[Development] Discussing reports related to the Challenger 2 MBT

At least the last generation MBTs don’t lose all their speed upon turning because they turn by clutch-breaking like a 1930s tractor…

Don’t get me wrong; BF’s mobility is very arcade and many dynamics are very poor compared to War Thunder’s (for example, mediocre ground interaction and you can’t feel the weight of tanks), yes; but, when it comes specifically to turns, it’s way closer to what you would expect from a modern MBT.

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That’s literally all I was griping about lol
BF is arcade af
BUT
The mobility is closer to what you’d see ideally out of a modern western MBT
Compared to T-34 transmissions and turning like we have now because a certain nation never moved past that

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No MBT made by any country is immune to battle. Abrams losses in Iraq didn’t even come from conventional weapons most of the time, the few that did were from RPG’s into fuel cells. People forget that breaking a track, throwing a wheel, or having your ammo blown out are all effectively combat kills.

In game we have the ability to do massive repairs in seconds, in real life, those tanks stop functioning instantly. So when a CR2 hits a minefield, crew bails it’s already done. When the ATGM hits it later, now it’s scrapped. When a T-90M tanks an FPV drone, a TOW, and a shitton of 25mm from 3 Bradley’s, the turret is jammed, the optics are blown, it’s a combat kill, even after the entire crew is caught on drone bailing out. Will the T-90M be fixable? Likely. CR2 we all know is done for, especially give the CR2 replacement parts no longer exists, British MOD admitted they are cannibalizing CR2’s to maintain a new smaller fleet that will become CR3. The Leo 2’s and Strv’s are mostly fixable as well, although Rheinmetall has stated that replacement parts are incredibly backlogged.

The point is that most crews on both sides are surviving the combat defeat of the tank they are driving, this is observable when you look into the KIA charts for both sides of the conflict we aren’t supposed to mention. Yes, this includes the turret tossers you see, mostly on the Russian side. Those are complete crew deaths, but for every FPV video you see like that, there’s ten other tanks that hit a mine, or lost a track etc, and the crew bailed.

Every single tank in game and IRL have good levels of protection, they will generally spare the crew, but they by no means will generally spare the tank from even a combat kill. You can sit back and claim Russian bias all you like, it will not make it so. You can insult the developers and owners of the game (I wouldn’t), and even say nasty stuff like a few comments above, but it will not give you a GOATed uber-tank.

In other words, stop getting political and remember this is a game. No one forces you to play it. You can submit all the tickets in the world, they may be properly sourced and 110% correct. But that will not stop the developers from balancing the game the way they see fit. What you need to do is stop talking about what you perceive is other nations experiences and stick to the facts at hand. Due to the way the matchmaker works in this game, you will almost never have a match against the current geopolitical rival(s) whilst being on a team of a coalition of current geopolitical allies. When Britain suffers, we all suffer. When the USA suffers, we all suffer. When the USSR suffers, we all suffer.

If you get past the bias accusations, and the external distraction, your message becomes clear and much more acceptable to the general player base. This continued political/geopolitical/Russian-bias conspiracy narrative only makes people joke about it that much more.

Spoiler

Flag Spammers hate this one trick

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no one is asking for a goated uber tank, all we want is for the devs to use common sense when it comes to some aspects that are still classified.

at the end of the day all were gona have is maybe a video or a photo and common sense, so when the devs come out and say “we need a primary source” you have to understand it frustrates ppl.

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“Klimb afterburner”

My god you must eat all your ram

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Up to 8GB when all are open, yes.
At least one of the sites has a RAM leak as well.

But that’s beside the point.
I want all tanks to be as correct as possible, even if their current state is more accurate than other games.

Yeah I know it frustrates people, and I also can see there’s a double standard at play with how Gaijin handles certain documents. You’re basically asking the devs for the benefit of the doubt, and yet most refuse to give Gaijin the benefit of the doubt too. Gaijin goes to the trouble to set these threads up and explain their rationale, and engage as best as possible in dialogue with the community. Many disagree, post a photo with little context in many cases, and then start narrativizing why Gaijin won’t do something using the lens of their favorite pet conspiracy theory.

The simple reason at the end of the day that we have the product we have is because ownership and development have decided since the beginning of the game, over a decade ago, that the game would be competitively balanced and not necessarily realistically balanced.

Most players, at least in the early days (like myself) came over from WoT after multiple Tier X tanks and realized that 1. future development was stalled permanently, and 2. RNG was the determining factor who won an engagement, and not necessarily who was the skilled player. WT fixes all of that with a semi-realistic game, which can be observed even in arcade mode to a degree.

If you want change you need to advocate for the dev team and ownership to look at the win rates and make appropriate changes at different BR’s a la what they did with the issue of many WW2 tanks facing post war tanks. Tigers and IS-2’s vs HEAT-FS, Stabilizers, LRF, and even Thermals in some cases was a problem, and now it isn’t, thanks to a unified community effort, not a tribalized, factionalized, sensationalized response that makes such insensitive comments about the people you are appealing to to make changes.

its hard to give them the benefit of the doubt when they provide no documentation. its a 1 way road. its so rationale they want to give the tes an aluminium plate instead of steel. whats heavier a kg of steel or a kg of aluminium? and they provide no sources, they say they have, but are we suposed to believe them when they cant even present a terciary source?

so if its to be competitively balanced where is that balance? you have the challengers, worse movement speed, worse fire power, worse armour… please do tell.

