1. Firepower 2. Protection 3. Spawnpoint 4. Going fast 5. Transport 6. Ammunition 7. Healing Currently, all of these functions are provided by one vehicle. To have more variety of vehicles active on the battlefield, I want to try splitting some of these functions up and increasing their potency where necessary. I think a certain balance is required between the two extremes; we don't want to have 7 different vehicles because most likely, half of them will never be used and hence the others will simply have "weaknesses". But I feel that putting them all together means we can't have a vehicle that heals you fast, resupplies you fast, or offers good protection because it would become overpowered. With the current state of vehicle engines, we will be unable to offer variance in the speed department, but that shouldn't matter too much I think. So here's my proposition for new vehicles: Guns and protection: The ferret sports a 2-slot MG, has 2 seats inside and can have 2 plates of armour on each side. No healing, respawning, or ammo. It is available from the start with a base cost of 80. When upgraded, it becomes the XT-50, with a 3-slot MG, and up to 6 plates of armour on each side. No healing, respawning, or ammo. It is researchable, 120 seconds inside electrical, and has a base cost of 80. Transport, ammunition and spawnpoint: The DAF Transporter offers only slightly more protection than a jeep (no armour, but double the base health, you are unable to shoot people inside it). It has 8 seats and you can spawn inside it. When inside, you instantly gain full ammunition, and are able to switch classes. The jeep stays the same, but a 60 second research in the main tree allows it to fit an MG for the second position. Another 60 second research in biology transforms it into a field medic car, which instantly heals anyone who enters it - each such heal costs "ammo", with max & starting ammo = 6. The M106A Mortar carrier has a 1-slot MG and 2 plates of armour. The mortar can be fired from the 2nd position while the vehicle is stationary. It has a range slightly longer than grenadier mortar, and the damage and area of effect is similar to the high-explosive cannon. It does not use clips, comes with 20 ammo, and has a reload time of 10 seconds.
I get the feeling this won't work out how you want it to. Just to clarify a bit though, we get a jeep, an apc with no healing, weapons, and no armor, and basically a jeep but with a weapon and armor right from the start? There's something to be said about how simple an apc is, it just works. You have to consider just how nice that is when considering all the other empire quirks that are harder to grasp like arty. A bonus is when a new person grabs an apc, they are being an immediate use to the team, as oppose to jeeps or pricey light tanks/any tanks. Please don't make more arty tanks, that mortar carriage sounds like arty. Something really situational and pretty easy to lose, with the difference it doesn't cost as much as a heavy. As an aside, you put 6 plates on that super mg jeep but that doesn't exactly tell me much without knowing the weight limit. Heavies also can have 6 plates but usually they end up with 5 or less, something to consider when the only thing to put on these mg tanks is 1 weapon, half of which are really light. In short I'm going to look at this as if I was commanding. The jeep with heals is actually a pretty nice buff, instant heals are incredibly silly useful. Depending on team composition and if I can fit at least 5 plates on each side the 3 slot mg thing has some nice game breaking potential, they will simply be better then meds because of duhmg having old rail tier damage as a hit scan weapon. Everything else I wouldn't even look at til I got everything else and was getting stuff to just make people happy I'm getting stuff. Honestly, I think instead of making separate chassis it would be better to have an auxiliary type item on the vehicle creation menu, where you can shove in things like spawning, ammo supply, health regen, and what not. Even better is the slot system readily supports a lot of it, slow regen for 1 slot and full 1 up for 2 slots or whatever you feel is right. Just don't make respawning a researchable item, unless you're gonna extend it to have a limit or change spawn time depending on level of respawn auxiliary item. People have already decided that making a basic function a research item is simply bad idea, it just forces a research path. Maybe not as terrible if you get it when opening mechanical which is mandatory, then it really just changes game til radars get dropped. People still wouldn't like it though
The mortar carrier is not like arty; it is pretty useless against tanks and buildings, and quite excellent against infantry, especially if you have one person to man the MG while the mortar is fired as well. In the hands of an experienced grenadier this could take out infantry very easily. I'm not sure about spawning, ammo supply and healing being researches applied to vehicles. Healing could be done, by applying a seperate texture to the APC/Jeep with a big red plus on it when the research is enabled. But if we're going to have ammo supply and spawning also seperate researches, it will be hard to keep track of what each vehicle is actually capable of. That's why I prefer to have at least the spawning seperate from the firepower(large MG's)+armour. You make a good point that it would be better if you had to choose between some of these aspects for your APC - the old system where commanders just had to research Advanced Personel Deployment because otherwise they had expensive jeeps with MGs was bad. But I still think the most logical way to choose between such different functions is to have seperate vehicles.
Personally, I like the current APC... It functions differently enough from a LT/AFV early game. Where APC is the worse of the two. Mid/Late game, it provides a useful alternative to LT/AFV. E.g it can kill infantry easier, and get them out of bunkers via the grenage launcher. However lacks the pure mobility of the LT/AFV. As for the utility functions of it. Well, I think they function just fine how they are now. As a mobile barracks and armoury. If the APC has to be split, I think it should be split in two. Into 1 utility vehicle, with 1 slot mg, keping the spawning and armoury functionality. And into 1 anti-infantry vehicle(alternate LT/AFV), retaining all the current weapons of the APC. I believe this solves the god-complex of the current APC, by making 1 support vehicle and 1 combat vehicle. Just my thoughts on this...
