Dev Diary: Tank Designer

Ever since we revealed the ship designer in Man the Guns, people have been asking about a similar system for tanks. We did, however, want to improve a bit on the ship designer. In particular, we felt that the ship designer was encouraging too many generalist designs. Part of the problem is that ships have a very long lead time before they become available, so it is difficult to iterate on the designs in a timely fashion. When your ship takes two years to build, you can’t really specialize it too much, because you can’t always accurately predict the situation in two years.

Thankfully, tanks require a somewhat smaller investment (although our QA certainly has tried to make designs that rival ships in cost), so you see a new tank design in the frontlines much sooner than a new ship, allowing you to react to new situations much faster.

Another thing is that ships usually had trade-offs between different capabilities, in the sense that the space (or module slot) taken up by a torpedo launcher could also be taken up by an AA gun, making the ship better against one or the other type of enemy. But rarely did you want a ship that had no AA or no way to defend itself against surface targets, so you always wanted some AA and some ship attack.

Tanks, on the other hand, don’t usually have trade-offs in the same way. You don’t usually design a tank, wondering if you should put on another AA gun or a second gun against surface targets (unless, of course, you are German and it's 1944).

But Tanks still have trade-offs in their design, and we wanted to represent those. Traditionally, tank design revolves around three aspects: Mobility, Firepower, and Protection. A well-armored tank is slow, a fast tank can’t carry a big gun, and a big gun requires a large tank, which is difficult to armor. During the war, different nations tried different approaches, and learned different lessons from their observations - it is no surprise that the last German tanks of the war were heavily-armored vehicles carrying massive guns, but the first post-war design was the comparatively lightly armored but well-armed and quite nimble Leopard 1.

So we wanted to make you think about these three aspects, and have it be a trade-off between them. However, in a grand strategy game, other aspects also matter more than in the typical comparison of tank designs - the best tank in the world is useless if it breaks down on the way to the battlefield (Panther fans take note), and it is even more useless if you can’t afford it. So we wanted cost and reliability to also matter when designing a tank or armored vehicle.

In contrast to ships, we wanted to make you think more about specializing your designs to fill a certain niche, and optimize it towards a specific role. While you will probably still want to have a somewhat middle-of-the-road design for your main production medium tank (one might call it “the Sherman”), there is a place for more specialized designs as well.

As part of this approach, we will be making changes to the reliability system and the armor system. The details will be forthcoming in a future dev diary (together with