@EleventhAvenue - sorry if any of the below sounds a bit short (other than the third clarification point
), I've only had three hours sleep because of a bug - I don't mean any of this in a rough way, I'm just one for attention to detail and addressing points. You keep raising points, many new (and tangential), and I'd feel rude if I didn't address them.
You are looking too much into stats - the Matilda II weighs 25 tonnes - and what? Should it be a heavy chassi?
This isn't rocket science. The Matilda is smaller than the Panzer III. The Panzer III is also a light chassi. The Real life Matilda SPArt is 25-pounder-armed. Is that a heavy SPG? (no, it isn't)
Since when was size the determining factor for light/medium/heavy? It sounds like you've decided to pick a metric that suits your argument, and roll with it. You also completely ignored my question about the other more appropriate tanks for the slot (the three pre-1940 cruisers). Unless you address this, then combined with your frequent use of incorrect evidence and raising of arguments that no-one is asking, I'm afraid I'm going to have to bow out of discussing this with you, because you're just not addressing the issue - you're picking the bits you like and ignoring the bits you don't, which is great for a political speech but terrible for getting to the bottom of something.
The Matilda is a light tank chassi. Maybe, the Real life Matilda is an Infantry Tank, or a Heavy Tank, or a Blubberwort-finder, but the Matilda is a light tank chassi, and this works well with how the units and chassis are implemented in HoI4.
The same thing can be said for every single tank on every tech tree - we could put anything in anywhere and say "it's just a name, make of it what you will, variant your way to freedom", but if we started calling them all Blubberworts, I think we might find a few people posting about it on the forums. The reason for this is that the names and pictures are there for flavour, and so the devs have generally put tanks in places where they belong. However, the Matilda there is a bit like putting strawberry flavour into a chocolate container. Yes, strawberry is still a flavour, and mix in enough other stuff with it and you might be able to get it like chocolate, but why not just but chocolate-flavoured icecream in the box in the first place? The UK has more tanks that suit that particular slot than any other nation, and instead the tank that's been put in there is the least appropriate of any of them. That's the issue we're driving at. Now, if you don't mind if all your tank names are out, that's fine, we can just agree that you're not worried about that kind of thing, but for us folk who like our strawberry to actually taste like strawberry (ie, to have light tanks as flavour examples in the light tank tree), then it's not crazy for us to ask, is it?
I'm actually less bemused by this being the way it is in-game (the UK tends to get less attention than Germany, the US or Russia in HoI games, and there's always a few odd things like this) than by anyone arguing seriously that the Matilda II is a good example of a light tank. I'm not saying that in a nasty way, it's just a little baffling. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure we'll both enjoy the game (and very much hope you do
), and you're well within your rights to have a creative interpretation of the Matilda's role and its purpose in game.
The Panzer III is 1939 Light, just like the Matilda. There is no 1939 Medium chassi. Or have I got the years wrong, again? I think I'm basing this off the WWW german tank tree, but I can't find it in the stream. I know that there's an older one too, but I think that some things have changed. I'm quite sure that the PzIV is the '41 medium now. Are you maybe looking at the pre-alpha tree?
I'm looking at the slots in the Wiki - there's a 1939, 1941 and 1943 medium tank slot, which I'm fairly sure for Germany are the Pzs III, IV and V (Panther). Thus, the Pz III is a medium, not a light - so the Pz III will always be able to be made more heavily armoured than the Matilda in-game.
- It would be pretty... odd to have a tank smaller than the Pz III be a ''heavy chassi''
I'm sorry to sound frustrated, but
for the third time, I'm not saying the Matilda should be a heavy (I've also already said that there isn't an appropriate slot for the Matilda as the tech tree now stands), I'm saying it should not be a light.
- The production cost would be odd if the Matilda was heavy.
Yes, but only about as odd as it's production cost would be if it was light - the 'heaviest' light tank in the late 1930s was 14 tons, not 25.
I would recommend releasing your connection to so much historical stats. It doesn't help much when everything is so abstracted. I shouldn't have argued with you about them.
Part of the issue was that you didn't argue as much as asserted things that weren't correct. Instead of saying "it's just a name, it can be whatever" (which is a perfectly reasonable position to take), you said things like the Matilda II was a good example for a light tank, or that people were saying the Matilda should be put where the Tiger is. I have no issue if the devs say "we just threw names in wherever" (which they didn't - they made some effort to get most of them close, FT-17 aside), but Podcat said "they tried to get the best possible compromise", and my argument is that the Matilda II is far from the best possible compromise.
Sure, but still, it is defined as a different vehicle chassi. A new Spitfire model would be modelled (heh) as a Spitfire variant with further improved stats.
Actually, other than the wings, it was initially largely the same airframe (most of what makes up what would be a plane 'chassi') It was basically a Spitfire variant but this time they decided to change the name. There were other Spitfire variants that kept the Spitfire name but were as large (or larger) changes in design.
One worry that I think is worth mentioning here - I hope that constant improvements and variation creation will be worth it. I know that we loose gearing when changing around our production to a new variant, though not as much as when switching chassis or production entirely.
I think it will - I think the production system looks excellent, and the tank tech tree is serviceable
.
This tank discussion is fascinating. I can't wait to read several thousand more words about a jpeg and a word in a box.
Sorry, I'm just trying to work around how people can imagine that a Matilda II would ever make any sense in a light tank slot, so talking it out (I'm planning to mod the game anyway, so I'm sure it'll take 5 minutes to fix this in my game) - apologies for all the Matilda II posts - I'm not really a tank person, but I have a soft spot for the Matilda.
