There is a link between the rise of "infantryside" and the downfall of the games popularity

You wouldn't. Before that, tanks were glass cannons. Had to hold them back on the battlefield because they died really easily.

Statistics on prenerf HE completely tell a different story.
Also I highly doubt tanks were to blame in bases like scarred mesa prenerf, sub, or even aurax firearms. in fact so few bases are even viable to use HE that you might as well just have an AI topgun if you really want to shell a base. And by AI topgun, I mean on a harasser

Why is talking about Infantry AV strength so taboo?


I pointed this out in the OP abit.

It's not the dent in numbers which matters, it's the dent in the position of the numbers which determines who wins and who loses. Spawn positioning and spawning abilities have seen a lot of changes over the years because of this. You might note that in most bases now, the hard spawn points are far removed from the points of capture and defenders often have to travel through choke points or open areas to get to the point.

The rest of us don't play in competitive matches so we see tanks smash unsupported infantry pushes all the time and, in the many bases which still allow it in some form or other, crowd control of where defenders can and can't go.

It is truly unfair. And as personal preference I will allways prefer buffs

Then we buff vehicle armor til rocket damage seems nerfed

I prefer balance :3

A fascinating thread.

Why should numbers not matter? Why should we not be able to kill off infantry as infantry are able to kill off tanks?

And that's simply because most people lack the ability to work as a cohesive group. That's nothing on the fault of tanks (which are far too weak to begin with), but on the fault of infantry for lacking the coordination and training to make mincemeat of tanks.

Your question is a loaded question, it assumes tanks can be killed off permanently. You get killed in a tank, you respawn back, spawn it,drive it off from the vehicle bay back to the fight, and that's it. If you're a competent tanker, a 9 minute delay (the precious nanite argument) is not gonna do anything to you.

What do you expect, a populace of average gamers who want to spend an hour or two getting some bases and having fun to act as organized as a millitary platoon? You want 90% of the playerbase to quit tomorrow with your suggestions?

Yes tanks can be killed off permanently. Have you ever tried to revive a tank?

A 9 minute delay is an eternity compared to the fact that infantry have no such delay at all. It would only be fair if infantry also had a nanite cost to spawn.

So tankers need to be competent to "have fun" but infantry can be completely incompetent and still be assured their "fun"? That sounds totally fair and unbiased.

Tanks are respawnable just like infantry is, albeit with that delay mechanic in place, no one is talking about revives here.

If you have trouble with that delay, you are not playing smart with your tank, it's your problem, not a game problem, being able to spam force multipliers every minute would break the game.

Well hello Mr. Strawman, how are you today? No, incompetent tankers in a farming situation can have fun, but they mostly won't, because they'll have bad positioning and bad situational awareness. Incompetent infantry can zerg, camp a spawnroom and I guess, have some fun, but they're mostly going to get farmed by vehicles and other infantry. No argument of yours seen here.

What I do see though is a dodged question, your vehicle buffs would make 90% of the playerbase quit, and you know that.

The thread is 90% other people.

Here's the thing though. Infantry can afford to "not play it smart", yet still get the benefits from near instantaneous respawning and the ability to revive. Infantry never have to pay for their mistakes of playing dumbly.

Tanks, on the other hand, have to "play it smart" in order to survive. Why can't you see that this is unfair to tanks?

Why is it "my" problem if I don't play smart as a tank, but the "game's" problem if I don't play smart as infantry? Why can I spam infantry but not tanks?

This is at heart the double standard that proves why this game is highly biased towards infantry.

I am confident in my capability to utilize copious grenades and mines without too much downtime in between any particular application under normal conditions.

I don't believe that he believes that.

Where did you get this conclusion from? Infantry never pay for their mistakes of playing dumbly? Getting farmed is not a punishment in your book, I guess? Or, to set this in competitive terms, a dumb squad pushing out of the A point into the open to get mowed down, only to get the point lost and be unable to get it back, is not a paid mistake? Getting trapped in the spawn room because of their dumb rush? You seem to be either intelectually dishonest, or not really observant.

EVERYONE needs to play smart in order to survive and win. You want proof, there's plenty of videos of infantry squads holding down against many times their number of infantry enemies. Defending team loses because they do the automatic rush on point shoot what you see, while the attacking squad is in their positions, covering staircases and doorways and waiting for the enemy to come to their crosshairs. Defending team that overnumbers the attacking one gets farmed and loses the base, regardless of them being able to near instantly respawn. That's not punishment for playing dumb?

The double standard is in your head, as explained above.

Grenades and mines don't give you as much power as pulling armour does. They are also unable to be spammed with the nanite cost, just like in case of armour.

Dying as infantry carries no cost at all, bar the insignificant few seconds to respawn (which would also apply to the tank crew). Infantry can die over and over again and everything is fine and hunky dory.

A tank, on the other hand, actually costs resources so there is a cost to dying.

This is why infantry pretty much get to die for free. There is no cost for infantry death, only vehicle death. If you think infantry death carries a cost, tell me what that is in nanites (the only resource that matters in PS2).

But infantry can die and suffer no consequences. That's the problem with infantry. Infantry should carry a (lesser) nanite cost to respawn, just as tanks do. In that way it would be impossible to keep spamming infantry.

Punishment for losing a base carries... what cost again? There's really nothing at all lost until the continent itself is lost, which still carries no direct cost for infantry (nanite discounts only applying to vehicles or MAXes).

Face it, infantry have it extremely light in this game. When infantry die, it does not matter at all because they have lost and risked nothing in the attempt.

Technically there is one other resource that matters in this game: time, and in that an infantry death costs 15 seconds. 7 seconds if they have a spawn point close enough to quick-spawn at. Rockets actually are completely costless though, because an ammo box can restore them faster than you can fire them. No amount of spam will ever see you waiting for an ammo tick.

That said, 15 seconds is a joke and 7 seconds is even more so. I know people aren't going to like the idea of increased spawn times, they're going to trot out the same argument that led to the 7-second quick spawn in the first place, "but muh action!"

This is a big part of what's wrong with the core of the game: it has too much focus on getting people "into the action" with no downtime, to the point that it is detrimental to the game's balance. See: Redeployside. TTK threads. Zergs. The game has too many relics of small-squad arena-shooter game design that don't belong in a game of this scale.

I'd rather have tanks adequately suppress infantry into a room, choke holds are annoying and stupid to deal with, if it's a medic ball choke then what do you do? Take north grove and mao southeastern gate for example. Two bases with the point being double stacks but tanks can't clear a choke effectively. That's my only problem with HE, you trade AP for the ability to tickle infantry out to 5 meters with a ridiculously long reload, an MBT in this regard is less effective than a lighting or even a harasser since harassers can actually get into bases, beyond that MBTs are restricted to the AV role which is easily fulfilled with air, valks, gals, liberators and ESFs can actually do a sufficient amount of damage to vehicles, one for one I would say that air trumps land any day of the week.

This doesn't mean that air is OP however, it's doing what it's supposed to do, BUT EVEN THEN, we just got AI nosegun nerfs, why? Because they were good at AI, shocking, I know. Even now another nerf to the airhammer is going through pts, how many times are vehicle AI weapons going to take a hit and never get back up? **** sake, look at light PPA, HE MBTs, the duster, kobalt even underperforms next to the gauss saw, how does that make any sort of sense?