The biggest balance issue will always be tanks, and heres why:

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A new player will fall behind in what he can actually do to help win the game, that is due to his starting arsenal, or lacking Pioneers to construct radios, or just having less active soldiers in general.

Yes once we get the bolt action dmg buff from Stalingrad implemented this issue will be a lot less severe.

Tank combat on the other hand is something different, because you usually dont lvl up your speed and abilities to shoot faster or get more kills in general, instead you always unlock tanks that have better armor and more anti tank power than before, and in many cases the next “Tier” of tank will often be practically immune to lower “Tier” vehicles.

That is the biggest problem of the game.

That is why ppl complained about the Jumbo, that is why ppl complain about the Panther, that is why ppl complaine about T34 and T50.
IF your ability to deal damage is completely taken away than there is no point in fighting.

Back during CBT Moscow, the only 2 OP vehicles were the Premium Panzer 38t because it was basically immortal, and the T60 starting tank, because it was a hard counter to the Panzer II starting tank.

Later in Normandy the Puma and Panzer III were surprisingly extremely heavy armored compared to the US Starting tanks, which got fixed ( Puma was ridiculous )

Later all that was back to being a broken campaign once the Jumbo was introduced.

The game never managed to fully get a good balance back, it was always one side OP, or the other, and I dont understand why this is the case, there are so many easy ways the game could have added “historically fair” counterparts instead of “Jumbo vs Panzer IV”.
However instead we have weird not balanced tanks fighting each other, and to make matters worse, alot of vehicles are even stronger armored then they should be.

There are seriously some Vehicles that have 50%-100% more effective armor than they would have had in the real world, you can directly compare penetration performance with War Thunder and will find lots of irregularities.

The game needs to go back to this old idea of “even early unlock tanks should have some chance against max lvl vehicles”

Like I always though the BT7 was the prime example of good gameplay, a glass canon that can outmaneuver and outgun all his opponents, making the better player win the fight, however sadly even the BT7 is somewhat useless nowadays, since it gets one hit killed always without even dealing any serious damage to his opponents anymore.

armor in general needs to be reduces to better fit historical accuracy AND satisfying gameplay. No one enjoys weak spot sniping with weak spots being so small, that desync and weird hitboxes and damage models, making luck shots determine whether or not you win or lose the fight.

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I see what you mean, however this only applies to head on engagements.
A PzIII has no problem killing a Jumbo as long as a flanking position can be aquired, if you cant get one you need to stay out of his gun and murder Infantry with you HE.

Simple as that.
Grey zone camping of heavily frontally armored vehicles is the biggest problem because the most of the time only a frontal engagement is an Option.

I consider the T-50 actually the worst offender in this category of Powercreep because its bloody fast in addition to beeing absurdly armored.

Edit: This should be explained in a Tutorial that new players arent just wasting their tanks potential.
Even a PzII in Moscow is an asset when in a good position.

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There is a point to what your saying for example the Jumbo versus earlier Campaign vehicles can be difficult for new players. However the large sum of what you’re describing is extremely situational and really refers to head to head engagements. This doesn’t always happen even for vehicles that are vastly superior to what they’re opposing say for example the Tiger 1 vs the M5A1. It’s not because that tank is “Bad” it’s just not designed for that purpose. There’s already a number of hard counters to powerful tanks. I believe the far better option is to design maps that allow vehicles like the M5A1 use there best asset ‘mobility’ to its advantage.
The other factor I think we need to keep in mind is that it’s not all balance related. Alot of this comes down to players skill and knowledge. There’s a huge number of people who don’t bother taking the time to learn that strengths and weaknesses of the vehicles they’re using and coming up against. I’m not saying that it’s mandatory to do that if you want to use a Tank but there’s a large sum of newer players who just jump into there vehicles and derp their way right into a explosive pack or big enemy gun, of course it’s going to be a steep and tough learning curve.

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and this here is the problem, a good player will never show his side, it will always be a head on engagements, unless your enemy didn’t pay attention

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and to clarify, I never show my side, you can hear your enemy get closer, you can hear him shoot, you approach always in a way that makes you point to the frontline, everything else is a mistake, and If tank A can kill head on, while tank B can not… then tank b is simply a noob filter.

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The Idea that “you just have to flank” while the enemy made sure that you cant flank, shows that ppl dont take this discussion seriously.

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Just because you “point your front” to your enemy doesn’t mean the fight is over. I run into Jumbos all the time that do this and if I’m not in a situation where I want to fight him from the front here’s a trick… I don’t just because you can see an enemy tank doesn’t mean you have to go on autopilot and slug it out them head to head. You can always sit back and force his hand or wait for Infantry support. It sounds like a lack of creativity if I’m being honest

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I mean, I know that destroying a heavy or medium tank is difficult with a light tank or one of the first levels, but I don’t bother since it’s not the only way to destroy a tank, you can use an anti-tank weapon, a cannon, shoot it a demolition pack, mark it for a plane to destroy, i.e. there are more ways to destroy a tank, if the only way to destroy a tank was through another, then it would really be a problem.

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Perfectly said

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that is all true, you dont need to use tanks in order to fight tanks, however that doenst excuse imbalance between tanks themselves.

