Does making a tank SIM more historically accurate make creating balance in game play more difficult?

[Angry_Kitten]

I dont know,,,,   the World War one tanks we have in game, could be taken out by machine guns using AP....  but machine gunning them with a ww2 tank dunt do nuttin

[BlitzPig_EL]

Do we know the belting loadout for the tank mounted machine guns in the sim?  I've never seen it brought up before.  WWI tanks were armored against rifle caliber weapons, with the exception of the M2 .50 Browning on the Sherman, I'm pretty sure all the tanks in the sim have rifle caliber machine guns as their secondary armament.

[LachenKrieg]

On 7/5/2021 at 6:24 PM, BlitzPig_EL said:

In a true simulation there can be no such thing as "balance", as there was no such thing, in any war.  WW2 was a constant back and forth as the two sides either out designed, or out produced, each other, sometimes it was both.  That is how it should be in the sim.

 

However, even if through some perverse sorcery a mission maker conjured up a "balanced" scenario, it still would not have balance, because you cannot change player behavior.  A good percentage of players will always gravitate to what they perceive as "the best" equipment, be that tanks, or aircraft, or in the case of the FPS, firearms.  I used to see it all the time in the original IL2.  When a map would change from either Russian Front or Europe, to the Pacific, all the Luftwaffe players would jump to the Allied side, every time. So there we would be, everyone sitting on the Allied side and no one flying for Japan, well except for a few of us that enjoyed flying the harder to be successful in Japanese aircraft.  Kinda makes you wonder who the real "experten" were.  But I digress.  People will be people and the only way around it is single player.

 

It has ever been thus.

I wonder if part of the problem isn't that the word "balance" is being used to describe different things. Most understand balance as meaning two sides of something are equal, or comparable. But I think here we are switching back and forth between balanced game play, and historical balance. Historical balance IMO does not mean the two sides were equal, but simply refers to what ever the balance was that existed. Tiger/Panther crews might have been able to engage their opponents from further away, but they were usually heavily out numbered and were often poorly supplied for example. That dynamic helped create the historical balance under which these vehicles met.  

 

For me, balanced game play simply implies that both teams have roughly an equal chance at winning the match. 10 PzIII L's vs 10 T34's would not be balanced match IMO. So to me the simulation part is the vehicles themselves, and creating balance with them in game play is a difficult task that usually requires a coordinated effort between the DEV team and Server hosts. 

 

But a major aspect of game play balance is team strength, and I agree with MSZ, it's not a lot of fun without it. If this really is an issue, why don't the IL2 team use some type of queue system to keep the teams organized. Like if you spawn in and the team you want to join has an extra player, you should be given the option to spawn in immediately on the team with less players, or be placed in a queue waiting for the next available slot on the team with more players. And for the players already in-game, if after several matches they would like to switch sides/vehicles/planes, they simply press a "switch team" button in the spawn screen to be placed in the queue. 

 

I am sure there are a number of ways that this could be managed, but it should be.

Edited July 15, 2021 by LachenKrieg