[Vehicle] Increase Rear Armor for all tanks.

let the strange discussion begin

Sunderers have extra rear armor.. (Battle Bus)

Lightning and MBT have an extreme weak rear spot.

No other vehicles have weak spots.

Could we please have some extra armor for the weak and under appreciated back side?

Sundy might be a bad example to use since IMO they might be TO durable compared to MBT's .. I don't think thats a lack of durability on the MBT's part ( considering it's spammability ) but too much on the Sundy's part ( considering it's weapon capability and deployment shield ) ..

Maybe tweak them both ..

Make MBT's a little more
And Sundy's a little less

The rear armor weakness for tanks adds some depth to the vehicle game, because it rewards you for outmaneuvering the enemy. It gives the light vehicles a much needed chance to beat heavy vehicles, but only if the heavy vehicle is caught off guard or out of position.

Harassers don't need this weakness because they're weak all over, and they're supposed to use speed to avoid damage.

Sunderers don't need this weakness since they're supposed to be support vehicles, and a directional weakness doesn't make sense for a deployed sunderer (there's no depth in outmaneuvering a stationary vehicle). The blockade sunderer is something of an anomaly, and it arguably needs tweaking.

The flash is one giant weak spot. It's supposed to avoid damage by cloaking.

Why not just give them much more armor in the front, and maybe a little more on the sides?

Make fights longer and more interesting, you reduce the significant infantry advantage against them, and the sunderer will be indirectly nerfed.

Plus your tank will actually feel more like a tank, instead of a means of carrying a gun into battle. Unless you use a Vanguard, that's a real tank right there.

Shave 20% off all directions from base Sunderer armor, and divide that 20% unto individual levels of Blockade Armor (which has four levels, so another 5% per level). That allows the Sunderer to maintain its status as a disposable spawn yet still be strong via its deployment shield, but as also well-armored troop transport, depending on how you fit it out. This doesn't get rid of the potential of a Blockade AMS either.

However,

Rear flanking is a core aspect of tank warefare in Planetside, though its significance is often questionable. By way of example, you need to trade exactly three rear shots on a Lightning using another AP Lightning to get even a single hit advantage (it takes 4 from the front) over attacking from any other direction. If you don't get the three rear hits, you're usually back to four hits (plus whatever else extra armor) and, of course, Fire Suppression restores the original shots to kill again. Short of misses from your opponent, going for rear armor is the only good equalizer in tank combat between different tanks.

..no , learn to drive. & no .. i play mostly lightning atm.

They just need to remove the extra bonus armor on the rear part of blockade armor. The reason it existed in the first place was because Sunderers had weaker armor in the rear so blockade armor had additional rear armor to equalize all sides. Then the rear armor weakness was removed but blockade armor was never changed.

Tanks in most games have less armor in the rear. I think it's something to do with the engine being back there, as well as the intent for the front and sides being used to take hits, versus the rear. So they reduce the armor in the rear, to reduce total weight of the vehicle. Less weight equals better acceleration, or you just use a bigger engine...

If anything, the sundee should be more vulnerable from the front, where it would take hits to it's engine.

Since I'm not a tanker, I can't speak on the tank-vs-tank issues. However, from an infantry perspective, I see tanks slaughtering Infantry at VERY high rates, versus the other way around. Not saying I want tanks to be nerfed; just that I see tankers complaining WAY too much about being killed, while they are getting easy kills from afar, with a vehicle that is immune to small arms fire, and can dodge dumbfire rockets at maximum range of their cannon's OHK distance. Like I said, purely from a Tank-on-infantry perspective.

Hell, I've even seen people asking for C4 against tanks to be nerfed... If someone manages to get that close with C4, that tanker and gunner deserves to die, for lack of situational awareness.

NO! I want the ability to rightfully OHK a smoking tank whenever I see its rear with my Lancer!
OR, you can keep infantry damage the same, but decrease the amount of vehicle damage to the rear of another vehicle, but that would REALLY kill the Magrider, so...
Meh.

Sunderers need less health. That is it.

I can't help but smile while reading this post.. as a year or so ago, forum goers were complaining that battles didn't last long enough, because Sunderers were too easy to destroy.

I'm beginning to think that there's no winning for SOE.

Now we have deployment shield and spitfire turrets.

So the OP wants to kill the flanking game. Welp, there goes the however-many-thousand certs I invested into MBTs and Lightnings specifically for this purpose, and one of the things I really enjoy doing in the game.

I'm all for a widening of the scale, though. Increase the health and damage output of ground vehicles somewhat, tweak resistance values to make tanks feel more 'tanky'. And yes, bring back HEAT splash-damage oneshots on infantry. This would naturally also require an(other) overhaul of the resource system to prevent excessive vehicle spam, since vehicles in general will contribute a lot more to the battlefield than they do now.

As it stands AV+Halberd MBT needs maximum of 15 seconds (Magrider) to destroy an unguarded sunderer. FIFTEEN max. Prowler and Vanguard do that in one less reload for 12 seconds time. Deployed Max-Anchor Prowler does that in ~9 seconds.

Seriously, this is long?

The flash has a serious weak spot, the unprotected bullet sponge sitting on top of it.

Sunderers are fine,tanks need to be much,much more durable. The problem with a sunderer is it's to defensible by infantry,damage should disable the AMS for a few seconds giving tanks the chance to destroy it without being swarmed. Infantry also need to be made much weaker versus vehicles and sunderer defense/destroy missions need to be implemented for tanks (whenever that's going to happen?) so that the playerbase can get away from the current strategy of spamming Heavy assaults and light assaults as the main method of vehicle control. Both sides should need tanks/vehicles present to control the fight,right now it's not really necessary enough.

Disagree heavily. The sunderer is supposed to be a transport and not the cheapest, most cost effective and ridiculously well armored vehicle in the game.
It needs to cost at least 100 more nanites to pull. And some armor debuffs. AMS will still be hard to kill because of the deployment shield.
And infantry does not need to be made weaker against infantry. That would be insane.

@ OP: no. position yourself properly and watch your flanks. Rear armor shoudl be weak.

why rear is weak spot? while infantry leaves from the left side.

I still remember how fast tanks died to stuff hitting their rear armor at launch (had no luck finding the pods vs MBT rear armor video), and tanks got a pretty substantial buff since then. Wouldn't push my luck. Last I knew 2 hits to the front more or less equaled 1 to the back, which is far less severe than it used to be.

And having a directional weakness does promote certain movement styles/helps punish overextending.

NO.

They need less armor.

Less health just means their damage can be repaired faster. Quicker to kill . ..when not getting repped. Exact same problem as now when getting repped.

Less armor means they take damage faster and can't repair the damage fast enough to completely tank incoming damage due to high armor blocking most of it. Problem solved.