There is a reason heavy tanks with huge guns fell out of favor. You are experiencing the reasons. Large guns with slow reloads aren’t effective against anything but other large tanks with slow reloads.
You need to go to World of Tanks then. This game favors a more realistic feel than World of Tanks, and actual vehicle layouts make this game actually good. If you want fake vehicle layouts with impenetrable heavy tanks, then you wasted a lot of time in Warthunder.
Nah, that’s not a “skill issue” when your machine has worse mobility, reload, gun handling and no stabilizer. Against a guy with enough mobility to run circles around you, out-reload you, better turret traverse, and possibly a stabilizer.
I’m amazed you can look at a situation like that and see it as “balanced.”
Well, You are the one who allowed such a tank to get close to You
But thats how it is in real life too. That’s light vehicle sacrifice. Having no armor for better maneuvrebility and having smaller calibre guns for faster rate of fire.
And because this is a video game, every machine deserves to be able to actually function, regardless of real life circumstances. Otherwise the machine has no point being added to the game at all.
I don’t want “fake vehicle layouts with impenetrable heavy tanks,” I want my armor to actually work sometimes in a way not entirely dependent on the opponent being low IQ.
Even though most maps are rat mazes with nowhere else to go?
When it comes to ground vs ground combat there is always something You can do.
What I am saying is that things were once very much in the favor of heavy tanks, and back then barrel damage made perfect sense.
Now, we have far more counters available to every single nation without question, and therefore should start removing some of the now-redundant penalties to heavies.
I’m fine with glass cannons being able to ignore my armor when they also trade off other things. I’m not fine with literally every single possible opponent being able to ignore my armor when I try to kill them.
With maps being more and more constricted over time, there are less and less “something you can do” options available.
For enemy to be able to shoot at You, he needs to allow You to be able to shoot at him.
Oh really?
The cupolas and machine gun ports are part of the armor layout. Removal of those weakspots would be changing the vehicles layout. Exactly like what World of Tanks did, and it has HORRIBLE gameplay because of it. Logic must not be your strongsuit, and it shows.
Every machine does have the ability to function, but not equally because, brace for it, they are DIFFERENT VEHICLES. This game goes for BALANCE not EQUALITY in vehicle performance.
And thats how it was in real life too. Heavy and medium tanks became obsolete and got replaced with MBTs which combined those roles.
Game also changes through the years. So you need to change your playstyle if you want to continue using heavy tanks.
You should have no means to prevent the opponent from deleting your barrel when it was your fault for carelessly letting the opponent get a first shot off and putting yourself in a position where that would happen, especially since in most cases whatever you are using likely has a smaller gun and way less armor than that armored monster.
Gun Barrels can be eliminated on every vehicle. Not just heavies or ones with muzzle breaks. Sherman’s, T-80s, R-3T-20s, M50s, etc. etc, all can have their barrel destroyed. And, another note, not everything that isn’t a Heavy is more maneuverable than a heavy. And just because it is, doesn’t mean it will have the opportunity to flank you. That’s just how it goes.
The only problem with barrel damage isn’t barrel damage, it’s the goofy as heck optic-in-barrel mechanic, paired with identicle reticles for all vehicles, making it far too easy to pixel-snipe.
But barrel damage is fine. If someone is complaining about such an absolutely specific type of damage, it’s probably reflective of a playstyle issue. Seems an odd topic to have gone over 200 replies.
And you don’t seem to get how back when tanks were new, the only real option for most things to counter something they could not frontally pen was the barrel and/or tracks, then go around. Back then, having such “weakspots” made perfect sense.
With the addition of HEAT, HEATFS, APDS, APFSDS, HESH, and derp HE, often on very mobile platforms that reload far quicker than you, there are now too many ways to deal with armor you cannot pen frontally, making said armor mostly irrelevant unless someone makes a low IQ play.
I’d be more than fine with trialing out forcing actual gun sight positions, but convincing these people is seemingly impossible.
I am taking offense to machines that already throw away all their mobility for frontal armor still having an easily-available frontal one-tap cripple point. It means that “armor” only matters when the guy you’re running into aims poorly. When we already have so many different ways to deal with heavy armor that do not require barrel damage to do so - HEAT/HESH/sabot/derp HE that ignore that armor.
I take offense to having all that and the barrel damage mechanics from before all that was added.
Armour-based vehicles definitely shouldn’t see HEAT-FS, I agree.
I feel part of the issue here is the devs’ insistence that everything be able to kill anything in a 1v1 frontal duel, which is just silly. Most light tanks are massively under-BRed; they should be focused on their mobility, stealth, flanking, scouting, etc. SPAA is similar in the opposite direction; most should lose their AP ammo and drop significantly in BR.
