people think that PS2 MBT's are anything like real-life tanks.

PS2 tanks cost 9 grenades.
Real life tanks cost in the 100.000+ grenades.
A single shell from a PS2 tank is free.
A single shell real life is in the hundreds up to the tenthousands of dollars, even the cheapest is more than 10 grenades worth.
You can't even fill the fueltank for the cost of 9 grenades, you struggle to buy a bicycle, let alone a fully armored, fueled, loaded, moving tank that is capable of firing without ripping it's turret off and taking damage anywhere without losing functionality.

As for "impossible for infantry to survive", remember that whole thing about nano-construction of the infantry? Graphene is pretty damn strong, between 5 to 300 times as strong as steel. An infantryman using an exoskeleton of Graphene consisting out of a 1mm outer layer of pure Graphene (which is flexible) and a middle layer of 2cm stiff Graphene (which needs to be accomplished through intentional errors in the Graphene layer) and an inner layer of 1mm pure Graphene again as spall-liner would be immensely strong. Using low numbers of 5x as strong as steel for the stiff Graphene and 50x (rather than 300 that it should reach) for the pure Graphene an infantryman would have an equivalent of 200mm worth of steel armor. A great many of WWII tanks have similar frontal armor as that. If you use thicker layers of say 3cm and 2mm you already reach similar armor ratings as those of modern tanks... And we haven't even talked about the armor the soldier is wearing or his shield yet or just used higher estimates for how strong the Graphene could be. And another advantage of such an exoskeleton would be the strength. You could use a bird-based respiratory system with an exoskeleton and be more efficient than those of humans (explaining the tireless capabilities) and you can create better muscle attachments for higher strength... With a Crab-like configuration for the hands scaled up to a human you would be able to cut through steel with your bare Graphene-layered hands.



So yeah, the only immersion breaking thing is the expecation that you should be able to wreck infantry anywhere you look with a tank just because you had the skill to walk up to a terminal and then ruin the gameplay for everyone else.

Having an unrealistic economy is totally different to having an unrealistic combat system. I'm fairly sure they used to have different resources but it was simplified in some patch or other. On is an issue of how often you encounter a specific weapon system the other is whether or not it does what it's supposed to.

Let's roll with your armour idea, how does the knife hurt infantry? How about the crossbow bolt travelling at 150m/s? A headshot from that leaves a player in worse health than if they were hit full on with a Python AP while wearing flak.

It's about comparative damage and the Python, for its size and purpose does ridiculously little damage in this context.

Oh here's another one, If this armour just a few cm thick is comparable to modern tank armour, why aren't the tanks using it? These AP shells are designed to penetrate whatever is the height of 29th century Tank Armour, there is no logical way that Infantry would be able to carry anything close to a comparable level of armour.
Not without every weapon being at least a light anti-armour weapon.

I think you're mixing up AP and HESH mate, I'm fine with Taking infantry against an AP lighting, I can jink and dodge and use cover and usually avoid dying for at least a couple of shots. HESH, on the other hand, melts you in a couple of shots no questions asked and it's almost as good as AP against tanks, so of course, everyone now runs HESH even if they're not farming at a base.

AP is not "able to wreck infantry anywhere you look" it has awful splash and a long reload, it's the only defence against infantry is its ability to one-shot them with a direct hit.

If there's an AP Python that is killing infantry by the bushel I can guarantee you that it's because that player has the skill to land every shot on target and not just "to walk up to a terminal".

And I find the concept that a tank survives a single shot by a technologically up to date rocket launcher(that is designed EXACTLY to take out the best enemy tank in one shot!) ridiculous. Let's not even get to the point where seriously damaged tanks can be repaired with some magical tool in the field...
You know why many soldiers do not want to ride in a tank vs a technologically equal enemy? Cause they are big targets that are easy to destroy if you got the right guns.

it's somehow odd if drivers want realistical strengths for their vehicles...but no realistical weaknesses.

It's somehow odd that infantry want realistic launchers that can wreck tanks but want to keep the ability to bunny-hop around in combat like they're not carrying a launcher, while at the same time not have tanks and aircraft easily demolish the building they're hiding in from kilometers away. PS2 has no room for your real life comparisons.

