Issue with the game as a whole

[Nightbringer]

Hello,

I played Wargame titles from their first title. Game had changed quite a bit in its feel, starting from more simulator'ish kind of route where developers tried to portray each unit realistically in accordance to how they would perform to Red Dragon where game is an arcade. Where stats and availability are made up and devs had long since abandoned putting any realism into their game.

What I'm interested in is game's unique feature of wielding vast selection of military equipment from any period. It is fun initially to think of having T-34-85 in a same match up as Leopard 2. However, said excitement quickly fades away when you realise that none of those periods or vehicles are balanced well. Early technology and equipment tend to have unrealistic accuracy ratings where they can't hit anything. Late tech however suffers from opposite problem of where they do not see meaningful degradation of their performance. Vehicle damage model is extremely simplistic, it is hp - armor vs penetration. This results in situation where vehicles are unusually resilient to older equipment who otherwise would score a kill on modern vehicle through sheer luck or hitting its rear armor. Then we have missiles who in this game have overly small engagement distances with unexplained penalties to accuracy. Half of the time, used missile's characteristics are wrong (looking at you Soviet tanks). AA in a similar vein are equally useless. Put any AA system in game against CAS performing aircraft and aircraft will be shredded, there are no ifs about that. In this game however aircraft is perfectly able to correctly identifying and shredding outdated AA defences. Where realistically advances in technology would allow a lot greater effective range, in this game however there is no such thing. Accuracy seems to define vehicle's accuracy over all ranges and low accuracy vehicle has hilariously sad accuracy even within its optimum range. Game becomes rather an arbitrary numbers game of which kind of tech has good enough numbers and how I micro manage my unit. This is especially noticeable with manpads where its effectiveness its completely arbitrary. Instead balancing in sense of range, ability to lock upon target and deadliness of its payload, we have bizarre "accuracy" meter which for the most part decides effectiveness of weapon system.

Environments in this game are also unrealistic. Long gone are open fields prime for mass armor movement. Now it is all about annoying bush play. There is nearly no territory in this game where tanks would be important. If there is an open field, you can bet it will be full of pockets for infantry and vehicles to hide in plain sight. That is unrealistic and stands out in stark contrast to Wargame Airland battle. In this game it is all about endless choke points with game actively discouraging maneuver warfare. It is all about clashing head on. It got so bad in this game that I actually prefer to play 1 vs 1 on 2 vs 2 or bigger maps. At least there you get a sense that you are fighting in an actually realistic environment and not gameyfied, overglorified fortnite arena.

Then power creep had started. Historically, there was only USSR and USA who were superpowers and thus had most extensive and well rounded military. This was reflected quite well within previous games in the series. However with time other nations were receiving countless units, no matter how historically accurate, they were given full availability and their performance in game was completely insane. Quickly game became less about historical availability of troops and more about spamming overpowered vehicles. Worst case is when developers had put Patriot within this game, a weapon system which has no place in this game. They might as well add tactical nuclear weapons as long we are at butchering realism. In the end, we have grossly power creeped and grossly over presented minor nations while major powers were pushed out to sideways.


Game fails to accurately simulate any era within cold war. By extending itself so much, it also makes itself extremely thin in quantity of equipment you can use. Sure, it appears much when taken as a whole, but try to split your army to early/late units and soon glaring gaps will appear. Game fails to simulate period of post WW to late 60s before advent of electronics and other advanced technologies. It does an equally half ♥♥♥♥♥ job in representing dynamic of 70s+ combat. When game tries to include so many vehicles at once, it does a poor job for everyone. Poor historic representation, poor interaction between vehicles, lackluster depth in its mechanics. I was a fan of the company, but I feel that they had lost their way sometime during development of Red Dragon. Firing their employees who dared to stand up for themselves. Half assing naval combat. Their further titles also fail to innovate and are rather reskins of known formula. I wish that Wargame would had taken different turn and had gotten more serious in trying to represent real life performance of military vehicles, but sadly for me, we instead got this turn for the arcades.

[Coma Berenices]

This is not simulator, it's RTT that is meant to be balanced and devs did great job back at time adjusting the prices and stats of units based on players feedback to make engagements interesting.
As each game unfortunately it is out of support for such changes now. Accept it.

[Nightbringer]

It initially started as simulator-lite as I had described in my original post. A lot more attention were given to balancing vehicles around their real life performance and later slapping price on top to balance it. However, during Red Dragon this philosophy was thrown out of window and even designing purely from arcade perspective, game balance is crap. BTR costs a fortune. USA is nerfed to a ground. Certain vehicles, especially from DLC have imaginary performances with extremely low price tags. During post launch release, devs seemingly had stopped caring about balance and quality of their product.

