Tank Centric Build

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    • Yeah, a tank build is just inefficient because tanks just end up being targets to air-craft and artillery; the best thing tanks can do is trade hits in melee and win due to hp. Not to mention the cost involved to make a decent stack.

      If/when tanks and other heavy armor vehicles get 20 range like tier 3 infantry it might be more justifiable to do a tank build….
      I am Aeneas, duty-bound and known above high air of heaven by my fame, carrying with me in my ships our gods of hearth and home, saved from the foe. I look for Italy to be my fatherland, and my descent is from all-highest Jove.
    • Aeneas of Troy wrote:

      Yeah, a tank build is just inefficient because tanks just end up being targets to air-craft and artillery; the best thing tanks can do is trade hits in melee and win due to hp. Not to mention the cost involved to make a decent stack.

      If/when tanks and other heavy armor vehicles get 20 range like tier 3 infantry it might be more justifiable to do a tank build….
      I've thought that exact thing. The 20 range... but damn, it would make them soooo powerful. Maybe T2 for ranged tanks....Hell, if it was T3 people would build them just for the end game.

      My first game I was stunned when my armor fought like a bulldozer.

      The terrain penalties are really steep... the city one is particularly deterring for a tank build.
      There doesn't seem to be enough open terrain/dessert on the map to balance out the negative.
      ... and they're as expensive as a ship.

      I'm just trying to figure out, or rather get the community at large to figure out, how the tank can excel... If there is no game-long strategy for them, perhaps they need to be reworked...not by just adding more HP.
      I intend for this thread to be about tanks in their current form... but if it fails to produce a viable strategic/tactical solution, I'll start/participate in another for how the tank can improve.
    • Smallsword wrote:

      Aeneas of Troy wrote:

      Yeah, a tank build is just inefficient because tanks just end up being targets to air-craft and artillery; the best thing tanks can do is trade hits in melee and win due to hp. Not to mention the cost involved to make a decent stack.

      If/when tanks and other heavy armor vehicles get 20 range like tier 3 infantry it might be more justifiable to do a tank build….
      I've thought that exact thing. The 20 range... but damn, it would make them soooo powerful. Maybe T2 for ranged tanks....Hell, if it was T3 people would build them just for the end game.
      My first game I was stunned when my armor fought like a bulldozer.

      The terrain penalties are really steep... the city one is particularly deterring for a tank build.
      There doesn't seem to be enough open terrain/dessert on the map to balance out the negative.
      ... and they're as expensive as a ship.

      I'm just trying to figure out, or rather get the community at large to figure out, how the tank can excel... If there is no game-long strategy for them, perhaps they need to be reworked...not by just adding more HP.
      I intend for this thread to be about tanks in their current form... but if it fails to produce a viable strategic/tactical solution, I'll start/participate in another for how the tank can improve.
      We tried tanks in challenges and they failed pretty hard. We saw other alliance try and they failed even harder.

      Tanks have in exactly one situation kind of a use: When the enemie is a very small land with hardly any retreat option like Spain vs Portugal or Algeria&Libya vs Tunisia


      In reference to the other discussion:
      A chopper build is kind of the counter to an MRL build though, so putting out more MRL won't help you that much.
      Choppers are hard to counter, als long they get played smart. @Opulon still gets haunted by them for a reason :D
    • Has anyone tried tanks in Battleground, USA?
      It seems like that might be the best map for it...Smaller, one land mass, more abundant open terrain, smaller "countries"

      I also see the Tank Commander playing a key role... if he's leveled up and in a tank heavy stack it looks more appealing.

      A stack with a Tank Commander/4 MBT/5 MAA.... might be pretty difficult for helicopters... esp since the MAA would get an attack and defense bonus.

      The Tank Commander with MRL and/or SAM also looks appealing.

      It might be that the strategy is more of a "Tank Commander Center Build"
    • Tanks are good for sitting on low-morale occupied cities.

      They can get hit by Insurgents a zillion times before they need to go to a Hospital (or a Naval Transport) for some R&R.

      They are also hella expensive, especially to use babysitting occupied cities.

      PS: Don't flame me - The point of this post *is* that deciding to build 6-12 tanks to use in this way would be *just a bit* silly.
    • When you break the game down to its barest form, the whole objective is to capture cities - that gives you VPs to win the game and it prevents your opponent from building more units to fight you with. To capture cities, you need to clear out the enemy units and move your infantry in. All non-infantry units, therefore, are essentially there to support your infantry in getting to the other guy's cities (and to stop him from getting his infantry into yours).

      Because of the terrain penalty, tanks are not good at clearing out units from enemy cities. And that's the crux of it. They do not help you do this in an efficient way, compared to other units that you have at your disposal. Therefore, they are not very helpful in offensive operations (except for in a few fairly niche situations which do not in themselves warrant the expense of building lots of tanks). I'd say that they are useful in defence, however - this is because you can entrench them outside of cities (at certain choke-points, perhaps), where they can be made very difficult to dislodge.

