u/Faabmeister

[Long post warning]: I've been loving the recent updates to squad gameplay, but one thing still bothers me. No matter the tactics that you apply to counter armor, a good vehicle squad will just 360 quick scope anything in their way with their cannons/laserbeam coax. We incentivize infantry to slow down and keep their heads down, yet reward vehicles for ramming into habs and playing dangerously. Ran your tracked vehicle into a carefully orgastrated ambush from the right side and lost a track? Just jump out and repair the right track from cover of the left side of the vehicle while keeping all infantry supressed with your 0 recoil 100% accurate (non-overheating...) coax gun. Use A and D buttons to quickly swing your turret around without inertia for a quick point-and-click adventure. It's an arcade game after all.

I feel like it is time for a new armor game style where vehicle operation is not just based on a health bar, but getting hit first puts you at a dissadvantage by blurring your vision. Ambushes should be properly rewarded, getting hit first should put you at a significant disadvantage. Just take a look at the video above, where a ZU-23 ambush shreds the armor (and would penetrate and kill all crew irl), yet their cannon calmy turns around, shoots and stops my vision, while his gunner sight remains perfectly clear. The vehicle knew I was around because I shot at his friend, yet decides to drive into my ambush because he knows his gun does more damage than mine.

Vehicle gameplay has become too binary, based solely on damage and little on tactics. Enemy tank pushing your 2 IFVs? The IFVs have 0% chance to fight the tank and should get out of there (health bar can't go down = run away). This is not just boring binary gameplay, it's also not realistic since IRL two IFVs are perfectly capable of dissabling a tank with a cannon (we've all seen the IRL Bradley video). MRAPs are driving around running over infantry because they know bullets can't penetrate their glass. They added a damage model to shoot out tires of MRAPs, or engines and tail rotors of helicopters, yet I haven't ever seen these get shot out by small arms (they expect infantry to hit these 100x while they are moving?).

My suggestions: make it such that any penetrative charge/round supresses the vehicle crew inside, reducing gunner efficacy while still keeping the vehicle operational, thus rewarding ambushes and teamwork of the defender. This also incentivizes vehicles to stick with their team/infantry to stay out of ambushes, instead of lonewolfing the enemy side of the map. Reduce immediate responsiveness (more inertia) of vehicle cannons/guns and change the 100% accurate laser beam non-overheating coax. Make small arms deal more (realistic) damage to armor, i.e. 10 bullets = heli/MRAP glass breaks (no more invincible pilots staring at you waiting to jump out). Or even add slight supression to IFVs from getting hit by small arms. You think a gunner should stay calm while there is 200 rounds of 7.62 ramming his thin aluminium side hull next to him? Make it such that smaller calibre rounds at least do more damage to the armor class above, so that with proper gamestyle a PKM could have a fighting chance against an MRAP, a .50 cal MRAP can have a fighting chance against a BRDM, a BRDM can have a fighting chance against a LAV and a LAV can have a chance against a tank (of course if they apply proper teamwork/ambushing tactics). The better armour should always prevail in a head on 1v1, but now it's just a boring game of reaction time and quick spinning your turret.

Anyway, let me know why my opinion is wrong below. What fun ideas do you guys suggest?