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ya know, as far as motives go, this one probably gets a win for most believable/realistic

Britain being bad isn’t one when there’s literal primary sources pointing to L27A1 underperforming, L23A1 Sabots (you know, the Tungsten dart bit with no explosive filler in) exploding, being left as a bug report for 2 months, no actual attempt made to fix the Phimat Chaff Pod, etc etc

I seriously hope it isn’t because a Gaijin Dev has a hate boner for Britain after we served his tea too cold or something

And it genuinely doesn’t seem to make sense for any other logical reason.

The only (reasonably big) problem is they aren’t based in Russia. They’re in Hungary, and financially in Cyprus iirc. Neither of which iirc have that sort of legislation. So you know.

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Yes and no.
Whilst DM53 is the superior round out of it and CHARM 3, and I don’t disagree,

  1. primary source points to it being effective against 700mm RHA
  2. CLIP was a one off tank. Either the MOD didn’t have the funds (possible) to fit the L/55 to all Challengers, it didn’t because of turret dimensions (maybe?) or (more likely) because the need to upgrade it wasn’t needed, because the MOD assessed the L27A1 as being capable at knocking out whatever MBT a likely state enemy (let’s say Russia) was going to field. Clearly that isn’t the case anymore and it’s become a matter of (some) urgency to fix that (hence Challenger 3).

That said from what I’ve heard we are developing our own Smoothbore 120mm round.

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Aluminum weighs less than steel, so it’s actually beneficial from a movement side of things. Steel seems to be what was used, so it’s incorrect. They did not provide documentation, so you are correct there. You don’t need to believe them, or some tertiary source they provide, but you do need to treat them with respect.

Frankly, the Challenger, as most British equipment above say 7.0, seems to suffer from a lack of care and attention by the developers. We all saw what they could do in two dev servers to finally fix German and Swedish armor values on the Leo 2, they’ve just admitted they haven’t given that kind of a fix yet to the Challenger. Expect a much better protected turret in the future. Do NOT expect an impenetrable mantlet. No tank in the game has that in spite of the fact that every tank, including Russian tanks at high tier, in real life, have extremely tough mantlets that should be theoretically impenetrable.

Regenerative steering seems to be a thing that just isn’t modelled, just like ERA is not modelled for physical accuracy, but rather as a simple buff to protection values vs. ordnance. I hope they add it. I hope they fix the side skirts, I hope the Leclerc gets it’s 5 second reload, I hope they add DU into the xray model and give it some protective value for the Abrams… It’s all stuff everyone should want. It’s just going to take longer than anyone would prefer.

Don’t gloss over the fact that they have made more BR changes, and technically decompressed Air a bit more with the addition of 12.7, they can keep going and will at some point.

As to why the Challenger functions the way it does, and to why they might consider it balanced is a question to ask the devs, not me. I don’t think it’s balanced, but I also don’t think that it’s terribly unbalanced, or that all the changes proposed are necessary to get it to the point of being balanced. It’s very clear Gaijin has a vision for the Challenger as they claimed it’s play style was necessary for adding the Bhishma and it’s “unique aggressive playstyle”. So you should ask them, politely.

I don’t think anyone is expecting that. But it should be a smaller weakspot, and provide enough protection, along with the breech, to at least sometimes protect your crew…

Fair, but I have yet to see any tank not lose at least one crew member from a top penetrating round as well. It should be a breach and 1 crew killer at a minimum.

I don’t disagree with what you’ve said but I think a big part of why the Challenger 2 feels the nerfs/underperformance as much as it does, especially when compared to the other TTs is just the current state of the British TT. Like you said, we are heavily neglected but it goes beyond what we have got and into what we dont have.

We have 6 MBTs and 1 Premium MBT at top tier. I think the most out of any nation. This is true and should make us a good nation. But that is basically all we have and that i think is more deeply felt than anything else.

What we really need, along side some much needed buffs for the CR2s are:

  • Actually effective IFVs especially some at both 10.0 and 11.0 areas. (warrior variants or Ajax would be good here)
  • Dedicated SPAA to almost replace the ADATS (Tracked Rapier)
  • An “assault” SPAA. (Something like the Warrior VERDI2 or I think canada has an LAV that would work too)
  • A TD/ATGM launcher, a few options here, including I think a Boxer variant
  • Improvements to our Primary CAS, notably the Tornado Gr1

In essence, the entire British TT needs looking at and fixing and then any of the remaining issues with the Challenger 2 might be mititgated somewhat. But regardless of that, there is certainly areas for improvement for the Challenger 2. Some small and some quite large. Just need to badger gaijin into submission

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t90M


CR2 OES

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The UK and Germany have agreed to jointly develop an Enhanced Kinetic Energy (EKE) round: UK and Germany team up to develop advanced tank ammunition

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you seem to be making a lot of assumptions about me. maybe you shouldnt do that, its not polite.

Weird, when I tried it, T-90M lost at least one person, could be a location and angle thing I guess, maybe the breech absorbs enough to only damage the crew. Will have to try out when I get home.

I haven’t. Hence why I say “many people feel” and not “zuadao feels” or “you feel”.