      Therefore, I'd conclude that a tank-centric build is essentially a defensive build. If you go out on the attack, you're going to want to use other units to get the job of capturing cities done, and your tanks are probably going to end up sitting about doing not much.
    • IMO, mbt is only good enough if you can surprise your enemy with it.
      Mostly early game especially if you have eastern tech.
      Then you can try to surprise your closest neighbor with few mbt's. It is possible and even more likely your neighbor is not prepared for this in first several days.
      But only if he does not build at least one anti tank.
      On mid game I don't see the way to do it, maybe if your neighbor is in war with another player so his troops are away. But then you can do it with anything, you don't need mbt stacks.

      Strategy to use pure mbt stack of 10 is suicide. Anything can destroy that. Arty, planes, choppers... even melee units can easely do it in cities. But you will probably die before reaching the city or be damaged a lot before entering melee fight.

      Even if you somehow manage to destroy one opponent the others will be ready for you. And you will have to rebuild / recover before you can attack next target.
      What if you loose 7-8 of your mbt's?
      You have nothing at that moment and you're out of action for a long time!
    • @WalterChang

      I absolutely agree, the city terrain penalty is crippling to the tanks effectiveness... with a tank commander in the mix the attack stat is then only down by 5%.

      That's what made me start thinking that a tank build really needs to be centered around a tank commander.


      You're right that tanks are only really ideal for niche situations... Mainly, slowing/blocking the fast path of your enemy.

      I think you're right that tanks are better for a defensive position in general... but they could be used to defend the offensive force.
      If tanks are between your enemies ground units and your MRL/artillery they can act in a defensive way for your offensive units....
      Like in American football, the linebackers defend the quarterback... then the whole position advances and the cycle repeats.


      I think that waiting to be able to build MRL for this would take too long, I'd need TA for the early game... the general strategy would have to be broken into phases.

      Phase 1. MAA are the early shield units. TA are the early sword units.
      Phase 2. MAA/MBT shield units...TA/SAM sword units
      Phase 3. MBT/MAA shield... MRL/SAM sword (TA becomes a sidearm of sorts)

      It's over simplified, but I think it's at least understandable.

      I have a current game that I'm far enough ahead to experiment... just started a tank commander and 4 tanks... It's midgame, but I'll play around with them and see what I can learn.
    • WalterChang wrote:

      I think you're right. But if you're using your tanks merely as blockers for your ranged bombardment (TA/MRL), then it isn't really a tank-centric build, is it? It's an artillery build with tanks as support, surely?

      And: do TDs not do the blocking job as effectively as tanks, and more cost-efficiently, anyway?
      Yeah, I'm having trouble trying to justify building tanks at all...center or support.
      TD are my usual bread and butter
      What started the whole thought was that MRL aren't as mobile as TA and TD aren't as beefy as MBT.... so a MBT/MRL build could work well-enough.
    • Smallsword wrote:

      It's a kind of challenge... like playing as N. Korea/S. Korea...

      Could you win with tanks?
      Deliberately hamstringing yourself by building bad units? If you like!

      I started a game a while ago as Iraq and set about building Tanks, AFVs and mech infantry - a melee army, essentially - just to try them out because I usually would never do that. Problem was, because game balance impels you to expand quickly at the start in order to boost your resource production and continue to grow your military and tech to remain competitive into the later part of the game, I found that I'd conquered Iran, Syria and Arabia with my starting units before I'd really got the armour-centric build up and running properly. And by that time I'd run out of desert in which to use them! If I wanted to expand further, I needed units that wouldn't suffer too much in mountains or jungle, because that was what the countries on my borders looked like - and I didn't have them. Also, all that melee caused a lot of attrition, even though I won the battles. I had to rest up for several days before continuing (and you can't airlift any of those units back to a hospital until tier 2 or even tier 3). To my mind, there isn't any point in impoverishing yourself in Components by building all those melee-effective units if you're not going to actually put that melee advantage into practice - if you're going to use airpower or artillery to break down the enemy before you attack, you don't need the high melee values in the first place. So you're going to suffer battle attrition, and that slows you down.

      Maybe that build comes into its own in the later game, once you can airlift them in and out of conflict zones. Maybe. But in the meantime you're going to be using sub-par units. And that feels like you're deliberately hamstringing yourself, which gets frustrating. ("Why don't I just build some fucking helicopters? This'd be so much easier. NO! I'm going with tanks! Hnnnnggggg!")

      I quit that game.
    • Smallsword wrote:

      @Kalrakh
      I think your competition would steepen if you disallowed yourself any helicopters. ;)

      It is true, that I was using the word more loosely... more as "someone to play against"
      I won a flash point map with only ASF and some ships

      There isn't much I did never play ;)

      With Choppers I won 1 vs 5 'competitions' though. However with artillery those would be even more easy, because lower attrition.
    • @WalterChang

      That's why I started the thread.
      I'd rather hamstring here in theory and see if I could work it out (with some helpful input) than pursue the idea in-game for a month and maybe not even learn as much (which I still might do).

      Maybe at this point this thread switches from "How can a tank strategy work?...Can a strategy work with tanks?" to "How could the tank be improved?... How should the tank become playable in-game?'"
    • Smallsword wrote:

      "How could the tank be improved?... How should the tank become playable in-game?'"
      I think turning them into a sort of low-ranged, high HP artillery unit might make them good: high offensive damage, low defensive, same range as mortar infantry. And get rid of the urban terrain penalty. Maybe give TDs the same set-up, but with different terrain modifiers and make them really bad at defending vs infantry.