1. supporting infantry != sitting behind infantry forever.mat552 wrote:See, the thing is, most APC drivers have tried this at one time or another. Most of them really do. They do their best to support infantry, cohesively follow with fire, provide cover, all that jazz. It loses its luster real quick for two reasons.
The first is that infantry is just ridiculously more mobile in an urban environment while also being tediously slow in an open one. Yes, realism, wonderful. Boring as hell in a video game. Eventually this will create an underlying (or outright!) attention problem in most of the people still playing this game and they will want to stray further and further in the guise of overwatch.
The second is that APCs are in an odd place in terms of vulnerability to firepower ratio. The proliferation of AT weapons from mines to large bore emplacements in PR means you never know for sure if turning a corner or edging out of a forest is going to kill you. Long term this will make anybody with two brain cells to rub together kind of cagey about staying in one place for too long, APCs are actually less survivable as a whole relative to the weapons employed to kill them and their available cover. As a follow on, if you're a lone APC playing mechanized infantry you are probably going to be murdered in a dark alley way by a roving gang of the enemy's APCs behaving like light tanks and there is typically nothing you, your cannon, and your squad's one mobile AT asset are going to do about it.
PR doesn't really support realism in tactics. It tries with some pretty interesting solutions, but ultimately it can't. There's no fear of death, so the best that can be done with suppression is to mess up your screen. Vehicles never break down due to lack of maintenance. The very concept of a magic fog that becomes impenetrable X meters away even in late afternoon in the middle of the desert is a game introduction, one that PR is built around on a mechanical level. I am still under the belief that in the long term it has caused more problems than it has solved to make vehicles cost tickets and to give them respawn times measured in geological epochs. The gameplay involved already makes it difficult and unattractive to play follow on support with mechanized assets before you start adding meta penalties.
The end consequence of all of that? It makes more sense for APCs to roam as a pack and look for infantry or other light vehicles to dispose of. At the end of the match you owe your team more tickets than you cost them, it's not worth dying 16 times to capture a flag you don't hold. You won't make that quota if you lose the APC be sticking its snout where it shouldn't go every time it spawns and you can't wait for the infantry to clear every window and doorframe before rounding a corner.
I don't know at this point if it's possible to introduce or remove any mechanism or group of mechanisms and get people to play "realistically" with this or any other asset.
2. you assumed roaming APC is less risk than having infantry in front of APC; unfortunately that isn't the case in many maps. It's also generally a lot easier to kill an APC that got hit by a LAT.
The point is that no matter what map it is or how APC should be played in that map, the number of LAT isn't the problem.
We could use angled damage modifier system like FH2 and maybe some airburst rounds for certain guns.
