The core issue isnt russian vehicles being universally better than their ““counterparts”” from other techtrees but that gaijin consistently gives them favourable treatment in ways that inconsistently but noticeably affect their performance and decrease gameplay consistency.
Gaijin attempts to make vehicles equal to such that they can simply never be equal to, by artificially improving their capabilities, primarily in the way of artificial inconsistent survivability.
This results in a sole increase of gameplay-inconsistency and lowers skill-gaps at higher brs.
No matter how much you artificially buff e.g. a T-90M, it will simply not be as good for warthunders gameplay structure as e.g. modern Leopard 2’s or M1 Abrams’
And of course, we can argue over how nato tanks have been absurdly broken in the past but that will not change, nor help the discussion for the present or recent state of the game.
Aside from BMPT’s being prime example of a already overperforming vehicle receiving artificial survivability buffs (6mm of rha that doesnt spall, fake external belts etc.) you also have many hidden platings on russian mbts that absorb spall, such as the 2mm of structural steel on T-64 and T-80 autoloaders; (sufficient to absorb spall, same thickness as horizontal-drive modules, but armourThrough value too low to create spall)
Present on all T-64, T-72, T-80 and T-90 variants
^ every part of this is modelled to be AT LEAST 150mm of mCHA (0.98x RHA) and up to 300mm effective.
And ofc there are also Contact-5 and Relict casually auto-destabilizing the best APFSDS rounds in the game at any angle and distance, reducing their residual penetration to such a degree that their damage (fragmentation count, amount & penetration) can become nearly non-existent - aswell as heavily affecting their trajectory.
The destabilization effect of the Relict/Contact-5 tiles on the skirts is also 5x higher than that of Duplet, despite Duplet having either the same (relict) or significantly more (contact-5) listed KE equivalence.
There are several other examples to bring up but I believe this to be sufficient to illustrate what I am trying to convey.
I could ofc go over e.g. Leopard 2’s and M1 Abrams being artificially nerfed in several ways through changes that at the same time benefit russian mbts (modules e.g.), or LMUR’s being added as hardcounter against IRIS-T the second the absurdly overpowered russian cas (SU-30SM // KH-38MT) had any counterplay whatsoever but this has probably been done to sufficient extend by other people in this thread.
To be quite honest, I would not mind any of this nearly as much if it wasnt for these things increasing gameplay inconsistency as much as they currently do.
Shooting weakspots/critical components should be rewarded with reliable results instead of being another roll at the slot machine that ends up punishing you despite not making any mistakes.
