I don’t intend to be - my goal is to solve the CAS debate at its source, which I see is the people who endlessly cry “CAS OP” no matter what Gaijin adjusts. And I do that by reflecting the endless screaming back upon the people who do said screaming via game mechanic overhauls.
None of those changes make the game unplayable.
Buffing APCR to what it should be allows it to work again and cease being a laughing stock - if some BRs adjust as a result, so be it.
People complain about too much APDS, HEATFS, and HESH in late WW2 and early postwar BR ranges - well the piss-poor postpen on all those is precisely why most of those sit that low. They pen everything but struggle to kill most of it.
Both of those changes make many machines playable, and thereby make the whole game more playable, not less.
Making SPAAG easy to use against CAS even in lower ranks doesn’t make the game unplayable either. If anything it gives people tools to solve their “CAS Problem” themselves, and expects them to solve it themselves. And by making the counters stronger, old idiotic nerfing of CAS can be undone, which also hard-counters armor bricks like the Maus.
I don’t respect people who try to state “but that would break the game” without much logic to back it up. I don’t accept the game as it currently is, because that is precisely the problem, and always has been.
If you want to avoid “breaking” the game with SPAAG rebuffs, then all tanks need fully-volumetric armor models to remove the stupid holes and gaps SPAAG currently exploit, gun barrels need to be made immune to all damage, and APHE needs to be toned down in postpen. Last I checked, nerfing SPAAG doesn’t actually fix any of these - they just happen to reveal longstanding problems that all vehicles can potentially exploit via high fire rate.
8.3 spaa already make that bracket really unfun to play a lot of the time, your suggestions would make them literally straight up better MBTs than the actual MBTs at the BR, more than they already are. Because most gepard types are already straight up better than MBTs at being MBTs.
And that is solvable by 1) bigger and more varied maps, because autocannon pen drops off rapidly with distance even when correctly modeled 2) giving all tanks fully volumetric armor models so there are no gaps to exploit in the first place and 3) making cannon barrels immune to damage so SPAAG cannot fly around a corner at Mach 1 and prevent you from shooting them.
Nerfing SPAAGs doesn’t solve any of that. In a city fight SPAAG generally should melt tanks if they catch their sides or rears exposed. They only “are more effective than actual MBTs” because the map rotation is all cities, barrel damage enables them to cripple what they can’t frontally pen before strolling up to their side to finish them off, and outdated hole-ridden armor models enable them to pen stuff they have no business being able to.
Well, then Snail is determined to have these problems exist forever if they refuse to go after the root causes.
We’ve had volumetric armor mechanics for how many years now? The fact that we haven’t seen all tank armor models fully converted to volumetric plate by now is beyond silly. That alone would solve most SPAAG rage from them penetrating stuff they have no business doing so.
It requires thousands of hours of work to re-model every single tank in game. Gaijin continuously digs these holes of never ending work by constantly trying to rework old mechanics and systems without doing it in full.
“This is a team game. I suggest you figure that out. People who play RTS games don’t whine and cry when their ground units get bombed by air units because they themselves didn’t choose to build AA or other planes or any other counters. You’re going to try to make the argument that this scenario I’m bringing up is a 1v1 in a rts, but the same applies here. This is a team game. The game is built for you to work with your team to counter all threats.”
Have someone from Your team spawn some to deal with enemy SPAAs so You can play Your mbt :^) /s
“This is a team game. I suggest you figure that out. People who play RTS games don’t whine and cry when their ground units get bombed by air units because they themselves didn’t choose to build AA or other planes or any other counters. You’re going to try to make the argument that this scenario I’m bringing up is a 1v1 in a rts, but the same applies here. This is a team game. The game is built for you to work with your team to counter all threats.”
I love when people get so angry when their own arguments fail to work.
So suggesting that someone should not be playing a tank but rather spawn an air unit/spaa is not trolling?
And with the majority of recent additions being copy-paste, they can just start with the tank models that occur again and again most frequently, like T-34s and Shermans. Update the base model’s armor and you fix several dozen vehicles all at once.
It’s definitely a coding mountain, but its hardly unachievable, Snail simply has not bothered to try outside specific portions of certain tanks it considers a “problem.”
There is a counter to Gepards.
Change the game mechanics that they exploit so they aren’t able to exploit things anymore.
If barrels are immune to all damage, Gepards cannot casually stroll in front of anything and prevent themselves from dying - they are quite squishy armor-wise.
If all tanks have volumetric armor models, they can’t frontally pen a lot of things anymore no matter how much they spam, and with the above invincible barrels then get blown up in response.
If maps are larger their guns lose potency against a lot of targets which can delete them from almost any distance, because again Gepards are squishy.
Gepards are quite solvable if you refuse to accept the game as it currently is and look at it objectively.