[TTMXMP]

I am a still not sure what you wanted with this post other then telling the rest of the world you don’t like how the game series turned out.
- MrTT

[Nightbringer]

Pretty much that.

[Sneaky_Beaky]

10/10 post agree completely.

[Enigmatic]

Yeah agreed. Well said OP.

[R131]

"vehicle damage is extremely simplistic hp - armor vs penetration" the penetration value is scaled up by +1 every hundred or so meters you get closer to the target for KE(kinetic energy) turrets, this adds realism or you would have t34 rounds doing damage to the front armor of a chally 2 at 2k range. unrealistic right?

also the modern tanks do have small amounts of increased armor at the back to prevent any old tiny explosive from causing critical damage so easily, and your t34s can penetrate this if positioned correctly but goodluck out maneuvering a modern MBT with your old engines behaving like that, quite realistic too.

but i do agree that no cannon should have an accuracy less than 40% no matter what, same for some of the medium era AA missiles on planes and RPG/atgms equiped by infantry.

i also think the moral recovery cooldowns do need adjusting just a tiny bit.

[GamerCH]

Interesting, around for so long and yet so.... clueless.

The old Eugen logic was: 90mm guns 1750m 105mm guns 1900m 120mm guns 2200m

Then they took stuff into consideration like optics and computers and ammunition and the barrel and so in, resulting in 2100m for some and even 2200m range for some others. USA players probably still outraged over Abrams tank having less range xD but there was good reason to it. Thou I don't know it anymore, something technical.

Anyway you're like 8 years too late with your feedback lol.

All these old tanks come with very high accuracy, often 40% which is like... 6 or even 8 from EE and then there's the high veterancy on top of that.

So all those T-34 tanks in RD have like 8 accuracy from EE here unlike the 3 accuracy that they used to have.


Ranges are all arbitrary anyway. ATGM would have like 5000m range or more, many modern tanks would fire their shells well over 3000m.


Then again Eugen never had the intelligence to give Radar AA the range it would need to do its job with most of them being at like 3000m so rocketpod planes can hunt them down lol. or an A-10 can blow up 3 tanks while two BUK are next to them doing nothing.


Anyway one would think after being around for 8 years you'd know the gameplay philosophy behind it but instead you're one of these stupid people who think this is a real life simulator when it CLEARLY ABSOLUTELY ISN'T and NEVER was meant to be one.

Originally posted by Nightbringer:

Environments in this game are also unrealistic. Long gone are open fields prime for mass armor movement. Now it is all about annoying bush play. There is nearly no territory in this game where tanks would be important. If there is an open field, you can bet it will be full of pockets for infantry and vehicles to hide in plain sight. That is unrealistic and stands out in stark contrast to Wargame Airland battle. In this game it is all about endless choke points with game actively discouraging maneuver warfare. It is all about clashing head on. It got so bad in this game that I actually prefer to play 1 vs 1 on 2 vs 2 or bigger maps. At least there you get a sense that you are fighting in an actually realistic environment and not gameyfied, overglorified fortnite arena.

Lets just ignore that more than half of the maps do not comply with your description.

Lets also ignore that you failed to mention the number 1 predator of tanks: PLANES

The last problem anyone has is infantry. The game is so full of bombs and other means to kill infantry that they really are not a problem.

Except when you play a map that is way too big and then send your 1 tank into a forest, thinking it would do well there. Also many ALB maps were full of chokepoints and it was a terrible game through and through. Only in EE were tanks doing their role properly and even there you needed to clear forests and bushes and hillsides before driving your 140$ tank through.

[Nightbringer]

Originally posted by Nom noms:

"vehicle damage is extremely simplistic hp - armor vs penetration" the penetration value is scaled up by +1 every hundred or so meters you get closer to the target for KE(kinetic energy) turrets, this adds realism or you would have t34 rounds doing damage to the front armor of a chally 2 at 2k range. unrealistic right?

also the modern tanks do have small amounts of increased armor at the back to prevent any old tiny explosive from causing critical damage so easily, and your t34s can penetrate this if positioned correctly but goodluck out maneuvering a modern MBT with your old engines behaving like that, quite realistic too.

but i do agree that no cannon should have an accuracy less than 40% no matter what, same for some of the medium era AA missiles on planes and RPG/atgms equiped by infantry.

i also think the moral recovery cooldowns do need adjusting just a tiny bit.

