This has been bugging me for a while. I've seen lots of posts about how vehicles under-perform and infantry are super-powerful. I've seen plenty of counter-points raised about how vehicles farm infantry, etc. And my conclusion is that the biggest issue is the game doesn't really lend itself to combined arms, but instead simply combines infantry play and vehicle play within the same arena. From what I can see, at no point do vehicles enable infantry. There are no hazards that require a vehicle to destroy or push through to allow the infantry to advance. The vehicles themselves handle too unpredictably (especially the magrider!) to be viable as mobile cover for friendly troops. In fact, the only really significant blockers to progress are vehicle shields, where in a turn-about it is infantry who have to enable the progression of vehicles! But vehicles don't capture points, so what the infantry are really doing is simply enabling the progress of AMS sunderers. For the vehicle/infantry 'balance' to mean something, the game needs to provide more opportunities for vehicles to actually support infantry. Things like shields that stop all enemies (infantry and vehicle alike) which require heavy ordinance on a generator to disable. Want to get past this checkpoint? Better bring a tank, and better make sure that tank is protected while it does its job. There's also very little in the way of infantry traps that vehicles can neutralise. The only one I see on occasion is simply distance. No barbed wire. No chain-link fence equivalent (a forcefield that stops infantry but not vehicles), no barriers to infantry progress that vehicles can remove. Things like this will, IMO, do wonders for the combined arms nature of the game. When tanks have a role beyond simply blowing up other tanks (which are only there themselves to blow up tanks) and are able to support an infantry push with more than prowler-HE, I think we'll see a healthier balance of vehicles and infantry actually working together.
lots of good ideas! i could see some sort of awesome forcefield maze setup that is similar to barbed wire that tanks can cross through but infantry cant. everyone can shoot through it, so tanks have to push through and help kill a generator to shut it all off to allow better attacker flow.
