Dang, take out that autocorrector!
Seems like a perfect job for Infantry! :D
I like this whole idea a lot.
While WarThunder is mostly a “capture the flag” kind of game, you could make an argument that “behind the scenes” or “under the hood” or “in the background” or whatever - well… Tanks don’t capture cities. Infantry does.
On City Maps, tanks have always been the “Hero Class” supporting invisible infantry who are doing the hard work of holding the physical ground (evidence: When a tank gets CASed to death while on/near a cap, the cap does not instantly revert to neutral. something is keeping control of that point while “off screen”.
The biggest issues that I see (as a longtime IT person) is Resource Management.
It’s a cool feature, but doesn’t bring any benefit to the table.
It’s not a new vehicle.
It’s not a new game mechanic: for example, there isn’t a mechanic to capture a point with infantry on a point without a vehicle being specifically “in the circle”. A new mechanic would be something like “In RB, on City Maps, every player vehicle exerts a Zone of Control extending 100m in all directions.” which means that you could be up to 100m away from the edge of a Capture Point and be capturing that point - but that would be an enormous change and would piss a lot of existing players off.
It’s a LOT of art assets, modeling, and animation for a cosmetic feature.
It’s an excellent idea, but without functionality, I think it would languish at the bottom of a to-do pile forever.
Now, if you set aside “War Thunder is not an infantry-focused game, and it would make the game less focused on being a military vehicle simulator” as an immutable characteristic of War Thunder and think of it as a new business opportunity for a company that likes to make money…
How would you do it? Plenty of other games (going all the way back to World War II Online which launched in June of 2001, and still exists today) have successfully integrated the idea of Mechanized Infantry.
It’s not impossible, but I think it needs to be some sort of Business Opportunity for it to get any real traction.
With infinite resources, I think I’d run with this with a new game mode that requires armor to support APCs and APCs to support Infantry and Infantry exerts a Zone of Control over their area on an urban map. Lord knows I’ve spent a lot of time riding in the back of a Bedford or Opel Blitz hoping we don’t die on the way between the spawn and the town we’re trying to capture (20 years ago in WWIIOL) Conversely, with a game mode that includes significant infantry assets, Armor ‘in town’ should rightfully fear the Panzerschreck and the Javelin, y’know?
Love the idea from top to bottom - not sure how to justify spending the development resources on it though.