Indeed, I did not mentioned a lot of things. Like another fellow said about airpower, but my post is already very long and sometimes you just have to leave some things out. He however wasn't here since beginning and does not understand that developers had hired researcher to research military equipment and devs based vehicle balance on and in it in earlier games, each vehicle had characteristics similar to real life performance.

For me, this game lacks that feeling of danger where even an outdated system can be truly threatening in its own optimal conditions. Even in 2020, T-55 is perfectly capable of destroying any modern MBT if it manages to ambush it, but in this game, it will deduce hp from enemy more advanced tank, said tank will then turn to face T-55 and it will be hopelessly slaughtered. A better tank is rather a better overall solution and is capable of unleashing more destruction than few more outdated vehicles. See Leclerc or MBT with autocannons. Vehicles seem to be unconcerned about damaged modules as even suppressed advanced MBT is more accurate than early cold war tanks. This however is quite inaccurate as M60 had 55% first hit probability. T-62 similar at 1500 meters range. This means that even if my tank misses its shot, second and the third will be nearly guaranteed hits as gunner adjusts his shot. This accuracy and hp system just makes old tanks irrelevant as they can't hit their targets properly and seemingly they never improve in their accuracy. When base accuracy for those vehicles historically were 50% ish at 1500 and maximum range 2 kilometers, we have a system where low accuracy vehicles will not scale to 90% ish accuracy. Anything at half range should be almost an automatic hit. While it is true that given ranges are greater and accuracy is lower, older tanks still can't reliably hit their opponents even at very low ranges like 1000 meters.

((AP POWER - ARMOR) / 2) + 1 and +1 AP minus every 175 meters from maximum range. Accuracy scales by +5% every 175 meters. So, it is 2275, 2100, 1925, etc. However, T-34 only has maximum range of 1575. Tank can only begin scaling from already short range, otherwise it has terrible 40% accuracy to hit. You have to bring tank to point blank range, stop it and even then it is a joke. T-55 has a greater scaling, but it is conveniently pre-nerfed. It has atrocious 25% accuracy meaning it is just a joke. It needs to close to same 1575 meters distance in order to get its accuracy to 35%! This tank is literally incapable of shooting accurately under any circumstances while historically it had first hit probability at 1000 range with 50% accuracy and hit probability would grow to 90% after following shots. This game tends to understate accuracy of Soviet tanks while giving more "correct" numbers to Nato tanks for no apparent reason. It also has awfully primitive accuracy system which punishes low performing vehicles.

In general, my point could be summed up like this. This game punishes severely bad vehicles while it rewards good vehicles a lot more. This results in good vehicles being extremely good and bad vehicles being very bad. Accuracy for example scales by 5% which is only good for tanks with already high base accuracy values and long ranges. Armor penetration scales with range. Guess who is going to get short stick when it comes to AP. Yeah, low range tanks become trash, they can't properly threaten higher tier tanks at their optimum range. Then veterancy. It scales based on base accuracy. So, any experience bonuses on low tier vehicles are useless. Any experience bonuses on high tier units are very important.

Btw: Similar historical inaccuracies are seen across the board. Early missiles had 90% hit chance already. Historically, it is missile speed, detectability, penetration, cost who was going down or up. Accuracy of all weapons rarely changed, especially not by twice or thrice. The real issues with early technologies were technological limitations. We had heat seeking missiles who can't fire at incoming planes. Later generations of sensors had fixed that issue. Why we can't portray equipment like this? When tech improves not by being useless spammable junk, but rather from very situational like manpads firing only when plane is behind them or atgm teams who have very slow missiles, are instantly detected and any shot at them would scramble the missile? This kind of balance would be highly realistic, historical and fun. However, this game fails to simulate such things, because it tries to do too much and fails to do anything properly.

[R131]

ok so reading a bit more about those open fields and tanks being obselete lol? Tanks are the frontrunners, totally essential in 99% of games.

you want to just faceroll your keyboard and send two tank columns at eachother in an open field? sounds like fun.....not.

[Nightbringer]

As bush campers. In previous games you could face roll opposition with tanks if they are in open field. Nowadays all maps were made in a way that tanks became unusable. It is more about positional warfare, hiding those metal bawkes in bushes in order to assassinate enemies in positional warfare rather than having an armored fist breaking through enemy defences and creating a breakthrough.

[GamerCH]

Originally posted by Nightbringer:

For me, this game lacks that feeling of danger where even an outdated system can be truly threatening in its own optimal conditions. Even in 2020, T-55 is perfectly capable of destroying any modern MBT if it manages to ambush it, but in this game, it will deduce hp from enemy more advanced tank

Do you even play this game? All these modern tanks have weak sidearmor that you can penetrate with cheap tanks like T-55. Some of them have ATGM that outranges them. The front armor angle isn't high and you have limited control over which direction your tank faces.