I hard disagree on nerfing SPAAG tankbusting ability further, IMHO.
We need reasons to encourage average joes to move their AAs outside of their own spawns. Part of why so many people sit in their spawns is because of how defenseless they often are barring exceptional stupidity on the part of the enemy tank, or happening to run into a tank thin-skinned enough to kill with it.
I would rather encourage SPAAGs as first spawn options by undoing the now-redundant nerfs to belt compositions, adding missing shell types to some AAs lacking them, removing tiny shell count limits on high tier AAs’ AP(FS)DS belts given that we have IFVs owning the place with often the same guns and also ATGMs, giving non-radar AAs short-range lead markers to teach average joes both where and when to shoot (tied to the rangefinding crew skill, 1.0km for bone-stock, 1.5km for aced), removing all ability for SAMs to be detonated by incoming ordinance except for IR ones and flares, and then changing SPAAG/SAM vehicles’ BRs as needed.
Because an AA with full AP belts is just a bigger, slower, taller IFV with a spinning radar dish that in some cases is impossible to hide.
Belts were nerfed because at the time barrels were too weak and shells frequently overpenned AA doing nothing. Now we have overpressure and volumetric shells which make killing them far easier and remove most of the old weakspots they once exploited, save for a few cases not yet using volumetric armor models like the IS-2(1944) being frontally deleted by an Israeli ZSU-57/2.
You don’t seem to realise that tank warfare isn’t all about killing other tanks. One thing this game lacks is infantry, which has a profound effect on how tanks are used. That is why these heavy tanks have hull machine guns and why tanks in general didn’t go unescorted by infantry or without other tanks as backup. Look at the US in WW2 where a squad of Shermans was 5. They didn’t operate alone like most of the situations in this game. Tanks were never designed for a single tank to be alone in a fight because no single tank can face anything without having problems, no matter the armor, gun, or mobility. Keep in mind this is a game where impossible feats in real life are regularly accomplished and limiting factors in real life do not exist.
Maybe because these people think that forcing things that don’t need to be forced onto others will cause problems. I will say this again, this is NOT a historical simulator, it is a vehicular combat game for entertainment. There is a more serious mode for people that want more serious gameplay, simulator mode.
Arcade has this. Realistic does not need this. Please stop trying to ruin what this game has by dumbing down armor profiles and adding magical lead indicators to realistic. Need to learn something about the game like leading? Play arcade, learn what to do, go to realistic and use what you learned. I also don’t understand why you would want to force using the actual gun sights but then want to add lead indicators. It seems like you want to force things that makes the game better for things you enjoy, all other things be damned.
I am all for adding new objectives to the game mode, and modifying existing ones to make current irritating nonsense mechanics minimized or nonexistent. Such as infantry with AT Rifles or Bazookas/Panzerfausts making cities a death sentence for tanks without infantry escort. Of course this would require overhaul of all building models so that infantry can enter into said buildings and possibly engage from upper floors’ windows. Currently “destructible” buildings merely have a destroyed model inside the intact model.
And your entire vehicle’s ability to be effective being wholly dependent on the stupidity of the opponent aiming poorly is not exactly entertaining, either. I got so fed up when spading the T95 that I had a friend squad up in his T92 and move behind me the entire game to help repair my barrel as many as ten times a round.
Yes, realistic does need this, though not to the same 4km distance Arcade does. That is why I suggest 1.0-1.5km range at most. The reason is that planes benefit unequally well from 3rd person camera and gain far more situational awareness than SPAAG sitting in rat maze maps do. Planes can see you from much further away with general ease, and artificially increasing SPAAG hit potential is just compensation.
We’ve waited and waited and waited for years for average joes to learn how to use AAs correctly. They clearly never will. Then those same people proceed to start rant threads here and on Reddit about how “overpowered” CAS is, leading to boneheaded weapon nerfs that get applied to other modes which did nothing wrong because the weapon itself was changed.
Instead of leaving the game vulnerable to nerf after nerf after nerf which solves nothing, why not remove excuses for the people doing the complaining to keep complaining instead? Punt the ball into their court by empowering the counters immensely, and ask them to either 1) use the counters and hit it back, 2) shut up now with no excuse to keep complaining, or 3) go to a game with no aircraft such as GHPC which was built intentionally as a critique to War Thunder’s grind and CAS. It’s dragging the stubborn horse to water and shoving its snout into the water to make it drink, then blaming it and it alone if it doesn’t.
Realistic gun sights would certainly help SPAAG in RB somewhat, and Simulator far more since when restricted to cockpit view most planes must get far closer to positively ID opponent tanks, bringing them into optimal SPAAG gun range far more often.