Stop allowing mines to be laid right on enemy vehicle

The issue is that the blockade armor sunderer dampens all sources of damage except Tank Mines. Players are detonating their own Tank Mines or creating situations that cause them to be detonated by breaking them in order to work around this. Tank Mines should have to be used in their intended role if you want to use them cheaply, IE you have to use them a booby-traps and not as an offensive blunt force weapon.

Blockade Armor actually makes no mention of being totally ineffective against Tank Mines. Infact it even adds armor to the underside of your vehicle though it doesn't mention it directly. The description does say it defends from attacks.

Well people are using mines to attack so something must be awry here.

Reduce the DMG of mines but make it so you can place much more.
Insert a range limitation between mines deployement so you c'ant place 3 or more mines on each other (1 meter between each mine sounds good).
And also add a non-deployement zone outside the vehicules spawn points.

1&2: A mine explodes by proximity motion detection. It's the best explanation. They take a few seconds to activate though. So throwing mines on top of a moving tank will not auto-detonate them. I've seen tanks drive over my mines 3 times before they activated and exploded.

the 'stupid' strategy is one of the reasons I can get so many kills. Anticipate people! Place the Sunderer in a way that you know where your enemy is coming from. Than place AI mines there. Occasionally you'll get a random kill and you know you need to place a few new mines around the Sundy.

Alternatively, if your enemy always comes with a Flash, you can place AT mines. By happy coincidence I had the most wonderful day yesterday: 3 flashes with engineers on them tried to C4 my Sundy, each managed to hit one of my mines. 3 flash kills, 3 engi kills, case closed.

Putting AT mines in the right spot helps for other things. When Tanks move up on a Sunderer they become so CONCENTRATED. They pay attention to infantry and the angle they have on the Sunderer... and forget all about AT mines. No one places AT mines near Sunderers, I don't know why, because you can get multiple tank kills that way.

Learn to defend your sunderer people! It's a core aspect. The Sundy was made vulnerable for a reason, but you have all the equipment you need to defend it.

I like you sir

I think C4 needs to have a 3 second timer when placing. C4 is overused and abused, and you should get a greater reward for a kill because of it. Sneaking up on a vehicle takes skill (or luck) and the reward should outweigh the risk.

Tanks have no idea how powerful they have become. Not only can they survive multiple explosive warheads striking them, they can stay at maximum operative capacity all the time except when burning, when they move slower. Hell, they can repair themselves on the fly!
That's nothing compared to the other thing they now have: awareness. In RL a tank is very dependent on information from infantry and command to designate targets. There was even a movie about is a year or two ago. And you know what? Most tank commanders had no idea what the hell they were shooting at.
Oh, and let's not forget: You can steer and shoot at the same time. Most tanks use different methods, such as one driver, a tank commander and a gunner if not more.

Considering all that as well as the age they live in (assuming some kind of multi-spectrum interference requiring a more WWII style combat), it's actually surprising that infantry doesn't have MORE powerful weapons against tanks. Shaped charges the size of a hand grenade that can blow straight through a tank wouldn't surprise me... if you don't use one of the shiny ultra-acidic compounds we have at hand today... we even have bunkerbuster missiles capable of digging through the ground at several miles an hour before detonating and blowing through several meters of reinforced concrete. Why not use a small rocket-version that digs through enemy armor with a delayed fuse to detonate... oh wait we already do
At which point we come at reactive armor and a whole slew of counter doodads we might as well avoid. I would personally say that this is the crux of why infantry is so powerful: Tanks might ram explosives up eachother at high-speeds, but this sets off the reactive armor, thus reducing the damage. C4 and mines on the other hand explode close enough to avoid this system.

Back to topic.
A mine-run with an engineer is a viable strategy. You are attacking a spawnpoint where every minute multiple people spawn. The fact that these people have 0 awareness of possible enemies at the Sunderer is THEIR problem. If you teach your guys some awareness...
Example, here is how I do a Sunderer spawn: Spawn. Check environment in case infiltrator is next to me for cheap kills, check Sunderer health&check radar for enemy flash signatures, check for engineers. If I think engineers is likely, place some mines (AI if they come walking, AT if tank/flash attacks are likely). Then I head to the objective again. This all takes mere seconds, and if multiple people do it you will rarely have to renew mines or repair the Sunderer. Occasionally I go infiltrator, place some darts and check the surroundings manually to see if someone is trying to approach. This works in discouraging engineer incursions and forces people to use Gal/ESF drop tactics or brute force.
With just ONE guy doing that you can save the sundy multiple times. If you have a Squad all doing that... you can create a minefield and awareness that the engineers are just going to give up.

