if your going to fully expose the tank and rotate to face your enemy it will take (random numbers here): 1 second to move out of the cover + 2 seconds to rotate now backing to safety you do the reverse: 2 seconds to rotate + 1 second to backup to your cover (that is assuming reverse speed/acceleration is the same) you where fully exposed for about 5-6 seconds. Now assuming the turret is in the middle of the tank, you would only be partially and you could be safe within a second. In conclusion even if you do take a bit more dmg from the side in the end it is still a safer approach. Can't say WoT is a good game for comparison, that game is biased toward heavy tanks and everything else gets 1-shoted, which makes sense since the role of heavy tank is to combat tanks and there is nothing else in the game. I would expect tanks in this game to be very resource heavy but will also take a lot of punishment.
Not sure how this can be balanced with the other Factions. I myself am a Dark Angel through and through and in particular i love to field Ravenwing armies, so it all sounds great to me, however some of the other factions might find it difficult to compete with an equal number of vehicles. perhaps just a bike/jetbike, a transport and a tank for each faction at launch? Then they can introduce other vehicles in a measured and balanced way. In any case they're great suggestions Khanistrello! IB
Progress! I love it. I agree with nearly everything Khan said with the only exception of being unable to leave the vehicle, I think like many have stated it should be an animation for disembarking and getting in. Making it so, if you plan to get out, better be worth it.
I've generally seen two ways to handle this problem: Make the facing "arc based". This is a very simplistic but effective method that determines armor facing using the location of the attacker (which "facing arc" you're standing in) rather than the actual point of impact. With this system, if you're standing within a 45 degree cone to the tank's front, you will hit the front armor no matter which part of the tank your shot actually hits. Very simple and easy to implement, but it can largely negate the usefulness of guided weapons or weapons with an arc (if you have top armor). It can also be hard to tell which facing you're in if you're near a boundary, so you could think you're shooting side armor but you're really in the front arc. Depending on how much difference that makes, it could cause frustration and break immersion. Planetside 2 is an example of this system. Modify effective armor by angle of impact. This is more complex and mathematically intensive, but produces more intuitive and immersive results (ie a shot arced over long distance would actually hit the top, guided missiles could actually be guided into the side or rear). While there are a large number of factors that could come into play regarding terminal ballistics, in its most basic form (ie a rough approximation rather than a full simulation) it would be applying trigonometry to determine how much material the round actually has to penetrate. Let's have A stand for Armor, E for Effective Armor, and I for Angle of Impact. The armor formula would then be E=A/sin(I). (to visualize this, imagine a triangle consisting of the armor's surface as one side, a line perpendicular to the surface as the other side, and the shot's trajectory as the hypotenuse) Here's an example of some common angles (in degrees) and their effective armor multiplier (ie the reciprocal of sin(I)): 30=2 45=Sqrt(2) 60=2/sqrt(3) 90=1 As you can see, it doesn't take long before you're better off shooting the front just to get a better angle. The main downside is that this would make Eldar vehicles hilariously tough due to their shape (and kind of hard to calculate impact angles for), though this can be compensated for by nerfing their base armor to keep them fragile. Edit: Here's a picture Imagine this drawn over a plate of metal as thick as the green line is tall. The blue line is the inner surface of the plate, which is parallel to the outer surface. The green line is how much armor you have at 90 degrees, while the red line is how much armor you have at angle A. As you can see, the red line is bigger.
I know this hasn't been a very popular opinion and has already been shot down, but I wanted to put my opinion on the matter in (sorry I'm a little late, I've been gone a while). To be honest, I've never seen a better suggestion for balancing mass tanks than Khanistrello's suggestion of MBT (not transport) drivers unable to get out. Sure, have your tank, have it as much as you want/can afford it and have it be really powerful (as it should be, it's a 40k tank). But it's going to come with a big trade-off: you can't just get out whenever you want and run to the objective for points and then run back. You trade your mobility and diversity to be that giant-death-machine you've always wanted. This way only those really dedicated to tank support (or just armor and 'splosions ) take tanks, and not just every person who wants to lone-wolf it and have transportation and massive firepower along the way. I get why most people want to get out of their tanks. I do. It's not hard to understand. They want to be able to rampage around for as long as possible in a giant-death-machine that shoots explosions and has armor measured in inches, and when it finally gets close to blowing up, they can hop out and be perfectly fine to rampage around in whatever capacity they can after that. The problem is with these masses of people taking tanks because they can, not with the people who genuinely like a tank experience. I see it as a compromise: let those who love tanks have a very powerful tank in which they can live out their dreams of rumbling, clanking death (I don't deny that's freaking awesome) but make it come with a mobility/versatility trade-off. If you love to drive tanks, for the sake of driving tanks, this little setback shouldn't be that big of a deal, as long as the tank drivers have their own way to contribute and earn XP. I couldn't think of how though, maybe by blowing people and other vehicles up? (! or perhaps destroyable objectives)
Sounds interesting, but I think vehicles should cost a lot. Bikes could be cheap. It's just a one-man transport with a gun on. And i don't find idea of locking people in a (for example) Predator appealing at all. What if you are waiting for your friend at base, but other people jump in without asking you?.. Plus it's kinda illogical not being able to exit the vehicles, but I don't think people should magically appear a metre or so beside the transport. There should be an animation of you, opening a hatch/trapdoor, climbing up on top of Predator (for example). During this animation, person should be targettable, so it would become a great risk to come out instead. Also, unless there are other means of exiting the vehicle, other people inside should not be able to start their "exit-animation" untill the first one ends. And maybe i'm going overboard, but I also think, that people should not be able to have any huge heavy weapons (or even better = they may have only pistol) with them inside of Predator (for example). If I remember right, there would be a commander of some sort on each side. Squad leaders?.. Maybe to avoid vehicle spam, some of the vehicles should be possible to purchase, only if you are a squad leader or other high ranking officer. Just some thoughts...
Because if they actually paid me I'd probably have to do a lot more than just pull ideas from other games and say "Shouldn't be too hard, eh?"
