The tank should be buffed

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Overread
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Re: The tank should be buffed

Post by Overread »

Personally I think that its good the tank can get stalled by too many bugs. It gives you a reason to have some strategy to the attack other than just ploughing through them.


The point raised earlier regarding keeping a challenge in the game is critical. It's far too easy to make something like the tank into a single superpower that then saps all fun from the game. Because if you remove the challenge you remove the fun. It would be neat to see a tier of tanks or a tank with various modular options (with a visual change for each significant modular option) which could start mid-game and advance toward late-game combat. However I think come the late game it would be good to see some additional options added so that combat takes a new turn against the ever increasing biter threat (or even new biter types).

Garm
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Re: The tank should be buffed

Post by Garm »

Overread wrote:Personally I think that its good the tank can get stalled by too many bugs. It gives you a reason to have some strategy to the attack other than just ploughing through them.


The point raised earlier regarding keeping a challenge in the game is critical. It's far too easy to make something like the tank into a single superpower that then saps all fun from the game. Because if you remove the challenge you remove the fun. It would be neat to see a tier of tanks or a tank with various modular options (with a visual change for each significant modular option) which could start mid-game and advance toward late-game combat. However I think come the late game it would be good to see some additional options added so that combat takes a new turn against the ever increasing biter threat (or even new biter types).

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=7475

There is little challenge in modular designs as is currently - just another resource sink.

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Adil
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Re: The tank should be buffed

Post by Adil »

Overread wrote:The point raised earlier regarding keeping a challenge in the game is critical. It's far too easy to make something like the tank into a single superpower that then saps all fun from the game.
Considering how quickly tank gets eaten, the ability of moving around while being damaged would hardly make it a superpower. And f you call hit&run a strategy, we have and always had a car, which is much better suited for that.

Also, it appears that tank is actually capable of doing so already, you just need to mash acceleration button. Which seems a rather odd design choice for not so action oriented game like factorio.
(As for modular stuff and so on, I do agree such mechanics would enrich gameplay but won't add anything on that since it has been brought up a number of times already and I believe devs are aware of that notion.)
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Marconos
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Re: The tank should be buffed

Post by Marconos »

Tank is very underpowered

MKII armor makes the tank useless. It's so underpowered it's scary. I play bugs one below max at high density. I was at large biters / spitters. Rolled out with the tanks and was pinned and destroyed without taking out a single hive. Walked out in MKII armor and the OMGWTFBBQ combat shotgun and cleared the 20+ hives and god knows how many worms. I also had the bots running in the armor.

Other items that I have noticed.

Combat shotgun is stupid powerful compared to other weapons.
Rocket launcher is absolutely useless and does nothing to packs .... not to mention the regular shells do more damage then the explosive ones (assume this is an oversight)
Submachine gun is great until you hit large biters but then just doesn't have the punch.
Flamethrower has the BEST graphics and is SOOOO much fun ... unless you have to engage bugs because then you have to get to close.
Tank is the worst option of all of them due to speed and fact it does like no damage.

Here are my thoughts on this.
MKII armor is fine the way it is, it is end game and should be awesome.
Combat shotgun is fine where it's at. It doesn't kill too fast and you aren't unkillable with it. Needs to do SIGNIFICANTLY less damage to hive, good against bugs, horrible against static fixtures.
Rocket Launcher, way too weak. This things should rock the world against groups (knockback option would be cool effect) and do bonus damage to static fixtures.
Submachine guns needs a little more punch on the top end, it's single target and should do the most damage of any weapon to a single bug. The submachine gun should kill one large biter faster than the AE shotgun kills one large biter.
Tank needs a modular system like the MKII armor, make different levels of the tank as you have armor. The ammo should have upgrade levels like other armor and you should be able to rotate through different types of ammo for different purposes. It should not stall out on bugs but move at a much reduced speed, crushing them under it's massive hulk. The module system should introduce a shield system to the tank to make it comparable to the MKII armor at the top end.

Currently the only viable weapon is the combat shotgun at higher difficulties. At normal difficulties pretty much anything works as there are virtually no bugs. In my current game I'm closing in on 20k large spitters killed at this point and the waves are coming non stop at my walls. In that type of environment you need a tank that is actually a tank and not worse then running around in your armor.

psihius
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Re: The tank should be buffed

Post by psihius »

Actually, about the tank - I think the cannon shells are actually not working right. The cannon shell has 150 of physical damage and 50 explosive damage. Right now I do not see any explosive damage applying at all, or does it apply the the target the shell hit? Because if you think about it, the tank shell, if it does explosive damage, has to mimic the rockets by having the AoE damage.

I think, the tanks and rockets are just placeholders for now and not actually being done properly at all. And if at least rockets have research that makes them much-much better than what we have at basic level, cannon shells don't have any research at all :/

Right now, you either go for power armor, or on harder settings, when you can't really get to power armor before you need to start to take out sizeable bases of biters - you have to do turret creep. Capsules help, but not really much, because to research them and make effective - you have to kill biters.

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Re: The tank should be buffed

Post by HulkingUnicorn »

psihius wrote:Actually, about the tank - I think the cannon shells are actually not working right. The cannon shell has 150 of physical damage and 50 explosive damage.[...]
I didn't notice that they had explosive damage at all. As the shell seems to penetrate everything to its maximum range, I figured it was simply a solid shell with the explosives in the recipe used strictly for propulsion of the shell.

I'd like to see research improving the tank weaponry as well (for the machine gun, just use the upgrades to the player's submachine gun (with a buff?)).

I think a customisable tank would mix well with this (Shield (Just for projectiles? Limited arc? Choose between recharge rates and sustainability?), mobility, exchangeable weaponry (Flame thrower? giga shotgun?), excavator, mine sweeper (PvP), sensors (Early enemy warning when not zoomed out?), etc.).

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