I agree with everything apart from a small change, barrels shouldn’t be immune to ALL damage. They can realistically be damaged to the point of misfiring or worse damage by main cannons, and sometimes by higher caliber SPAA, but if it were changed so say only guns above 57 millimeters or something, a common high caliber for autocannons, could damage it very quickly and it would still take a while, like somebody’s already disabled and you have like 10 seconds, and like 70+ millimeter cannons can take out a barrel fully in one or two shots, with a buff to AP damage because, HE doesn’t do THAT much to like a hardened tank barrel that’s small and stable relative to armor plates, but essentially getting hit with a solid chunk of metal would do a good deal more.
While I understand your logic here, extending the immunity to all damage is to solve a related problem - the “just shoot the gun if you can’t pen it!” mentality that plagues all heavy tanks above about 3.3 BR. It is oppressive to vehicles which are already having opponents run circles around them or have their armor rendered worthless by most opponents. Then the one time they run into someone who can’t pen their front armor…they just shoot the gun and your heavy STILL has no purpose.
This is due to War Thunder having no parallax error on gunsights, but I am aware asking to have that made standard in RB is a non-starter. Stopping the barrel portion of “track-&-barrel torture” is about more than just SPAAG.
Unlike say a weak lower plate, you physically cannot hide your barrel tip without also being unable to shoot back.
That’s fair, for full realism there are a good few other changes to be added and it’s probable that if Gaijin for once listens to less than the entire community roaring in protest and does this some modification or midpoint between both our suggestions actually gets added, but I do see your point that you see something like a Tiger 2 in some little rat like an M18, can’t pen it frontally, but because it sees you just just barrel, track, flank, and they stand no chance. Some vehicles, mainly high tier ones with good mobility allow for good enough wiggling that that’s more plausible to fight against but there, you’re dealing with a ton of autoloaders and stuff on like T72s and T80s where if it misses, it reloads fast and if it’s hull down good luck doing anything in most cases.
Exactly. Heavies are already punished for being large, slow, sluggish, and usually with long reloads in exchange for powerful guns. I guess I just think “isn’t that enough, especially if you undo the nerfing on all the ammo types that currently don’t work?”
I personally have no opinion on high tier machines, it just looks like a clusterfuck and a half if you ask me.
Relatable. As somebody who either does maximum BR and as close to top tier as I can get or 2.7, 4.0, or 6.7 I can say that it’s not quite as bad at like 9.3+ because then missile AAs and stuff start to more effectively counter CAS, and while there are autocannons in most cases you’ll have enough armor. I HATE the 7.3-8.7 range for a lot of reasons, the smallest of them being that Germany simply doesn’t have a ton of vehicles there, but there are SO MANY things like the Falcon that don’t get the current Gepard nerf of like only 40 APDS belts or something, and I loathe playing with or against them. Real top tier I don’t think needs a ton of like complete overhaul rebalancing, stuff like Challengers need some help especially since IRL they’re pretty good, but apart from the occasional really bad or really good vehicle it’s not horrible. 6.7 and below has some really annoying CAS, but you’ve proposed some really good solutions that I agree with, as somebody who does a lot of my work myself, especially when it comes to building and programming there is literally not a single case in which I would say “put a bandaid on it” instead of saying to fix it at the source. That kinda 8.0 bracket is really hellish because it’s really a sweetspot for early powerful cannons and high mobiliity, but with the introduction of helis, much more powerful CAS jets with AA that hasn’t quite caught up, and annoying rats like the XM800-T that, yes, can melt most stuff in close-quarters but at range that tiny autocannon loses pen FAST, and despite that still wreck absolutely everything. There is a measure of skill but there’s also a lot of point-and-click.
Essentially what drove my ideas was “how do I fix both the mechanics that make CAS annoying AND ALSO fix the whiny player mentality keeping the argument itself going?” I admit I do have a bit of a vendetta even today against the segment of the playerbase endlessly whining about CAS being supposedly OP, because their crying led to repeated nerfs in all game modes that punished me when I was playing totally different Air-only game modes such as Sim EC. Right after I chose to talisman my first two favorite planes to support the devs back then, too.
And that is precisely where my changes originated. Instead of “I don’t like this, let’s nerf it” I thought “What exactly makes these so annoying to fight, and can that be changed without nerfing the vehicles themselves so they remain fun to play without being abusive?”
If you think the XM800 is bad now, imagine if its APCR and APDS were working correctly. 20mm Rh202 rounds of both types realistically achieved nearly 120mm vs flat plate. Yes, seriously - Gaijin artificially neutered autocannons to in some cases half of what they were actually capable of.
Yeah, stuff like the M51 is a great example of when that goes right, and while yes the HEAT damage is a bit iffy sometimes it wouldn’t be that much harder to fight if it was good. Normally though, having both played and fought it a decent amount, I love the thing. The armor sucks and the crew is kinda packed, so it’s easy to kill, but the gun is super fun and when you play it well it’s an incredibly good vehicle, but an equally good enemy player playing something fast enough you can’t hit it or hiding in bushes that fuse your round can still kill you easily.
Yeah it’d have to be uptiered a good bit to be balanced with that, but it’d still be worth it because it becomes more fun to play and realistic, which is one of the things people recommend War Thunder the most for, the realism.