I think there’s a misunderstanding here. I mean everyone starts each match with the same fixed budget, just for that match. You wouldn’t be paying Silver Lions for these spawns.
For example, everyone gets 100 budget points. A tank priced at 20 lets you spawn five times. One priced at 50 lets you spawn twice. Or you can mix them.
Everything uses the same budget unit, so there’s no need to convert dollars into yuan, rubles or rials. The balance concerns are fair, but the idea is simply choosing how to spend an equal starting budget on different vehicles and numbers of respawns.
For prototypes and field mods, I’d just estimate a price based on similar vehicles, then adjust it for how capable they are in-game. No need to price every individual part.
And no $1 deals lol. We’d use an estimated production cost, not a special sale price.
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But NATO tanks being the most expensive still in your system only get to spawn once or twice.
For example, everyone gets a $50 million budget per match. You could choose a Leopard 2A7V or M1A2 SEP V3 and get roughly two spawns. Or you could choose a T-90M or ZTZ-99A and get around six. Everyone starts with the same budget.
The catch is that choosing the T-90M or ZTZ-99A could mean going through more crews. If one crew gets killed, you’d need another crew to take out another tank of the same type. So you might need more ace crews ready to go.
That’s a trade-off for each player to work out. Do you spend your budget on fewer expensive tanks, or more cheaper ones with the extra crews to use them?
still not fair if NATO tanks even with 10 crews will be hard locked out of spawning anything more than 1-2 tanks.
You’re right, extra crews don’t solve that. Equal budgets don’t automatically mean a fair fight.
The two-versus-six example was too extreme unless the more expensive tank actually offers enough of an advantage. I’d keep the fixed-budget idea, but adjust the vehicle prices around in-game performance, using real costs only as a rough reference.
The choice should be worth considering on both sides. Otherwise it’s just punishing someone for picking the tank they like.
this is what nuclear thunder SL spawn cost and SP spawn cost already have it may be a little broken but what it does is if I want to spawn a f-15 spawning it with dumb bombs is less expensive than spawning with guided bombs
What I mean is everyone starts with the same fixed budget and decides how to spend it on vehicles and spawns for the whole match. Your example is about different loadouts having different spawn costs. The ideas are similar, but they’re not quite the same.
This way, Gaijin wouldn’t have to keep changing tank performance for balance at the expense of realism, upsetting players and filling the forums with arguments about which nation is OP or too weak.
They could focus on recreating the tanks’ real capabilities and use different spawn costs and numbers of respawns to balance things out.
The way I see it, tanks that cost more to build generally offer better protection, firepower or mobility. Designs built on tighter budgets have to make compromises and may rely more on numbers to make up the difference.
Think of the Tiger versus the T-34 in WWII. Or Neo fighting all those Agent Smiths in The Matrix. Individual strength versus numbers. That’s the kind of trade-off I’d like to see.
This system only works in long lasting matches where you could manage a personal economy to stay at the match instead of using your real balance. You have a good example, the videogame Wardogs utilize a similar system each match. The reason why it’s not applied in War Thunder is because matches can last for less than 10 minutes in the best case scenario and new (unique) game modes are being introduced at a dead turtles’ pace with Nuclear Thunder à la Enduring Confrontation for realistic battles being added just now (not considering Bullet Hell).
I love the Idea as an event. Maybe test it on ww2 tanks first?
Yeah, a WWII event sounds like a good place to start. Try it on a small scale and see if the trade-off between stronger tanks and more spawns is actually fun. I’d definitely play it!
Cheaper doesn’t always mean weaker, but you got to know there a tons of reason that affect the price of a weapon. And for example a second hands Leopard 2A4 is 11-13 mil USD each and a new T-80BVM is just 3.5 - 4 mil each, so yeah…
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Gaijin can’t even get vehicle statistics right in some instances, some “cheap vehicles” already perform on par with some “expensive” ones while they quite shouldn’t
Also, how do you adjust for inflation ? if you don’t you also need to include year of production
Shouldn’t GDP be taken into account ? F-16 costs more than Su-30, but US can get more than Russia. So shouldn’t it be numbers instead ?
I’m talking specifically about production costs, not sale prices. Take the M1, for example. It can only be produced in the US, not elsewhere, so its US production cost would be the reference.
I’m not factoring in exchange rates or GDP here. We’re not trading tanks between countries, just using the cost of manufacturing them as a measure.
These aren’t drinking glasses or bottled water that can be made anywhere. The reference should be the production cost in a country that can actually manufacture the tank.
in which case you’ll simply introduce a bias that favors nations where labor is cheaper, mostly
not to mention the difficulty of estimating the price of certain vehicles (especially modern aircrafts), let alone production costs which are usually kept quite secret
You could have a mode with assymetric balance like the other tank game did (Tiger IIs and Is vs more numerous T-34-85s), but that should be more balanced by weight or a proportion of the total amount of tanks available at the time, cost alone as a fixed value does not tell the whole story
Not necessarily. But I agree that if two tanks perform similarly, giving one more spawns just because labour is cheaper wouldn’t be fair. That’s something the pricing would need to account for.
…we already have a similar system. It is called Spawn Points.
This would maybe work, IF Spawn Points were reworked heavily.
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Yeah, you could see it as a rework of SP. The main difference is everyone gets their full budget upfront, with no extra points earned from kills or caps. Then you decide how much to spend on each spawn and how much to save for later. I’d try it as a separate event first.
What about Ground AB though? I mainly play Arcade. Ground vehicle spawns there don’t use the SP system you’re describing. My idea would let players choose between fewer expensive tanks and more cheaper ones, all within the same starting budget.