Critical failures like optics or tracks render the tank near useless. Then there's morale damage. There's also critical 2x damage. AP scaling you mention later and is very dangerous for modern tanks as some T-55 will penetrate them severly at 500 - 1000 meters. Then there's HEAT rounds that ignore armor.

Early missiles certainly didn't have 90% hit chance, quite the opposite actually.

Soviet tanks are smaller than Nato ones so all Soviet tanks get a +5% (or more maybe) chance at hitting Nato tanks.

Cluster MLRS was a new addition that came out years after release making tanks weaker once more.

Then there's all this stuff about you wanting a base T-55 from the late 50s to be as accurate as a Leclerc??? Its already twice as accurate as it was in EE. Remember the first mission where you had Leopard 1 vs T-34 and 55? They would fire like 8 times to hit once.

[Nightbringer]

Don't waste your time, I'm not interested in trolls. You pretty much disagree and insult me on every point I make. I have no doubt that you will merely disagree on everything else which I will say in response to you.

90% hit chance for Sagger. The most popular ATGM in a world, at least for its time.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2188478875
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M14_Malyutka

I'm not sure that we even have it in game. Instead we have a lot more advanced second generation variant.

https://wargame-series.fandom.com/wiki/PTUR_Faktoriya

With grand total of 45% accuracy AND 2450 meters of range! Oh boy, did Christmas and my birthday came all at once?!

Malytuka in game:
https://wargame-series.fandom.com/wiki/BRDM-2_Malyutka-P

For some reason it has reduced accuracy despite being updated version with improved fire control. Another great example of arbitrary balancing.


Historical game balance is a joke. It doesn't even try to portray abstracted ranged for ATGMs. If we suppress distances for gameplay reasons, at least keep relative distances appropriate. Now we have RPGs with unhistorically massive ranges and unhistorically short ranges for ATGMs. This one should be 1925 meters range if we go by game's arbitrary logic. No model names are given. Use of slangs, making proper research more difficult. Employment of anti tank units are also highly unhistorical. There weren't any 2 man teams. They were deployed in platoons and more akin to 15 men squad with one ATGM launcher. Launchers had a lot greater accuracy and deadliness than in game. In this game, ATGM is worthless on its own, such units are being spammed en mass. Game has no HEAT armor/protection. All missiles behave the same. In game unit performance is loosely based on historical equipment performance at best.

Btw: For T-55 firing as accurately as Leclerc. That is indeed how things happen in combat. I was talking however about optimal ranges. First of all Leclerc would outrange T-55. However, if we would have a firefight at 1500 ish meters and T-55 gets around 15% increased chance to hit in its second shot. This percentage increases, because gunner and commander observes how their last shot had performed and adjusts gun accordingly until tank zeroes in on its target. This is how tank combat had worked since WW2 to 60s and this is how even hopelessly outdated Soviet tech would fire just as accurately as Leopard 2A5, Abrams, Challenger 2 or any cutting edge tank. The differences between newer and older tech are more subtle, it is in stabilization technology to enable fire on a move (Soviets had this since T-62, but again, missing in game completely). Various optics like heat and night vision would provide night time awareness. This game however has no day/night cycle for some reason. Then laser range finder and other telemetric gadgets. They mainly increase first hit probability. They are useless in prolonged firefight as any tank would get range estimate by telescopic sight or through coincidence range finding. Vast majority of outdated tanks here have capacity to find more or less accurate ranges if stationary and given some time to do so. Game however fails completely to simulate any of those details. This is why it fails to properly portray any historic period and becomes a parody of itself or rather an arcade RTS.

Soviet "textbook" estimates of the 100mm gun's accuracy are much higher. Theoretically, a gun using a BR-412B APHE round against a halted enemy tank 2.7m high and 3.6m long should have a 77% chance of hitting its target at 1,800m range. Actual accuracy would doubtless be much less in combat conditions.

[GamerCH]

Its 2020 if you haven't noticed yet. I read the forums for 6 years including a great many posts from community and developers explaining the things we argue about here. I have been giving you insight into the answers that you'd have to dig out from their forum. Obviously you're not interested into that.

Waste my time? How about you don't waste your time. Its 2020 if you haven't realized yet, this is futile

Ah yes ofc, everyone that destroys your weak argumentation with facts is "just being a troll".

Most units in this game, and btw IT IS A GAME, are conform with GAMEPLAY, not 100% real life accuracy. They're supposed to WORK in the GAME.

The devs don't need your input to know that stuff like 15 men traveling in a humvee is impossible. You're supposed to just accept that.