Congrats for repeating what I just said...

And again, vs. a technological equal enemy on that level you would not even be able to use tanks cause some cruise missile or orbital laser would destroy it still in factory. All the flying and driving near or even in enemy territory only works as long as you ain't facing an equally strong opponent.
Dump fired close range rocket launchers wouldn't exist anymore anyway. Rocket launchers with deadly precision would be used from several miles behind the front lines by dedicated squads (no need for bunny-hopping there).

Still the fact remains that "OHKs" in infantry vs vehicle are not a one way thing as vehicle drivers seem to think these days(cause they watched too many WWII Hollywood movies or think that Desert Storm is what a modern war looks like). I actually think such a war would be almost exclusively an infantry war...cause everything else is just a valuable target for the enemy long range weapons(which are usually much cheaper than a tank etc.). Not exactly what tank drivers in their wannabe-allmighty machines want to hear tho... ;-)

The problem is that none of that works in a game where nothing renders past a kilometer. If infantry get their RL anti-tank firepower then it's only fair and balanced that vehicles get proportionally increased lethality. But none of that matters because infantry rarely render past a few hundred meters. It's just ridiculous trying to base balance ib PS2 off of real life. I do agree that infantry would be the cornerstone if superpowers face off, but vehicles providing fire support would be the determining factor, especially air and artillery. And tanks definitely fill a mobile artillery role, at least for the side with air superiority. Bit still, none of that matters in PS2, because vehicles can't engage at fire support ranges, so they have to be able to engage at infantry fighting ranges.

rps is definetively neccessary if you include armored vehicles .. otherwise you would turn the game too much into a shooting gallery were you might just focusfire any target similar to unreal tournaments onslaught were vehicles simply have health and no resistences ..
the game needs a ballance between hard and softcounters ..
if the kobalt f.e. is meant to be specialised in antiinfantry with high RoF then imo it should not do damage against heavy armor ..
both the walker and basilisk can and are rather ballanced torwards that
low RoF cannons like the halbert do poor damage against infantry but are ballanced torward antivehicle
and the bulldog is not as easy to use against infantry as a kobalt but has the added benifit of damaging heavy armor to compensate .. imo ranger/burster, walker and skyguard need tweaking to be usefull against groundvehicles

Allright, let's make it realistic! A real-life grenade is already 30 to 1000 times cheaper than modern day tank rounds (there's rounds that cost 30.000+ per round). Now a real-life grenade is weaker than a real-life round and PS2 rounds are a bit weaker than a grenade. Let's be incredibly lenient and say that the tank rounds are only 1/10th the cost of a PS2 grenade: 5 resources. For a modest ammo count of 30 rounds you would need to pay 150 resources extra for your tank... Want to try and figure out how much more the tank's engine should cost? We have an ATV engine in the game which is basically the entire vehicle and if we compare that to a modern-day tank engine we should come to how many times more expensive such an engine is, and then multiply that by a portion of the Flash's cost (hint, even if we think the engine is just 1 resource it's likely not going to be cheap).

The combat system is unrealistic because it's a game. If you wanted realistic most people would be busy with supply lines rather than fighting. We wouldn't be fighting on "continents" that are only several kilometers across. You would need a team of several dozen people to keep a single aircraft going as it would need to be serviced for hours after flight at costs of 10.000+ dollars per hour. Realistically a tank can be mobility-killed by a .50cal when it's tracks are broken, and realistically a single infantryman could die to a single shot in the chest while the next guy quite literally takes 70 hits and keeps going on Adrenalin for half an hour until he finally bleeds so much he's incapacitated.
A good game only takes the realism that is necessary to support the game. And like it or not but despite free infantry the vehicles get the best benefits out of this deal with cheap ammo, cheap tanks, no fuel costs (or even a need to refuel), no repair costs, lightning-fast repair times without any supply chain or large facilities required...

There used to be 3 resources: Infantry, air and tank. There wasn't really a reason to segregate these, not even for realism.

And the last one is "how will it fit into the game". It doesn't matter if you meet the weapon only once in a blue moon, if the weapon completely ruins the gameplay for everyone else when it's used "because it does what it's supposed to" (read: It does it's real-life role without consideration of balance) then it doesn't do what it's supposed to.

