With Fridays stream it got me thinking about how many players are going to be able to fit into vehicles in relation to there roles and felt it would be a good thing for us all to have a discussion about it. So i have done a little research and come up with some data based on lore + the stream. *first some notes. 1) it is assumed that all rhino variant vehicles have storm bolters 2) the predator is based off the stream that showed 5 player slots 3) the rhino in the stream looked more like a Damocles Command Rhino but i am treating them as two separate vehicles with different roles. Something i am a little concerned with is that almost an entire squad may be able to deploy from a Razorback if the drivers and gunners get out to. I fear this may make a standard rhino a little redundant as having a big gun on your transport and still being able to move potentially 9 players around may be to big an advantage over the rhino. Although it is unclear as to what affect RP will play in this. The role of the command rhino intrigues me, i do hope it is more than simply a mobile spawn point, my hope is that is somehow linked into the how commanders get more information about there forces in the field and other high level command functions that basically make them mobile command and control points.
Nice work. Hopefully the higher requisition cost will prevent this problem, as a pred should be about 3 times the cost of a rhino (going by tabletop to start). Also, you forgot land raiders (1 driver, 4 gunners, transport capacity varies based on pattern. 10, 12, and 16 for the regular, redeemer, and crusader respectively if I remember correctly).
i only did the rhino variants as we are not even sure if the land raider will be making it in for launch
i think that it's more probable a single land raider variant (for transport terminator) than see vindicator and whirlmwind.
i dont expect to see those at launch ether, i just included them for Rhino variant completeness of the list. the Rhino variants i am expecting to see at launch are the first 4.
I hope that the Damocles rhino add-on requires considerably more requisition than the normal rhino (and possibly predator) for it to become a mobile-spawn point. As cheap spawn points will encourage zerging. As with the Razorback I see it costing more requisition to create one than the Rhino (hopefully) and it's probably down to the squad-size or danger on which variant is chosen
This should help balance things out, yes. Is a Rhino really capable of transporting 10 people, and a gunner and driver ? Because, proportions-wise based on the stream, that doesn't seem very.. realistic. I hope this is not the case. Anyhow, that number could be tweakable, to help balance the Rhino, depending on how much rage they get for "lore-bending" that aspect. There should also be a limit on the amount of vehicles you can spawn, and of each. I think it'd be entirely unfair if one player runs around doing nothing but placing Damocles-spawn-points everywhere. You could limit each type of vehicle to 1 per player. Alternatively, when a vehicle is fielded by a player, reserve some (possibly heavy portion) of their requisition, to limit their further zergings.
Repairing vehicles will be a bit of an issue, I suggested that only a mech unit, like a techmarine could repair vehicles. This will add to the rarity of vehicles on the battlefield and also add to the role of tech units. But how will the animations work? Will the tech unit hold out their hands or whatever device they have and do what engineers do in battlefield or will there be more work involved? These are big issues, but they can be solved easily. I'd say just follow battlefield on this, but make it take longer and be set in stages or something.
