Make tank gameplay enjoyable now!

[Trapper 0]

Please refrain from asking for additional tank sim features out of context in this topic!

The ones since OFP are part of making the tanks less playable without an improved interface. My goal here is to show how many players are interested in to get an OFP like state of tank user-friendliness back in ArmA2 for all kind of fighting vehicles.

This is such a big topic I won't even bother to write precise issues for every unit on a tracker.

To make things short:

In OFP tanking was really an option for the player. As tank platoon commander, tank commander, gunner, driver. With AI or with other players. Official and custom missions were fun.

In ArmA1/2 the tanking is left behind because the official content concentrates on infantry and helicopters. It has even become worse because of that. We no longer have the joy we know from OFP tanking.

Now the main role of the tanks is just to give the players something AI controlled to shoot at while playing different roles.

What has to be (re)added for all kind of fighting vehicles:

• Bug fixes for not getting stuck in views when switching them often between sights/3rd person/zooms/interior/turned in/out.
  
• Remove the left behind placeholder interior views which we only discover by bugs and get stuck in. Even better if you would make any kind of good working interior views again.
  
• Check and maybe fix the turn in/turn out controls of the hatches for ai/players/mixed crews. In OFP it was nicely to control for AI with the different combat modes.
  
• A practicable squad list for crewed vehicles. Remember the old OFP one where vehicle icons showed up in the list and the numbers of the operating squad members were listed below them. E.g. four MBTs ~ 1 tank platoon = perfect control. I know you'll have to think of something new because of the bigger groups this time but do it!
  
• Stabilize the turrets and their secondary turrets/periscopes in a playable way like once in OFP. No matter if it becomes more arcardish, your tanks always were it. It has to be enjoyable for the user. Leave realism at this point to mods like ACE2.
  
• Let player commanders switch off their MG(-camera) to get a fast turning periscope view when they have to command the tank. A slow turning MG(-camera) makes that unnecessary difficult.
  
• Add a menu command for player tank/platoon commanders to reset the position which the gunner watches back to his common watch sector in formation. Resp. give us a possibility to cancel whatever target/direction he is fixing his view on since previous orders and make the turret stop turning wildly.
  
• Stop the friendly fire issue of the forced FIRE command (Ctrl+fire key) for the AI gunner. He fires immediately no matter what he is targeting.
  
• Make the watch commands for the AI gunner in the player's tank relative to the hull. E.g. "Watch N" -> always point the gun to hull front / 12 o'clock. And please only for his personal gunner, not for other fully AI controlled tanks.
  

Edited January 25, 2010 by Trapper

[Evil_Echo 11]

This poll is useless. Just a flame.

[maturin 12]

The biggest problem with tank combat is that the detection for vehicles screwed all the way the hell up. My mouse broke so I've been playing as a tank commander constantly, and I have gotten into demolition derbies with enemy BMPs and followed MBTs around for entire minutes at point blank range before my crew realizes "HOLY SHIT. There's a TANK right there!"

Either that or they call them out on the very fringes of the game's draw distance, before the player can even see through the fog.

[EDcase 87]

EvilEcho your post is more useless and just a flame.

I don't have a huge problem with tanks as I don't use em much. Maybe with the above fixes they might be more enjoyable.

My only gripe is mentioned by Trapper. That is to stabilize the commander gun so rotation is not influenced by the main turret. It may not be 100% accurate but its totally useless the way it is.

The unpowered turrets like in the HUMVEEs and UAZ should be faster turning.

[Flash Thunder 10]

What a nice poll OP. :rolleyes:

I would like to see some refinements to the tanks mechanics like the handling/ damage values/armor values, the Tanks main cannon should've a larger explosion and not glitch all the time and not kill infantry.

it happens way too often to me.

[Trapper 0]

Should the poll be garnished the right options are still available:

1. Yes, fix.

2. It doesn't matter for me.

3. No, keep.

If somebody is interested, this is the first custom tank platoon mission I've came across since ArmA2 release and it suffers more from the points I've mentioned above than from any own bugs. Try to play it in vanilla ArmA2 as platoon commander without 3rd person view and switching seats much, commander view is ok. It wouldn't be that hard in OFP.

Operation Hunter @ OFPEC

EDIT:

@Flash Thunder

I understand but some of your points, even if mentioned often at the moment, are the second step from my point of view. They wouldn't make the tanks more "playable" for humans.