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But it is also silly to look for a “complete balance” that is, in the battle for Moscow, the Soviet tanks were superior to those of the Germans, in the invasion of Normandy the German tanks were superior to those of the allies, in Tunisia they are on a par as in Berlin, in Stalingrad is a city so the tanks do not stand out much, but the point is that looking for a perfect balance is simply a waste of time and it is better to look for other options on how to deal with them

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of course it is the goal of every game to strive for “complete balance” with the exception of asymmetrical balance, which we however don’t have to begin with.
So if you say "germany just happens to get worse tanks because that how it was, well then why should anyone pick those worse tanks then?
What if one side gets to win automatically, while the other one doesnt, why bother even playing then? An even fight is a must in every game where players compete against each other.

Back in the day it used to be that the germans got better MGs, while the Soviets get better SMGs, however this asymmetrical balance idea got thrown out the window.

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Yes, but what do you think would be the solution to that, invent tanks or add tanks from another decade? It’s just reality, your idea of ​​doing a fully balanced tank battle is literally just utopian stuff. And asymmetric progress was obviously not going to work as this is a ww2 game and each army had its strengths and weaknesses

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100% agree, the whole “just flank them” comment started a while back in WT, when the maps were large enough for teams to actually do that in RB or Sim.
These days its just an annoying meme by intellectually challenged rock throwers.

But lets actually try to discuss the problem at hand. Tank assymetry aside, because I can live with that if its balanced out elsewhere like better planes since Enlisted is pretending to be a combined arms game.

I believe that the issue with tank vs infantry balance goes further back than just the tanks themselves, although I do agree that most tanks are poorly copied over from WT in terms of their characteristics implementation, be it maneouvre or firepower.

The greatest cancer in this game thusfar are the maps themselves.

They are incredibly rough/complex terrain, and illogically cluttered with shit designed to serve as cover for the infantry - this is a waste of time and is cognitively dissonant from the game play - none of the structures are damaged at the start, so the wrecks serve no logically aesthetic purpose other than to clutter map. Given that we’re fighting over shitty Soviet villages the amount of cars and trucks is also disproportionately fake and takes away from the ambience.

I don’t mind trenches for infantry, or anti tank obstacles / wire protecting them, but they have to be shrunk to real size, so that they are traversable - they’re trenches not large anti-tank ditches…

The solution - rework all the maps. Flatten the crap out of them or at least make them as realistic as the terrain you’ve selected for the battle. You don’t even have to make the current maps larger, just remove the grey zones completely, and make terrain destructible. This should also allow you to fix the current object boxes that block shots or HE when they should be destroyed by the first shot. Remove the armour indicator crutch and fix gun sight alignment as it is for infantry. Where you aim is where the round goes not as currently where the shitty indicator has swerved to, giving you the impression of some banana shot…

Once the terrain is flattened and cleared of stupid and illogical or non-destructible obstacles, even the current tank line up as shitty as you have made it will become a lot more workable because at least the tanks can leverage all their characteristics of mobility, protection and firepower, not just the last two to contest the map. There will be enough wrecks and cratered ground once the arty and bombs start dropping, which will be fair enough, and immersive from a terrain degradation due to battle effects.

This is the easy fix, without going into too much muck around with the current infantry game.

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You’re being far too picky and seeing this as black and white completely missing what the other gentleman is getting at. You will it balance every tank to its direct competition. A Tiger 1 will always have the edge of a M4A2 but the Tiger 1 has a crutch. It’s a big slow rolling ammo box and easily countered by other feats in game. Explosive packs, planes, other tanks with powerful AT guns like the Firefly, M10 Wolverine, and M4A1 76mm. It’s not a win automatically sort of situation as we’ve already stated multiple times in not always ‘head to head’ engagements there’s more at play then 2 tanks in a stand off in the middle of an open field

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I agree with your point about the maps. I think new map design would work wonders for the more mobile vehicles we have in game that don’t really get a chance to shine

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In my opinion it would fix 85% of the current dramas with Inf tank coord.

If you wanted to pressure the teams to focus on objectives, then there are ways to do it be it by XP rewards for combat near objectives, or timers or whatever. Either way, opening up the maneouvre portion of the game to take back mobility from teleporting infantry via respawns, means that infantry teams now need to think about setting up some defences for themselves. All of a sudden those Tank obstacles, AT guns and shovel enabled fox holes will take on a new level of importance. Yeah you can run and gun and get run over / mowed down by MGs or do what was historically done, use trench systems, smoke and multi pronged attacks to reduce obstacles or vehicles. At the end of the day the game has TDs and AT guns to deal with tanks, let them do their job, and balance/implement them correctly so that they are fit for purpose and historically accurate.

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what? pz38(t) didn’t even exist during CBT. also nice rewriting history there since the actual OP tank was the panzer 2c (it had a timeperiod inaccurate armor plate welded on) and the t-60

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But most people in well armored vehicles are scrubs, not thinking at all about angles and Position.

It speaks for your skill, when you slaughter other vehicles with impunity.

If greyzone camping gets even more discouraged for example by cutting the EXP gain in half this gets even less of a problem because Greyzonecamping can be done with impunity even by scrubs in heavy armoured tanks.

T-50 is a bitch however. Bloody experimental desing of wich not even 100 where fielded if i remeber correctly.

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Wikipedia cites 69 manufactured, of which 48 were armed. It had problems with its diesel engine specifically adapted to this rather revolutionary design by Soviet standards. Lack of engine reliability and high manufacturing cost coupled with Barbarossa in effect, killed off this project in favour of producing more of the “good enough” tanks like the T-60 or BT’s
They fought against the Finns on the Leningrad front in 1941, one was captured and exists in a Finnish museum to this day, but no noteworthy combat reports exist. They also used 27 T-50s on the Transcaucassian Front from Oct '42-Jan '43, but all were out of action by Feb '43.

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