EEEEEEEEHHHHHHHH... If this should happen to anyone, it should be the NC and the TR. Alien guns are too advanced and well-developed to have room for errorXD

It's unlikely that they are still using actual C4, especially the fact that these DO explode when shot shows this. Adding more explosive charge to it... I don't see no reason why it should decrease effectiveness. These things were made to explode quickly with a few bullets, and you see the effectiveness isn't reduced. So their design is so that before the damage starts messing with the effectiveness you have already triggered the device itself.

They could have been more aware. They could have placed mines. If you aren't planning on doing a mine run yourself, just place a few mines out! AT mines would have blown your lightning up. AI mines at the corners would likely have blown you to pieces. Defense success

Perhaps AV mines should do far less damage if triggered by shooting them - after all many AV mines in real life depend on shaped charge effects to deliver a targeted blast - rather than relying on pure brute force. Detonating an anti vehicle mine on the top or side of a tank would be far less effective than under it as much of the blast would be directed away from the tank (i.e. out of the top of the AV mine) - PS2 should probably reflect that.

AV mines should not be an alternative to C4 - their roles should be distinct.

Why the hell would I even bother laying mines if all they do is destroying flashes and telling the enemy that somebody prepared a welcome for them? There is a reason why I lay mines always in packs of 2, namely because just stopping a vehicle for a quick repair will cost the enemy less time in their advance than it took me to place the damned things.

A. Mines should take a few seconds to setup where you aren't being shot, when people lay mines they don't just chuck em around like frisbees they very carefully lay them and arm them. This would make it impossible to do this tactic unless the sundie was undefended but not make them useless.

B. C4 should be thrown faster... this drives me so insane when I'm trying to place it on tanks and they get away because you throw it like a child underwater

When I visited the 1st régiment de spahis in valence (9 years ago), one guy told me about the M401 COTAC (automatic fire driving for tanks) a feature equiped on every AMX 10 RC present there, that allows the gunner to shoot on the move moving targets without aiming more than a second, the tank doing all the further calculations and adjustments, leaving to the gunner only to press the trigger whenever he wants to. US army has devices able to automatically prevent detonation of explosives such as rockets or bombs when they come close to the tank/transport. (with limitations, of course).

Now these things have existed for a while, but none of them exist in planetside 2. Nothing more about armor penetration and angle. It's like when your rocket hits the tank, whatever the angle, it will deal a set amount of damages, weird, huh? Like it sorta get through the armor, but not really?
Tanks are everything but realistic, and it applies on both how they are played, and how they are countered.

As I said, it would take many mines to guarantee a person cannot do this. But to see a haraser come crashing full speed into the sundar (so you will NOT destroy the harasser before that happens) then the guy is being shot at by many people but can still drop the mines in time for them to destroy the sundar, that's just a bit ridiculous. I do this time and again against sunders now that I've seen it and it makes me laugh how easy it is because only a hard core outfit will stop you. If 10 guys can barely stop you, if you think 2 or 3 people defending will stop you, you're making things up to keep this foolish game mechanic abuse alive.

Exactly. If undefended, then let them set the charges. If you're in combat, then you should not be allowed to say "Hold on while I toss this mine and it gets set up perfectly all on it's own from me just chucking it".
But of course until they fix it I'll continue to suicide using harassers to easily take out sundars so that more people will realize how stupid it is to need a half dozen+ full time defenders LOOKING for this tactic to stop this nonsense.

This is far from historically accurate, and probably quite incorrect. Compared to WWII, modern tanks have fewer threats on the battlefield compared to back in WWII.

This is largely because even though infantry AT weapons are "more powerful" when compared to WWII equivalents, tank armor has improved at a much faster rate. This results in modern infantry AT weapons being much heavier, expensive, and rare than their WWII counterparts.

For example, a WWII 149mm panzerfaust was 6.25kg... whereas the modern 105mm RPG-29 is 18.8kg. There were 6 million panzerfausts made by the Germans... whereas RPG-29s are still relatively rare.

