inktomi19d

Every vehicle should have some sort of anti-personel weapon IMO. Without the main gun a tank can still run from other tanks, but if a tank comes under infantry attack the only escape is to fight. When armies have fielded vehicles with no machineguns, the crews have figured out ways to weld them on. I'm curious about how line-of-sight will work with infantry. Infantry can go invisible in high grass or shallow ditches. AFVs almost never see dismounts until the dismounts attack. I've had a dozen times playing OPFOR where an armored vehicle rolled up 20 meters from where I was hiding without seeing anything. I really think that the detection range from the vehicle should be extremely limited, except for through the gunner's sight or near where the gun is aimed.

Mortars are great against turrets if they aren't jammed. If they are jammed you're better off with a direct fire weapon, IMO.

The Hurricane is overpowered because of it's combination of firepower, mobility, and armor. I kinda like the Thor mortar, but since it's rounds have a much higher trajectory their flight time makes them impractical for use against moving targets. Also the Thor only moves at 25 km/h, making it an extremely easy target at any range. You can deal with a Thor mortar by changing direcctions every time it fires, and manuevering to where the armor is weaker. If a Hurricane is shooting on the move a 76 Paladin can't keep up with it, and certainly can't maneuver to fire on weaker armor. About the only things that kill Hurricanes reliably are ATGMs (while the target is moving slowly) or a well-placed 120 round (while the Hurricane is stopped). The problem is that since everything can be killed in one shot by the Hurricane, you need to be able to kill, disarm, or immobilize it in one shot, or it will kill you (even with a near miss) as soon as you reveal yourself. Because of the vehicle's speed and slope of the armor it's next to impossible to hit a critical system on it while it's moving. I really don't mind when the Hurricane is used as artillery. The sort of gun it has is just fine when fired from a more or less fixed position, the way the other mortars are generally used. If the Hurricane had to deploy anchors before firing I think it would be fine -- it would then need a team to support it and could be maneuvered against. I kind of like the power of the plasma mortar, I'd rather not see that go. But even if it never moves an inch from it's drop point or receives a bit of fire the Hurricane is already extremely useful. Maybe the craft should be *much* more fragile. Make the lift equipment as easily damages as tires, or make it so most hull shots disable the vehicle. Make it so that players think twice before driving out where they'll be shot at. It bugs me that a craft that can fire over obstacles and at such great distance is so often used at point-blank range. The only other solution I could see is to drastically limit the supply, to say one or two. It's pretty common to see 2 or 3 players using Hurricanes exclusively for 30 minutes, when other vehicles have been depleted. Since it takes such extreme effort to kill a Hurricane, killing one or two in a match should deprive your enemy of them. I pretty much only deploy Hurricanes as an emplaced gun, they just seem way too easy when they can roam.

I really don't think the Viper ought to be able to carry enemy vehicles. No real reason, there's just very little most vehicles can do about it. It's about as fun as getting 1-shotted by a Hurricane, except there's less defense against it and you're out of the fight longer. I'm not very keen on it working on flag-carriers either. Much of the fun in CTF is the chase. Having to dodge a whole team dropping on you with one of your wheels shot out is fun. Getting carried from one end of the field to the other isn't. I can't really give a reason why those two things shouldn't be the way they are, except that both of them limit the participation of other players. The Viper really functions in a whole different space from everything else.

I kinda think default bot drops need to be changed a bit. They shouldn't completely deplete the stocks of any item when they're autonomous. They should maybe check and not drop an item for which there is >20% of the starting inventory. It's fine if they do it when they're directed too, but since not every vehicle is equal at every point in the game, players should have the opportunity to drop vehicles that the bots quickly exhaust throughout the match. I don't mind that the bots prefer 120mm Thors and Shrikes, but I hate that players need to rush to get those or else the bots will have used them all up. I don't feel that giving the bots specific drop orders is a good enough substitute, because then they'll just use up a different item, and then use up the 120mm Thors and the Shrikes. Bots should require human input to drop something that's in short supply.