You know at the beginning of ArmA1 every OFP player asked for multiple turrets/commander MGs. Today they're added, in a lazy way and their disadvantages for commander seat "playability" still need to be addressed.

Edited January 24, 2010 by Trapper

[nuxil 2]

i have to agree that the tank's need to be improved

what anoys me most are 2 things.

the speed uphill. it so damn slow. for god sake.. you can cycle past a tank in 30/40 km/t in a little uphill in terrain. i mean wtf. its so stupid.

2nd thing is if you make your gunner / commander scan the horizont. you can not make them disable it. i have not found a way to do it.

so a solution would be to add in a extra watch command. . example Gunner watch front/right/left or back.

Flash Thunder

...

the Tanks main cannon should've a larger explosion and not glitch all the time and not kill infantry.

umm what you mean.? you should not be able to kill infatry with main gun if you shoot at them ?

if so.. so you know what HE rounds stands for ?

They are High Explosive rounds. meaning the explode on impact

so it makes perfectly sence that they kill infantrys..

[zdavid99 10]

i have to agree that the tank's need to be improved

what anoys me most are 2 things.

the speed uphill. it so damn slow. for god sake.. you can cycle past a tank in 30/40 km/t in a little uphill in terrain. i mean wtf. its so stupid.

2nd thing is if you make your gunner / commander scan the horizont. you can not make them disable it. i have not found a way to do it.

so a solution would be to add in a extra watch command. . example Gunner watch front/right/left or back.

umm what you mean.? you should not be able to kill infatry with main gun if you shoot at them ?

if so.. so you know what HE rounds stands for ?

They are High Explosive rounds. meaning the explode on impact

so it makes perfectly sence that they kill infantrys..

what i think he means is that sometimes when multiple types of targets are present (like tanks and infantry)

the gunner will start to engage the infantry with the main gun and the tank with the MG instead of first use

the main gun to take out the tank before moving on to the infantry (unless the commander already have dealt with them).

[Inkompetent 0]

if so.. so you know what HE rounds stands for ?

They are High Explosive rounds. meaning the explode on impact

so it makes perfectly sence that they kill infantrys..

Sort'a wrong actually. The tanks have HEAT rounds, and it's a vast different between HE and HEAT. HEAT stands for High-Explosive Anti-Tank - yes, but they aren't very high explosive. Unless they hit a hard surface the vast majority of the force of the warhead will ho directly into the ground and be absorbed by it resulting in very poor effect on surrounding soft targets.

[galzohar 31]

Tanks IRL have HEAT rounds. Tanks in the game have HE rounds. So of course the ammo should be replaced, but as it is now the rounds are behaving correctly. Against people that is - against buildings it's quite funny to see a SABOT doing 10X the damage of a HE round even though I'm really not sure which one would destroy buildings better, definitely not the massive difference you see in the game.

Of course HEAT rounds are pretty useless in the game as they are meant for engaging armored targets above ~1500-2000m where the HEAT becomes a higher penetration round than the SABOT (as SABOT loses its penetration over distance while the HEAT does not), but we can't really engage anything at those ranges right now (though I hadn't really got a chance to check how well 1.05 handles that issue).

Of course IRL it's also not just SABOT and HEAT, but also some other kinds of rounds depending on what army that tank belongs to and what you have for that mission.

[NoRailgunner 0]

Tank interiors - yes

Better crew AI/command options - yes

More arcardish-fun - NO

[Trapper 0]

With "arcardish" I only want to describe the difference between OFP/ArmA tanking and the detailed simulators like Steel Beasts or M1 Tank Platoon. Don't worry I don't want it more arcarde then it ever was in OFP.

[xPaveway 10]

Come on man, you can't make polls that are basically:

Should BIS improve <x> aspect of Arma?

1. Yes

2. No

3. Fine as is

Of course everyone will vote for an improvement. If you made a poll that had specifics it would be way more useful.

As far as tanks go though, what specifically could be improved? The way I see it, ArmA 2 so far has kind of a jack of all trades, master of none thing going for it. There's every aspect of the military in the game, but things like planes, helicopters, and tanks are not to 100% simulation as you would get from playing a game solely dedicated to one aspect. (IL-2 for example)

Sure tanks could be improved, but so could planes and helicopters. Perhaps we could focus more on specific aspects that could be tweaked. For example: tanks seem to become useless after being hit once. I mean if I'm engaging a T-90 in my M1A1, after the first hit or so I seem to lose turret control and my tracks. Makes tank battles kind of short and uninteresting.

