Quick Tank Designer Guide

[Orlunu]

It's really horrendous how much the battalion size changes IC cost. Something is definitely horribly wrong when you can have 8kph superheavies being CHEAPER than medium while also having better stats...

It's not even just the battalion sizes, the base costs are way out of whack. Heavier tanks are under-costed.

Historically, as the first example that came to mind, the Tiger I cost thrice what the contemporary Pz IV design (ausf. G) did per chassis. That was a particularly cheap Pz IV, to be fair, but even for the F2 or something it'd be roughly 1 Tiger = 2 Pz IV = 4 Stug III.

Let's call it ~22 IC to make a reasonable approximation of the Pz IV model, ~30 IC to make a reasonable Tiger. That means that the relative pricing of the Tiger is 1.36 Pz IV, so between 68% and 45% of the price increase that it would be going off the given cost ratios historically. This seems to hold true for lighter vehicles than the medium as well - in that "bigger" units get a consistently favourable IC balance as well as their smaller unit sizes working in their favour on the IC front.

 

[Dman1791]

It's not even just the battalion sizes, the base costs are way out of whack. Heavier tanks are under-costed.

Historically, as the first example that came to mind, the Tiger I cost thrice what the contemporary Pz IV design (ausf. G) did per chassis. That was a particularly cheap Pz IV, to be fair, but even for the F2 or something it'd be roughly 1 Tiger = 2 Pz IV = 4 Stug III.

Let's call it ~22 IC to make a reasonable approximation of the Pz IV model, ~30 IC to make a reasonable Tiger. That means that the relative pricing of the Tiger is 1.36 Pz IV, so between 68% and 45% of the price increase that it would be going off the given cost ratios historically. This seems to hold true for lighter vehicles than the medium as well - in that "bigger" units get a consistently favourable IC balance as well as their smaller unit sizes working in their favour on the IC front.

Yeah, the battalion sizes just exacerbate the strangely flat IC requirements. When superheavies are only twice as expensive as a decent medium, there's something very wrong. I have a feeling that one of the main problems is that turrets don't meaningfully affect anything other than cost and breakthrough, when larger turrets (particularly superheavy ones) should be very expensive and slow the tank down a lot. Couple that with enforcing correct turret sizes for your weaponry (heavy turret/medium casemate for heavy guns, medium turret/light casemate for medium guns, etc) regardless of chassis, and we might get somewhere. That would at least eliminate the 3-man light turret plus superheavy cannon problem.

It's also very strange that casemates are just as expensive as two-man turrets, when they should be significantly cheaper. If anything, it should be a percent cost reduction. As things are now, unless you're using howitzers on your normal tanks already, SPGs and TDs tend to be more expensive per vehicle than normal tanks, when it should be the opposite. I'd also add an open-top version of the casemate that is extremely cheap (probably zero cost with a percent reduction as well), but completely ruins breakthrough and defense regardless of other modules, and reduces hardness a bit.