I really don't mind the Thor being tough to kill from the side. It's not exactly an MBT, it's more of a heavy tank. MBTs are intended to be the *only* tank used, so they sacrifice survivability from the sides and rear to achieve the speed they need to fill the light tank role. The Thor moves at 25 km/h, so it needs to take a few hits from the side. The Thor is more of an old-style heavy tank. I think much of the focus on the Thor is because that's what the bots will drop in absence of other orders. I generally pick a 76 truck for my first drop on the green map, because I'll need to cover the 4-5 kilometers from my LZ to the objective quickly. For a rolling attack, the best tank is the Apollo. The Thor is probably the worst vehicle in the game for an attack -- it's only useful when you can drop it within 1000m or so of where you intend to fight. Most players will chose other vehicles most of the time, so players are almost always more vulnerable. The only reason killing Thors seems so important is that bots prefer them. But bots in Thors are easy to disable. If you get a chance for a side or back shot on a Thor and you shoot the hull instead of the turret, you're wrong. Ammo storage takes up about a third of the Thor's turret, making it an easy target, and 76 AP will get a mission kill in 1-3 hits there. With 120mm HEAT you can destroy the ammo on practically every shot. The only vehicles I can think of which should be easier to damage are the hovercrafts and the Cutter. The hovercrafts' armor is well-angled from every direction, and they're the most difficult targets in the game to hit. The Cutter just seems to have a *lot* of empty space inside, and it's difficult to find components. Paladins can take a few hits, especially from the front, but their wheels are easily damaged even when not hit directly. Also, Paladins are not armored cars -- the armored car chassis is the Shrike, and center-mass hits with HE will kill those. Paladins are a 20-30 ton wheeled AFV, and real-life vehicles in that class tend to be very resilient, especially to HEAT rounds. It's not unreasonable to think it would take more than one round to kill them, although they seem to take damage from most side attacks.

I'd find HE a lot more useful if it were more accurate. It's barely accurate enough to hit buildings, and it's useless against turrets or vehicles unless you're at very close range. HE is very effective against fast-moving wheeled vehicles -- any hit or near miss will likely destroy tires, making it good to use against targets which are moving too erratically to line up a killing shot. Against a lightly armored target like a shrike, a center-mass hit with 120 HE will kill it from any angle. The only downside is that HE scatters so much that whether you hit or not is pretty random.

I really don't mind the vehicles rolling so easily. It's really only a problem at full throttle, and armored vehicles have problems with roll-overs at full throttle. Accidents still cause more deaths among soldiers than hostile fire does. Humvees roll easily, Strykers roll easily, M113s roll easily. M1s and Bradley's don't roll quite so easily, but they do roll. 40 km/h is fast enough that a wheeled vehicle might flip while traveling cross country; 60 km/h is fast enough to flip while turning on a level paved surface. I'm not sure if I've ever rolled a vehicle in DropTeam that was traveling less than 60 km/h; most rolls occur at top speed which is 70-100 km/h depending on the vehicle and terrain. I really think there needs to be a speedometer on the third-person view, just to keep speed in perspective.

I'd give myself a headache trying to figure out the flash-to-bang range on maps with different atmospheres, but yeah, that would be cool.

Mortar smoke is used, but tanks pretty much just use HEAT and sabot. The philosophy seems to be that tanks are there to kill other tanks, and other roles fall to lighter vehicles. It would be great if we could get mortar smoke, or maybe smoke generators/launchers on the armored vehicles. Smoke tends to even things out for lighter/weaker forces.

I think a lot of it has to do with the attitudes of people playing. Right now we're a lot more focussed on the individual game, because it's new to us. I kinda think that there just needs to be a bit more time before you start seeing tight team tactics.

I've had good luck shooting at turret sides and backs with the 76mm. I normally aim center-mass on the hull with any other gun.

There is an option, but I missed it too. There's an "advanced" button that will light up when you select the aiming control, and you can adjust sensitivity and invert the axis from a dialogue that pops up. It just wasn't very obvious how to invert the y axis just scanning over the control setup.

I noticed the same thing. Other weird thing is that It would sometimes launch at some targets, but not others. It seemed like I had sort of a dead zone in part of my turret traverse.

I can notice the change to tracked vehicle responsiveness. It seems about right, though the tendency to spin out on the ice map still bugs me, especially while neutral steering. The change to penetration angle seems right too, though it makes things more difficult while using the 20mm. Making the 20mm a bit less useful is not a bad thing IMO.