Also considering infantry quite literally need to be segregated and all bases that we've seen that didn't prevent vehicles from firing into important infantry routes of a base are easily curbstomped by vehicles, vehicles more than do what they are supposed to do.

This is called "things change". Imagine a world where every tank actually uses a Graphene compound, or other future material with good qualities (Boron Nitrate in the same shape as Carbon Nanotubes which are itself Graphene mats rolled up have wonderful properties as well, not just radiation shielding: http://www.bnnt.com/resources/applications/radiation-shielding), was used in every single tank. A light tank would sport enough armor to make a battleship jelous, and most kinetic kill projectiles would become obsolete as the size of the canon would be multiple times larger than the actual tank's chassis to defeat it.

So you need to find a new method to destroy the vehicle, and the game quite literally throws you the alternative in your face: Nanites (and the super-acids and other chemicals you could build to turn a vehicle to dust). A sophisticated nanite is required to construct a vehicle in less than a second. It needs to be sophisticated as it requires to know the big picture it's building and still work on a nano-scale so that every piece of the vehicle or infantry comes where it's supposed to go, this is why you pay "nanites" to buy a vehicle: Quite literally the mass of nanites required to build your vehicle and keep it alive when it gets damaged. But a nanite designed to deconstruct does not have any such problems. It can be so cheap compared to the construction nanites that it's virtually costless.
Put that in your gun, fire it at the enemies armor and have the nanites eat through the armor as they quite literally turn it to dust. There can be different deconstruction nanites, each with their own molecular shape and specific pattern of deconstruction. Each pattern of deconstruction has a different strength against different materials, so something that can chew through tank composites might have trouble chewing through the skin of an infantryman. The explosions you see are mostly from the speed at which the nanites work: As they tear molecular bonds apart and disassemble the target in less than a second a large amount of heat is generated which causes the air to react with the dust that is released. This also explains why C4 is so powerful: These are deconstruction nanites of a high sophistication (hence you pay for them) that can target and disassemble at a much higher rate. The differences between HESH and AP also become clear: HESH disperses it's nanites farther before they activate, meaning it has a larger radius where the nanites deconstruct but also less concentrated on the spot you hit.
But what about the velocities of the projectiles? They are all so slow! Well ofcourse they are! There's a number of reasons why you can't fire these at ludicrous speeds, for example the nanites would break if accelerated at too high velocities, or the nanites might go off inside the barrel as they are shock-activated upon firing and the shockwave pushing the shell out could cause them to activate.

Now a fool would start using exclusively the strongest of the strongest materials, which would make it easy to design a nanite that disassembles specifically that material. So smarter people design different Graphene-based compounds or other metamaterials for different vehicles and infantry. This might mean that infantry is actually vulnerable to penetration again depending on what kind of round hits them. This is why a tank round might not have the same killingpower as a knife or crossbow bolt. It's just not designed for it while the crossbow and knife are. They might have a few nanites on the blade, or a chemical that disassembles the outer armor of the infantry and then puts a lethal dose of some kind of chemical in their system (you might only need a scratch to deliver this). In the meantime the properties of the tank round do not allow for such chemicals or nanites because it would destroy it before it could be dangerous to the infantry.

I'm not mixing it up, it doesn't matter which round they all need to be balanced.

Or shooting them again, or driving away, or driving over them if you get the chance, or just tanking a hit and then blowing them away, or getting out after damaging them and killing them with your primary (works especially well against flying LA), or using your brains once in a while...

Maybe you haven't noticed, but vehicles require maybe 1/10th the skill of an infantryman to be effective. They don't need to pay as much attention, are protected against most attacks infantry can throw at them, if threatened they can always drive away/out of effective range and be repaired up for the next round within a minute, the only infantry attack that can actually kill them before they escape is a CQC attack that has a dozen different ways for the player to protect himself from it with one of the most effective one's being "just move". So the AP Python that is killing infantry by the bushel has reduced his skill requirement immensely by... Simply walking up to the terminal.

No way is anyone reading all of that.

I actually scrolled to find this comment, bravo! XD

I think it's a new record.

i did .. so your statement is false ..