Tank or bulldozer ?

[minikingrus]

I was holding off with taking on the biters until I had a Tank loaded with Cannon shells.

I rushed on the biter bases... and then realized that it's way more efficient to simply run them over. Full speed ahead and don't look back!

Would it make sense to add some kind of bulldozer shovel graphics to it? It's really efficient at bulldozing. Much more than at tanking.

[The_Mtn_Dew_Master]

It already has a texture for a some sort of bull bar on it (all though it looks a bit like a snowplough)

[Hannu]

Bulldozing works against nests until behemoth biters are hatched. They are spawned around nests, stop the tank easily and eat it. After behemoths tank will be obsolete or at least very impractical compared to Power armor 2.

[bobucles]

Who could have ever guessed that something 3 times the size of a tank would be dangerous to tanks?

I love the idea of adding a cowcatcher to the tank. It definitely matches with how players use tanks.

[mrvn]

I would also prefer shoving aliens out of the way instead of running over them. A cow catcher should cause less damage to the aliens and proportionally less loss of momentum for the vehicle.

[shanemadden]

I did a quick fix for the bulldozer mod for 0.16, for those interested: viewtopic.php?f=190&t=16151&p=362994#p362994

[Aeternus]

Yea. Tanks are also useful versus the true enemy of the Player: Trees
Bulldozers are a nice idea I used to use the AAV Mining vehicle for automated forest clearing (more or less, it's not exactly perfect for that job).

[Hannu]

Who could have ever guessed that something 3 times the size of a tank would be dangerous to tanks?

Maybe most of video game players yes, because it gives interesting game balance. But you can not deduce it from real world facts. Simple Jeep with 7.62 mm machine gun can defeat easily any massive animal, even large groups of them, and any known biologic mechanism can not produce armor or combat skills to compete even against unarmored lightly armed military vehicle. And all defense and attack abilities of tanks are at least order of magnitude better.

[BlakeMW]

It's interesting playing Marathon setting with enhanced biters, because then it shows really what the Tank can do.

First off you won't get the Tank until Big Biters have evolved (or nearly evolved) so you're not going to be fighting puny little biters. The Tank can crush Big Biters but it takes a lot of damage doing so, on the other hand it's highly resistant to their bites, the majority of damage you'll take is from ramming, not being bitten. The most effective way to eliminate swarms of Big Biters is to throw down a few poison capsules and park in the deathcloud while the biters nom on the tank, until dropping dead. Since the Tank is parked, construction robots can safely pop out to repair it then pop back in, the enemies won't target them (much) when they are above the tank.

You can't kill spawners with poison, and crushing them inflicts a lot of self damage on the tank, you can reduce the self damage by "pushing" instead of "ramming". The tank has flat damage reduction, let's say that ramming a spawner at full speed inflicts 200 damage on the Tank, that might get reduced to 150 damage. On the other hand, driving up to the Spawner then pushing into it just inflicts a series of small amounts of damage, maybe 20 damage a tick, the flat damage reduction nearly entirely eliminates that damage (actually pushing is also effective against bigs, you can just slowly push forward rather than staying parked to get some free damage). Overall though it's more effective to just machine gun spawners to destroy them, the machine gun can fire over the biters who are nomming on the tank, unlike the cannon which hasn't mastered the art of teleporting bullets to their destination.

Once Behemoths arrives the Tank is still actually useful. Behemoths are a more extreme version of Bigs, while ramming Bigs damages the Tank, ramming Behemoths nearly instantly destroys the Tank. It's still fairly safe to let them nom on the tank though, but killing them quickly enough is a bit of a problem. Fortunately, the Tank has no trouble outrunning Behemoth Biters and it's always ncie that the Tank doesn't slow down when firing it's weapons, unlike when you're on foot. So now the strategy becomes one of evading the Behemoths while obliterating their nests, at this point note that it's much safer to drive through a spawner than to (try to) drive through a behemoth! Spawners are always a good escape route from being encircled by mobs of behemoths. Once the nests are dead the most straightforward way to clean up the mob of furious behemoths is to jump out of the tank and give them a hosing with the flamethrower then jump back in and drive away while they all slowly burn to death over the next 40s. You can also load up with Personal Laser Defense equipment, these will fire from inside the tank and erode the hitpoints of pursuing behemoths, it's not really adequate for destroying swarms, but it's adequate for cleaning up stragglers. Uranium ammo is similarly effective, not really adequate for swarms but good for cleanup. The Cannon is never really great unless you invest a great deal into the weapon upgrades.

The major obsoleter of the Tank is not so much Power Armor II, because the Tank+Laser Defense combo is pretty nice and the Tank MG is an extremely nice weapon. The real Obsolter is Nukes, once you're producing nukes you can simply make nests of any size go away with a single click. Nukes + Flamethrower is an extremely potent combination and leaves no real role for the Tank to play. But since Nukes are basically the very highest (non-infinite) tech in the game, this leaves plenty of time for the Tank to be useful.