Perhaps boosting HP for the tanks would help. I heard that in reality the M1A1 barely flinches when being hit by an RPG-7.

[galzohar 31]

ACE boosted tanks so that M1A1 barely finches when hit by an RPG... Problem is it doesn't even do much when it hits the M1A1 from the rear where it only has less than 100mm of steel (not Chobham) armor.

[xPaveway 10]

ACE boosted tanks so that M1A1 barely finches when hit by an RPG... Problem is it doesn't even do much when it hits the M1A1 from the rear where it only has less than 100mm of steel (not Chobham) armor.

Yeah I know ACE did this, but ArmA and ACE are different you know. Not picking on you specifically, but I dislike how there seems to be this tendency to answer any problem with ArmA with "just play ACE, it's amazing and it fixes everything and it's the answer to all our prayers." ACE definitely has its own problems.

Don't forget that BIS are still working on ArmA :) and as a side note this is the ArmA 2 suggestion forum.

[galzohar 31]

I'm definitely not one of those saying "ACE solves all your problems and BIS shouldn't fix anything". I think BIS should fix everything, but I also don't think they ever will, while ACE might get there eventually because there are actually people there working on things.

Not playing ACE just because it has issues is quite silly, even though it introduces a lot of bad things (even very bad), the good things it brings outweigh them in a noticeable way.

[76 0]

My only gripe is mentioned by Trapper. That is to stabilize the commander gun so rotation is not influenced by the main turret. It may not be 100% accurate but its totally useless the way it is.

The unpowered turrets like in the HUMVEEs and UAZ should be faster turning.

+1 and +1

BI please address this issue, pretty sure its been a ticket a dev-heaven for quite some time... not that hard to fix................

edit: not in dev-heaven :j: will add.

Edited January 26, 2010 by 76

[jasonnoguchi 11]

Hey guys, tested the new armor penetration system released by ACE today yet? THATS AWESOME!!! That's how tanks should REALLY be in ArmA2!

UPDATE: I am not trying to advertise for ACE but just sharing with the community if you really want to get playing those effects rather than bitch to BIS and wait forever and not get it. Its up to you. I rather play the mod and enjoy the effects right now. Lets face it, BIS DO NOT make engine changes within the same title and anyone who has been playing BIS titles long enough knows that. Perhaps you can wait another year or two for ArmA3 but I am not going to wait.. I wanna play.. NOW. :)

Edited January 26, 2010 by jasonnoguchi

[nuxil 2]

please keep ace out of this thread, its addressed to bis not ace team.

and btw there is no penetration model/config in arma2 only hitboxes

so ace must fake one. maybe by using handledamage. dont know havent cheaked it out since i dont play ace

[jw custom 56]

Either that or they call them out on the very fringes of the game's draw distance, before the player can even see through the fog.

Agree, i rarely play with tanks but this also apply to footsoldiers. Sometimes they can't see the enemy 30m ahead while at other times they report the enemy 1000m away through heavy foliage and whatnot :p

[ron533 0]

Tanks definitely needs to be reworked and not neglected, as appears to be today.

I use to play them allot once but they got so useless now I lost the fun there.

I wish it would be fixed even for those who do not use the tanks themselves but for the ones you are playing with.

If you get tank support in MP, you would like to know that tank can handle the job and act at least as realistic as BIS does things, and they've just messed it here.

Just to be clear, I love BIS work , but I know they can do better, they once did...

[Trapper 0]

Come on man, you can't make polls that are basically:

Should BIS improve <x> aspect of Arma?

1. Yes

2. No

3. Fine as is

Of course everyone will vote for an improvement. If you made a poll that had specifics it would be way more useful.

As far as tanks go though, what specifically could be improved? The way I see it, ArmA 2 so far has kind of a jack of all trades, master of none thing going for it. There's every aspect of the military in the game, but things like planes, helicopters, and tanks are not to 100% simulation as you would get from playing a game solely dedicated to one aspect. (IL-2 for example)

Sure tanks could be improved, but so could planes and helicopters

I see a lot of this counterargument here. Mostly from users who've joined the board not long ago, so I believe you won't have played OFP tanks. When you carefully read my suggestions again I want mainly things/the spirit back that were already there in the predecessor OFP.

And over this long time I can assure you that the helicopters from day one of ArmA1 and then the new planes afterwards obtained improvements/bugfixes in a big scale compared to OFP.