In other words tanks in WWII had to contend with many more threats on the battlefield, where many soldiers in an enemy platoon might be armed with AT weapons that were effective against medium tanks. Today, out of a rifle platoon of 40, there might be only 2 AT weapons to go around, and these might not even be able to penetrate MBT armor. Much of the heavy ATGMs have been moved beyond the platoon level.

The only thing that is as effective against tanks today as it was in WWII are AT mines... tanks still have to fear those. But in most other respects tank technology has improved much more rapidly than infantry AT technology... this is largely because most military doctrines call for enemy armor to be engaged by air or other armor assets. Infantry AT weapons are seen more as a case of last resort or if no other options are available.

There aren't many explosives that are designed to explode when hit by something else, because again explosives are a rather delicate and precise process. If you want a shaped charge to perform properly or an explosively formed penetrator to form and penetrate, you'll need a very even and controlled detonation, something which a bullet or another grenade cannot do.

This is a shaped charge:



Not only must it be pointed in the right direction and placed a certain distance away from whatever it's blowing up, it also must have an even detonation so that all sides of the main charge detonate at the same time. If you were to shoot it or use a grenade to set it off on one side, it would most likely just topple over and do negligible damage to the target. Even if it did explode instead of falling over, the uneven detonation would mean that one side of the explosive would detonate first... ruining the shaped cavity and resulting in a less optimal detonation. This is why more explosives don't make shape charged explosives better... they make them much worse.

Which is why shooting at a C4 explosive in PS2, even if it's not C4, shouldn't allow it to do the same amount of damage as a carefully placed and detonated C4.

Reduce mine cost
Increase the amount of total mines (both AI and AV) to about 20 (10 for the first level and 10 more for the second)
Reduce mine damage by 50%
Add EMP mines (that disable vehicles in their effect field for 15 seconds)
Add a mine counter for engineers

As it stands the only reliable way to kill vehicles with 2 mines is the pizza delivery special. No one likes it, but it works.

I stand corrected . I don't do this extensive research in military technology.

I like to have some plausible explanation for why we use WWII style equipment. Since you blew mine to pieces can you supply me with a new one?

Again, this is a problem of the defenders, not your tactics. If they had placed AT or AI mines you would have easily been thwarted. If they had more awareness they could have spotted you beforehand and tried to do something.
On the other hand, you did need to pay a Lighting, some mines and a grenade to blow up that Sunderer. With the resource revamp coming up that will become a lot more costlier since you won't be able to buy a stash when you are high on resources.

Well the "real" explanation is that in modern warfare infantry have a much more diminished role than armor and air. Of course infantry still have a role, but in modern mechanized militaries infantry aren't too far from tank, air, or artillery support. In such a way most of the heavy weapons have been shifted to non-infantry units... the amount of damage a single cluster bomb can do launched from a jet outpaces what a platoon of infantry can do by so much... that infantry are generally reserved for times when you don't want to blow everything up.

PS2 is a game, and many people enjoy playing as infantry rather than as tanks or air. So if PS2 were "realistic" most of these infantry players would find themselves as puddles of goo and it would make lots of people unhappy... so things are dialed back to an age where infantry were far more important.

Though I would argue that even WWII is too generous... I'd say something like the Middle Ages would be more appropriate, with tanks and air tacked on as window dressing. Ever since WWI (and probably a few minor wars before), artillery has been the leading killer in modern warfare, accounting in WWI for some 60% of casualties. Small arms can account for as low as 5% of casualties/deaths... infantry in war aren't all that dangerous (relatively). Infantry are just there to find you and keep you busily fixed in one spot, while artillery (and in modern days airstrikes) wipe you out.

Whereas in the early Middle Ages it was often all about waves of infantry crashing into each other and essentially invincible fortifications (in the pre-artillery age). Hence why PS2 is essentially medieval in military complexity. We don't have anything that remotely approaches the dynamic warfare of WWII... just try to blitzkrieg any base in PS2, and you'll quickly find out that such tactics don't work. There are no lines. There are no logistics. It's essentially "defend the castle".

The "lore" explanation... uhhh... nanites? There's no non-gameplay reason why things in PS2 are as they are... so "nanites".

I agree that Harassers are too hard to kill and were the beginning of the downfall of this game.
Anytime you have a super-fast dune buggy that's more powerful then a tank it's an issue.