How about you actually read the wikipedia article???

"While early estimates of the missile hitting the target ranged from 60 to 90%, experience has shown that it can drop to an efficiency between 2 and 25% in case of less than optimal conditions and lack of skill from the operator. In fact, MCLOS requires considerable skill on the part of the operator, nevertheless, the weapon has always been quite popular with its operators and has enjoyed a constant updating effort both in the Soviet Union/Russia and in other countries.

The two most serious defects of the original weapon system are its minimum range of between 500 and 800 m (targets that are closer cannot be effectively engaged) and the amount of time it takes the slow moving missile to reach maximum range—around 30 seconds—giving the intended target time to take appropriate action, either by retreating behind an obstacle, laying down a smoke-screen, or by returning fire on the operator."

So they need a minimum range of 800m.

The accuracy is only for stationary targets and it needs 30 seconds to reach the target, no unit ever stands still for 30 seconds in this game.

You claim its accuracy is 90% when the very article you mention states its 60 - 90% at best but can drop to 2 -25%.

So what is the game supposed to do? Make it complete RNG? That just drives people mad.

No, if you want a Malyutka to hit then use multiple ones of them. They come cheap anyway, get 4 BMP1 and tell them to attack. Maybe 2 will hit.

Half the units in the game only exist for the campaign anyway. You're not supposed to bring them into MP and expect them to be amazing.

Oh and last but not least, communist statistics about communist weapons are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Also again, you can take these Malyutka units with elite vet and then get the high accuracy.

Oh and tanks have no smoke screen which also has to be taken into account.

[Nightbringer]

You fail to read what I'm saying and object to everything I say. I had said that first generation ATGM had 90% hit rate, further developments had improved practicality of said weapons. There isn't much difference in accuracy between first generation ATGM and second generation ATGM. This is why I talked about how to make ATGM to be more realistic instead of nerfing its accuracy, because historically they all had pretty much 90% hit chance. Models which this game uses come with upgraded control system which brings those missiles up to par with second generation missiles.

Numbers which you quoted are for combat performance of systems. However, all ATGMs suffer from same countermeasures. If you raise up smoke, there is a strong wind, target is moving, no matter how modern or old system is, hit probability will drop significantly for all manually guided ATGMs. I had offered suggestions how to improve ATGMs, but you missed them.

First, earliest generation missiles were different in their abysmal speed. Here, a massive way how to balance all ATGMs around. At extreme range ATGM would take upwards 20 seconds to reach its target! If you would have 20 seconds to order your units back to cover, wouldn't that be a massive advantage? Newer generation of missiles had drastically increased speed, if newest weapon merely took away your time to react, that would be a massive increase to ATGM effectiveness. Then there are costs. Older generation equipment contrary to popular belief sometimes costed more than newer generation. This is due to expensive training of operators. Keep cost of older weapon systems up which would make sense, because their performance now is a lot better. Thirdly, earliest generation equipment was impractical to use. Sagger teams needed to be perfectly calm and concentrated. If any shot lands towards them, operator loses control of a missile and shot is completely negated. Fourth, later generation missiles had offered a lot more protection to operator in terms of camouflage. They use telescopic sights which allows user to hide behind terrain while firing and guiding their missiles. Make newest generation ATGM teams get bonus to their camouflage, making them a lot harder to locate and dispatch. Fifth, earliest generation missiles had monstrous launch profile. Massively reduce camouflage values of ATGM teams who are actively guiding their missile, allowing any unit in range to fire upon them. This would stack severely with previously mentioned debuff of how fiddly and hard those missiles were to guide initially.

Here, plenty of realistic suggestions of how to balance game around historic authenticity.I hope you don't miss the list a second time.

You object to everything I say for the sake of objecting which is extremely irritating. You are contrarian and it seems you have inflated ego. Not only what you said previously is wrong, but also think that you are contributing something to discussion when in fact you are just ignorantly poke at random facts. Have no understanding what an argument is or have capacity to make them. Most of what you write are disconnected statements and points which had no relationship with what I had said, the other half are insults which you consider to be your "arguments". You were dead wrong on historical accuracy of weapons, how maps were different in Airland battle from Red Dragon, how game balance had shifted through the years, etc. None of these points you ever bothered contesting, you said: "your are wrong", insulted me before and afterwards and then called that "destroying weak position with arguments". Your behavior here is just pathetic.

In the end, you contest bunch of points, show your ignorance on them and give up as soon as had started. Most of your contribution in this thread is by making insults. Truly amazing "insight" you are giving me. However, I knew all of this about you the moment I saw that your profile is private. They all are like this...