So with this poll I'm presenting to BIS how much the same focus now on tanks and fighting vehicle playability as a whole is or isn't desired by the community today. Because this is a point which isn't done with adding +10 damage points to that gun/hit zone system. Everyone is free to use the dev-heaven issue tracker for detailed small things like that, though such a thing wouldn't improve nothing about what I'm concerned.

Regarding "ACE has got/will get it", "Yes, stabilize the turrets" and again "Please don't ask for going even more arcarde!"

I've played my example mission Operation Hunter vanilla until I got frustrated by the not stabilized commander periscope on the T72.

Then I played it with ACE2 and had much more fun because there it is stabilized. But... because of their research ACE2 completely removed stabilization from the main turret/gunner scope. That's realistic. And it makes the gunner position complicated for players now unless they would add some other views for the gunner, without locked 8x zoom (realistic, too).

And this is a point where I want vanilla ArmA2 to stay "arcardish" like OFP. E.g. just keep stabilization here for usability until you've added everything realistically necessary to compensate the lost combat awareness by practice interior views, commander main gun override, easy target information share between commander and gunner. AI or player. Before you've got all that right I prefer an aracarde stabilized main turret and/or dynamic zoom on that tank oldie, or I just won't man it myself.

Edited January 26, 2010 by Trapper

[oxmox 73]

I agree that tanking needs improvement....

Leave realism at this point to mods like ACE2.

dont agree here, the point is it is advertised as a military simulaiton so please the realism aspect is important. I dont want to see more arcade, i want to see it realistic as possible but still enjoyable.

the speed uphill. it so damn slow. for god sake.. you can cycle past a tank in 30/40 km/t in a little uphill in terrain. i mean wtf. its so stupid.

I think the speed of the tank uphill is alright, but the speed of the bycycle is silly. You can drive fast like a car which is totally unrealistic.

2nd thing is if you make your gunner / commander scan the horizont. you can not make them disable it. i have not found a way to do it.

Sometimes it works when you use 2-1 (cancel target) but this doesnt work always and it seems it is a bug.

I have some points where i would loke to see improvement aswell:

- AI detection of enemy units in general is weak and bugged in this game, this is a big part if you play warfare in veteran mode without 3rd person view.

- Easy mode scanning with spacebar or right mouse button should have no place in a sim, i heard you can switch off the settings on multiplayer ? Anway this is cheaper than arcade even, for what we have such a nice territory with great cover but you can "cheat" to find a target...this is crap. But probably at the moment neccasary if we take none restricted gear aswell no dmg modell aswell ai detection in consideration.

- The main gun movment doesnt feels right, it should be slower with a feeling that you move a big gun and not a water pistol. Even infantry weapons feel more heavy than the main gun of a tank.

- When i order to turn off engines i want to have it turned off !! Often the gunner just starts the engine for his movement...thats an important issue.

- The commander position turns with the gun which makes it impossible to scan anything.. important issue !

- Some kind of infrared camera is missing which is important in urban fights vs highly dangerous infantry units.

- A tanker or any soldier should have his own role i.e. when iam a tank driver i have to concentrate on tanking and should not have the option to equip a sniper rifle+javelin or any specialized or highly effective weapon. It is too arcadish when you jump into a tank, equip super infantry gear and than you cap even whole towns without teamwork, this is not a simulated military but rather for the bf2 fanboys.

- There should be more restricted gear and units i.e. every player can equip highly specialized weapon systems currently or just anti tank/AA missiles. In warfare you can have a whole squad with javelin or AA soldiers...this is crap and totally unrealistic and gives tanker really hell, its not fun as a tanker with those crazy options.

- Not that important but would be fun, what about gear in vehicles ?

Edited January 27, 2010 by oxmox

[Alex72 1]

i

2nd thing is if you make your gunner / commander scan the horizont. you can not make them disable it. i have not found a way to do it.

so a solution would be to add in a extra watch command. . example Gunner watch front/right/left or back.

Whats wrong with "Gunner-3-8" wich is WATCH DIRECTION X? Always worked.

EDIT:

A command to get the gunner to look forward again and keep it there would be great. Maybe thats what you meant though? But snapping them out of SCAN HORIZON works with WATCH DIRECTION.

Edited January 27, 2010 by Alex72

[That guy 10]

by adding in interior models for tanks and other AFVs, alot of the current problems could be alleviated, especially for the commanders

that is really the only big boost OFP has had technologically over ArmA1 and 2, and would love to see its return