Right now we have 1 premium APC armed with a gun, and 1 unarmed APC for each faction. I think that adding some armed ones and armored ones to the tech trees would help to give free-to-play players an option to bring an armed APC to the battle. I was specifically looking for half tracks and tracked vehicles, however I will also include wheeled vehicles that I believe fit as well.
The Soviets don’t have a ton, but there is enough to add some variety. First off, the M2A1. This would be similar to the premium M3A1 albeit slightly smaller.
The Universal Carrier was also given to the soviets. I did find a picture of one with a Dushka machine gun mounted on it, which is probably what it should have in game as well. It would make it unique compared to the allied Universal Carriers.
I couldn’t find many good Soviet made vehicles to put here. I found three half-tracks made by the soviet Zis-22, Zis-42, and Gaz-60. All of these seem to be conversions of existing trucks into half-tracks. I doubt these were armed and do not appear to armored. However these could be considered perhaps for a new type of mechanized engineer squad.
The US (and by extension western allies) have quite a few more by virtue of being far more countries.
I mentioned the Universal Carrier already and so lets just get that out of the way here. If the soviets get one then the allies should as well. There are a lot of little variations to choose from. They mounted Bren Guns, Boys-AT rifles, PIATs, a 2lb AT gun, M2 .50cal, 2-inch mortars. Really the devs are spoiled for choice here. The 2-inch mortar would be a unique thing to have, giving it a clear use case over something like an M5 halftrack or the LVT-4.
The M5 was a more heavily armored version of the M3 half-track that we already have as a Soviet Premium. It is a bit of a shame the Soviets have an American Half Track but the US doesn’t.
Another cool addition is the M20. This was an M8 Greyhound with the turret removed and replaced with a M2 machine gun and used for a variety of tasks including as an APC. The crews were also given a bazooka to engage against enemy armor. This is still a Greyhound chassis though, so not gonna be too hard to kill with any AT weapons.
The Stuart also received a similar treatment to the above M20. However I think that the Canadian Kangaroo’s would be a much more interesting option. You would have a similar agreement of .50 and .30 cals, with the difference being in the chassis options. The two big contenders here in my opinion are the Churchill and M7 Priest, both of which were used for Kangaroos.
Lastly is Japan. Japan only had 1 halftrack in WW2, the one we already have in the game. At most, they could do a rearmed version of it for the Tech-Tree assuming we won’t be able to customize vehicle load outs. The new version could use the Type 92, with about an increase of about 100 rounds per minute.
There are 2 options for a brand new Armed Japanese APCs. The Type 1 Ho-Ki and the Type 4 ka-Tsu. The type 1 was officially unarmed, however soldiers would often mount machine guns to them. In the bottom most picture on Wikipedia for it, it seems to be armed with a Type 3 or a Type 92 machine gun.
The Type 4 however was an amphibious troop carrier intended to be launched from a submarine. It carried 2 torpedoes and two 13mm Type 2 Machine guns. These were basically copies of the German MG 131s. The torpedoes would probably be unnecessary since we don’t have any big ships for them to be used on.
. perhaps, better than that? for it’s intended role that is )