You clone the tiger and put the best TD in the game behind it and the best infantry squad in the game in front of it and the axis won't have a chance in hell. I'm interested in balance, not fan boyism. USF has compensations for squishy armour and you can't simply remove that and expect it to be balanced. There is a whole army surrounding the Pershing, one that is designed not to have a tiger. The Pershing cost can absolutely be lowered, but it cannot become a tiger and the tiger itself is completely irrelevant. Different armies allow for different cost effeciency. As I've said if OKW and ost both had a doctrinal Panther with 4 levels of vet they would be different costs because they would be both superior and inferior to the stock options despite being the exact same unit. Such is the USF heavy tank. It has a differently balanced stock army that creates the necessity of heavy Armour being less resilient than other factions.
There are rules. These rules ensure balance is a possibility. This is why ost 5 man gren needs to remain less cost efficient than the lmg, this is why soviet should lose their FPR in airborne and why svts need further nerfs. You cannot simply shoehorn in something that has been compensated for them not having.
Absolutely: This! I too feel that the Pershing does a good job, it can be a super premium medium tank, but the cost needs to be severely adjusted to reflect that.
I have no knowledge of the history of changes in its cost, does someone know about this? How was it set initially? Because the equation "description says heavy so make it as costly as Tiger" does not work, as we have seen and discussed with multiple good arguments in this thread.
Again here you handpicked the Allied armor that are not GENERALLY available whereas you mentioned the generally available axis armor, when I mentioned 'unlike the light frontal armors faced by axis.' I meant generally available tanks. Axis tanks face the 160 armor Sherman, T34, all the TDs, Comet as you mentioned, Cromwell on a more regular basis.
Agree on this, I too wouldnt call it a myth. The list does not contain T34 and Cromwell, and generalizes Shermans with an "up to ..." following the highest doctrinal value.
This is not necessarily an issue and can absolutely be part of an asymetrical balance design, but let's not confuse the raw numbers of the most frequently used, standard stock tanks here.
Edit: Also, by the logic of the Panther being a special form of axis AT tank, OKW wouldn't need it, they got a stock Jagdpanzer. Just a summary, axis have plenty of tools to deal with a Pershing. If it would become a real heavy as its price suggests, they would probably just have to try as hard to take it out as allies have to do when facing Tigers, KT etc.
Depends. It would at the very least be a huge amount of work.
The first issue is how many shots you allow in the first place. Technically, unless Relic rounds their RNG based values at some point, you'd get almost endless possibilities per shot. For the alpha damage calcs that MMX mentioned, I already restricted this to (simplified) 10.000 shots per square meter of scatter area, resulting in often 100.000 possible outcomes for a single shot. Now raise this to the power of shots you need for your calculation. Unless you use a way more coarse method, you'd end up at easily >10^20 different outcomes. For every possible outcome, then calculate the damage done on single model and squad level and summarize the data. So that's not viable. The other possibility would be to use a more geometry based approach for each model, but then you need to deal with more advanced geometry and a lot of other issues.
(EDIT: The above described method is not purely statistical, but running a purely statistical method is quite complicated and requires a lot of expertise of what you're actually doing.)
Long story short:
Just sitting back and let the sim run for 5-15 min is usually the more viable approach. MMX showed how the data converges after a couple of hundred samples. If this sub-dataset can represent the larger picture well enough, I'd rather work with 1000 data points rather than hundred billion billions.
True enough. I work in engineering modeling/simulations, but more with state space systems in physical applications, so I only know of statistical modeling, my expertise is very limited here. I was thinking in terms of modeling the probability distributions and deriving conclusions from those, but as long as we dont have a mathematician doing this for us, your approach is great, I agree! Let's get back to topic, sorry for my offtopic diversion.
What do you think about the price adjustments and positioning the Pershing explicitly as a better AI panther?
Could one not plug the game parameters into a statistical model? Should be possible to model this mathematically without having to run thousands of simulations, no?
I'm not sure if the pershing need more AI damage, in its current form what it does need is
a- Price reduction to better reflect its value on field
b- survivability boost, increase hp to tiger level
This is an "either a or b" proposal, I assume? Both would probably too much. But why not just tone down the price and enjoy a better doctrinal AI panther? Make it 550/190 or something and see how it goes in beta.
Can we not agree on that the Pershing itself feels like its in a fine state, just way too expensive for what you get?
Reduce the cost and everyone will be happy. Its role is a panther with AI? Then only make it slightly more expensive than a panther and don't put it on par with real heavies like a tiger.
Thanks for the explanation, that helps! So I guess I just need to keep an eye on this, since if the ability is denied, the opponent is practically playing without a commander and has limited munitions. Makes sense! This just really caught me offguard.
But doesn't that make it incredibly easy to pull 'Close the pocket' off? The commander also has
"Break Supply Line"
Send in a Stuka bomber to neutralize a targeted point with a precision strike, causing the territory to shift in a neutral state.
- which can just cut you off. Then 'Close the pocket' and boom, opponent's army is gone. What am I missing? This would be terribly overpowered and everybody would use it ...
Woah, that's crazy. Does cut-off mean neutral or occupied by the opponent? Because the commander also has this neutralizing-ability, that would be a bit crazy ...
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