Why NS vehicles actually don't make balance any easier

So I've been taking a bit of a break from planetside after the last patch broke hit detection and I come back and see this new NS tank concept. A heavy tank to "end the crewed tank debate once and for all" except it doesn't.

Tanks and tank balance have real problems right now, from every point of view tanks are in a bad spot.
Consider this: The magrider has maintained a very high gunner percentage in comparison to its counterparts, it has been balanced so as to perform at or under the same level as its enemy despite this (so while there are literally twice as many "fully manned" mags they don't outperform the prowler in any category except life length)

We have been told several times that adding an NS vehicle/weapon is easier to balance than adding 3 ES ones, this has become a widely accepted view.
I believe this to be false.
take the harasser example, on the surface you could say it proves the rule right saying that as soon as they mounted ES weapons on it there was a problem except we know it was a problem before hand and adding a pseudo ES system just made the existing problems worse.

The harasser as it was introduced performed essentially the same role as the magrider did, a mobility based vehicle that got its primary damage from its gunner. In many ways it managed to obsolete the mag in this role which lead to a real stir over why the mag had to be poor at both the mobile vehicle role and the heavy tank role. Many of my gunners began to refuse to gun my mag and instead gun harassers, it became an outfit requirement to have a certed harasser and gun and be proficient with it.

The thing is that while harassers were unbalanced for everybody, they weren't necessarily unbalanced for everybody the same way as we all have separate ways of dealing with enemies.

The magrider never recieved the "anti mobility vehicle" buff the vanguard and the prowler got

While the striker's fast lockon was great for dealing with them the charge time for the lancer and the poor maneuvering of the pheonix made them subpar

The addition of non specialized for the job ES weapons made this even worse, NC guns were not made for the harasser at all and the saron was arguably made worse for its original platform to accommodate the changes while the vulcan/marauder and harasser combo thrived.

What we got was the negatives of ES equipment and the negatives of NS equipment all thrown into one package.


Is it really easier to make one NS vehicle balanced against three different arsenals and still be complimentary existing vehicles?

OR

Do we make 3 vehicles, purpose built not to obsolete your old arsenal and does not need to be able to be killed in a balanced manner with your own equipment while still being a fun experience?

If the NS heavy tank comes through:

vanguards have no reason to exist, lightnings take care of the main zerg tank guys. harassers are fast and nimble, NS tank gets the hardcore tanker crews

TR lightnings STILL only exist for the skyguard

Magriders are further marginalized as now teams have a much stronger platform to work with, they will migrate to the NS tank for real tanking and to the harasser for real mobility. Plus such a tank is likely to have high velocity rounds further weakening the strafe ability.

Lancers and pheonixes will be really effective while the striker will be lacking.


Just because its the same between factions does not make it mesh with each faction equally.

I hate to sound stupid but...

What NS tank?

You've been going to reddit behind our backs havent you

..and yes my main community is reddit..

I still dont think im getting the whole point. By some guessing i'd say that it looks pretty fast, has a double barrel and is probably weak with slightly less firepower.

Seems like an intermediate between MBT/Lightning. I agree that adding NS things doesnt necessarily balance them but i dont really have enough information to tell if this will be stronger than normal MBTs or lightnings.

You'e making predictions of future events that you cannot possibly pre-determine. I'm putting this in the paranoia pile until we see what happens.

Except that those guns on it are the same as the big gun inside Tech Plants...

And it's named the Colossus...

I have a feeling the colossus will be a super heavy tank with It's own specialised manufactory. Main Battle Tanks will still be the bread and butter of tank combat but the super heavy tank will be a objective in It's self to accuire and take down.

You have to think each of those treads is about the same size of a harasser.

and the MBTs are called Manguard/ PROWLAAHHHH/ lamerider

This. It must be at least 4x the size of an MBT.

Just saying it's probably pretty big. Those Tech Plant guns can give us some scale, and the name Colossus generally implies very large size.

To be completely honest i dont think it looks like a tech plant gun.

Tech plant guns are a square base with a round barrel sticking out. This has 2 barrels a slightly curved base with more of an oval shape.

Can't possibly predict eh?
Add revolvers -obsoletes rebel but was a viable trade off gun for other factions
Add harasser -performs much better for one faction than the others and largely replaces one factions vehicle
Add NS series main weapons, NS-11A is a good choice for VS but poor others and makes the CME obsolete, NS15M is worthless for the VS but has considerable benefits for NC/TR
Add NS SMG -doesn't obsolete anything only because it is in general inferior for most people.
Burster -performed much better for VS/TR than NC do to factional abilities
Liberator -performed much much better for TR than other factions during the reign of the striker
Lightning -invaluable for NC/VS but fairly irrelevant for the TR

its not just a paranoid prediction if it's got a 85% success rate

the barrel is very similar and the two lights on the housing are the same. They are clearly based off each other.

either way it is definitely intended to be the crewed super tank, though only in the conceptual stage.

To give you a idea of It's scale those round nubs above the front treds are secondary weapon mounting points, eg that's were the basalisk turrets go.

Let's ignore the NS MBT issue for now since that lies in the realm of speculation, and focus more on the Lightning. Mostly, let's focus discussion on the Lightning and how it meshes with empire specific Armor. We can not discuss the Harasser due to poor implementation of its access to empire specific weaponry, on top of initially being poorly balanced against any other vehicle in the game that wasn't itself.

Common pool stuff is lazy game design. We have plenty of lasy base design already. So I'm totally against it.

NS anything short of bases should die in a fire. I was led to believe this game had 3 factions, not 4.

Paranoia or not, Dax brings up a good point. The devs will have to be careful when creating more NS vehicles and take all factions into consideration instead of being lazy because everyone will have access to them. I would hate to see a faction-agnostic tank replace a faction-specific tank because they have most of the same traits (slow, heavy armor, high damage = Vanguard).

I'm not sure how I feel about the Collosus but its scale makes me think that it would be used in special events only. Maybe a special alert type will make use of these, I don't know. I can't imagine people pulling it like normal tanks as this thing looks as big as a building. There's no way it will fit on the vehicle spawning pads we have now.

I wouldn't worry, its just a bit of concept art that we wont see in the game, just like those new HA models.

I doubt there's any chance of the Colossus replacing ES tanks. The sheer size (and likely low speed) render it far less mobile, and mobility is very important to survival for any vehicle. It will likely have very heavy spawn restrictions like spawnable from Tech Plants only. Any Colossus will likely attract so much fire that it will have its own squad of engineers on permanent repair duty in order to stay alive.

In any but the most restricted terrain, MBTs would be able to hit and run a Colossus. Whittle down its repair crews, hit it in the sides, and so on and so forth.

I'm a big proponent of empire specific gear, but for something whacky like the Colossus is it actually necessary? We won't even see it that often. It just seems redundant, like having an empire-specific Flash.

If they are going to put in two more ES vehicles, I'd much rather they did it for the Harasser category of vehicles... Where's my TR battle truck?