Alright, starting with non-replies then moving to replies.
After some testing and faffing about, it's hands down unquestionable tanks are worse as a straight fighting unit. The fact armor has been nuked so heavily, even with upgrades, vs the fact both MATG and tanks/TD + sup ATG can get well into the 100~200 range means the benefit of armor is gone; You're never going to have enough armor to counter pen now. Add on the fact you need to increase the production cost to even get to that point, and it's not even a question.
Further, the lack of damage bonuses that can goto a tank with high SA/HA vs Art of any stripe means that even if they were the same value, 30, in the designer, art will double or triple in SA depending on the year. Remember, Art gets bonuses for anything that is Art specific, Infantry specific, division, and mot. Tank only gets buffs from a hand full of places.
However, Tanks have a use. Defense....Wait, no, come back. Let me finish first.
Tanks can get Dozer plows if you research Engi t2. They have a broken effect of giving every tank that you use +2 to entrenchment. Every.
Every light, medium, heavy you put in; every tank, SPA, SPAA, and TD; Every armor recon and flame supp. +2 entrench.
It is now possible to get over 75 entrenchment with a 20 width. This, is busto. Remember, 1 entrenchment = 2% of everything. SA, HA, Def, Brk, Per, AA, name it. Probing attack makes fights a joke now. But, the minute you lose entrenchment, you might as well be running around with a 40 width of infantry.
Additionally, flame units add +25% attack on forts, +20% on urban, and +5% on everything else. This includes while defending. Add in Engis, and you can get a +65% from an urban with 1 fort. On the flip side though, this means any unit with one is decent at nulling the fort benefits as well when attacking. Heavy tanks, and only heavy tanks, retain their 10% to attacking forts and urban, vs med and light tank's -5%. Add in a railway gun, and a heavy tank unit with some mot can ignore the magi line and roll over anyone.
But....That's pretty much where it ends. By and large, tanks are no longer comparable on attack, even if we disregard the production costs. With the changes to how combat width works, and the fact defenders can now choose how weak the attackers are by simply having smaller units, the large benefit of having a concentrated block of damage and armor is gone, and primarily warfare, when done properly, is a contest between who has better air, who has better supply, and who can recover faster. In MP, this means defensive nations with a decent airforce can sit and wait forever while the enemy breaks themselves against their units, all the while destroying their air units with units that have at least one dedicated AA unit-- remember, attack bonuses apply to AA damage as well-- and keeping their factories running. In SP, it's matterless currently due to the AI bugging out, but once that's fixed I highly doubt the AI will have the needed tactics to deal with the fact that combat width and supply have changed so drastically from what should be minor changes. As it stands, you can get the same benefit, offensively, of having a proper tank unit, mixed or otherwise, by simply replacing armored units with their relevant mot counter parts. Replacing SPA with Mart yields the same amount or more SA for significantly less cost, TD are outclassed by ATG until '43 while having larger production costs, supply cost, and 3x as much width [1 v 3].
Of note, super heavy tanks, the meme unit of old, while expensive isn't that much more expensive than the trains are. Given relevant combat modifiers, late game useage sees a single column of SHT supported by mot/mech fill the role of old tank units without too much issue. That said, it still doesn't compare to the new spirited cas.
Everything you just posted said they were CHEAPER, but not BETTER when compared to combat performance in the their respective games.
See you make a basic error. You are looking at the tanks in the older version vs. tanks in this version. But you leave out the combat mechanics. Those were also changed.
I can make a tank that the older version could never penetrate. And that alone shows they were NOT better.
Now how is building tanks worse than the "other options avaliable". Heck you never even state what those other options are.
SPA is 3 width and almost no breakthrough.
Iunno if you're just ignoring what was posted or misreading it, but what I posted wasn't cheaper. Even if it was, the issue is 'is it worth it compared to the alternative', which the rest of us have conclude is no. Armor is irrelevant now given how little of it you can stack and the new armor mechanics.
Mart-- Motorized Artillery-- is the other option, which does 30 SA on paper, and close to 45~50 SA when bonuses are applied in combat. All said and done, Mart will cost around 8~10 depending on tier, while tank/SPA of the same SA value costs 12~16 depending. That's assuming you build the lowest grade possible as well.
SPA uses 1/3rd of the equipment while having the same production cost. And further, all artillery units have 3 width; We've been using them for the better part of the last 5 years regardless of that.
But armor still works at 75% piercing.
Other way around; Armor stops working at 75%, and scale down from 100%. If you have 100 armor and the enemy has 75 pen, you start losing the benefits of armor. say they have 85 pen? They have a smaller debuff on them. So you don't need to match 100 to 101; getting close is well enough. More over, besides heavies, you never have more armor than pen options, which I think is an oversight; you need all 5 armor techs, on a heavy to beat out sup atg + matg, let alone dedicated tank hunters, in real combat conditions.
Also, armor doesn't work like before. It doesn't just half the damage by changing the damage dice; It debuffs like a fort now. There's
something going on in the background under calculations, but we're still pulling those apart. But, the simple of it? Armor doesn't protect tanks by reducing the damage they take anymore. If you had a 0 hardness unit with 0 armor vs a 0 hardness unit with 1000 armor, they will both take the same damage when hit now.
Wrong. Infact, whenever my tanks smashed trough their line and went for their supply hubs the AI trew caution to the win and desperatly tried to get that hub back, i've never seen the AI be that agressive before. No, i won because i smashed trough with my tanks and rushed their supply hubs, depriving them of supplies before i made big encirclements
THe same is happening in the late game, its 1950 fo me now, i lost the airwar, peroid, i can't pull that one back. My infantry can't push because, well, its infantry, fighting in red air and udner CAS fire... but wherever my tanks show up i crush the enemy, so i'm basicly constantly putting out fires with those tanks and it works.
Tough today i'l be playing MP with some aquintances and promised i'd co-op play germany with someone, i'l try my tanks in MP and see how well they hold up against actual players.
Umm, not wrong. The AI is definitely not hooked up right considering people are complaining about it
crashing trying to access old code that doesn't work anymore. Reddit is currently flooded with 'The AI isn't working' threads because of it.
AS it is, good luck in MP if they've done any research on tanks, likely they won't build any.
Without criticism, I would nuance your statement to make it more general. For "objectively worse" I would substitute "constructively worse depending on context". The context of course includes whether all nations are "nerfed" in the same way, especially in terms of its effects on strategy; etc.
So one takeaway might be that, if tanks are constructively worse "value-for-IC" than TD/SPG across the board equally for all nations, then (say) Germany following the historical path, and using military builds centering around medium tank divisions (as presumably the AI will continue to do so at least for the historical option!), would become relatively disadvantaged in the early years against France etc. With optimal play on both sides, this may even be a good thing in terms of game balance! I certainly hope so...
It'll be fascinating to hear about the experiments of German players in MP games!
This in a nutshell. If you have one nation building tanks in the new system vs one that doesn't, say Germany vs France, you see a world of difference now. Of course, depending on the situation, that changes, like having a bunch of armored cars pretend to be tanks with snow plows sitting on the magi line with dirt up to their turrets like it's Russia all over again. suddenly there's a 200% increase to damage against the incoming Germans, who have to fight with a -100% because. It's hillarious watching players go 'WTF, HOW?!' every time now XD
As it is, MP has more or less devolved into the China/Japan war because of the changes. Or more, the ground war has, it's mostly about cas and transport planes now.