Devblog 1.0 — May 18

Over the past month, the PTE has already seen a large number of new solutions and balance changes. Some of them still require serious fine-tuning, while others managed to hit the intended target almost immediately. In today’s Devblog, we’ll take a closer look at two of what we believe to be the most successful changes so far.

MBTs Are No Longer Playing Nice

According to feedback, heavy armored vehicles armed with 120 mm guns finally started feeling like a truly uncompromising option on the battlefield, which ended up resonating with the overwhelming majority of players. In part because the visual and audio impact of firing them now finally matches their gameplay performance.

Why did tanks originally have an aim time of 3 to 4 seconds, while APFSDS rounds base DMG capped to 6? Previously, the logic was roughly the following: in a direct duel, the MBT was, so to speak, “playing fair”, giving enemy vehicles enough room to use their ATGMs. At the same time, it’s important to remember that tanks do not need to maintain LOS until hit, meaning their only task was to simply survive long enough to fire, instantly deploy smoke afterward, and still guarantee a damage.

However, time has shown that such “fair duels” simply did not justify themselves. This logic especially hurt long-range tank engagements, as well as ambush fire against superior vehicles. On top of that, MBTs also were hard to prove their cost due to the near-guaranteed arrival of a strike fighter carrying guided bombs or cluster munitions, because while the price looked justified on card, the vehicle itself often did not feel worth that amount in actual battle.⠀

As a result, in current meta heavily favors vehicles armed with 50+ mm autocannons, since they are cheaper while also being outright more effective in close-range engagements. Meanwhile, tanks themselves are typically played either through the cheapest possible options or merely as situational countermeasures against threats such as M10 Booker.

Now, after the buff, even the weakest tank caliber currently present in the game, represented by the 2A29 Rapira and mounted on the BMOP Toros, is capable of two-shotting nearly every armored vehicle at any firing range. However, if something gains power somewhere, something else inevitably loses it elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, this buff ended up creating several adjacent balance conflicts:

At the same time, despite the inverted open-field resist system, many players still point out that tanks remain insufficiently effective against infantry. This is influenced both by infantry tools themselves (sprint, smoke), which make disengaging from incoming fire relatively easy, and by the overall damage distribution of the tank. Compared to HE shells, MGs still account for nearly half of the total impact simply due to their massive contribution to suppression and generally comparable DPS. ⠀

However, at this point it can already be confidently said that tanks have successfully secured a very important — and more importantly, genuinely interesting gameplay part. What remains now is primarily polishing.

Less Economic Pressure, More Army

The economic system is, essentially, one of Broken Arrow’s core gameplay systems. Income, pricing, and so on — all of this is deeply interconnected with overall balance. Because of that, even seemingly minor adjustments can noticeably affect things like pick rate or the overall meta environment. Unfortunately, this area also came with several large-scale problems.

One of those problems was the linear income system itself. Not only could it trap players inside fairly unintuitive rules for proper reinvestment, but it also somewhat punished smart rotations and favorable trading during combat. Most importantly, the amount of tuning flexibility inside the system was extremely limited, forcing much of the economic stabilization onto the compensation system... which ultimately also turned out to be far from an ideal solution. ⠀

The new dynamic income system has now replaced all of that, functioning through segmented scaling stages instead. Without diving too deeply into the complicated details, the key advantage of the new system is that income now reacts far more accurately to the actual battlefield situation. In practice, a full wipe no longer forces players to stop deploying units simply to preserve maximum income, while prolonged favorable trading combined with gradual force buildup has, on the contrary, become economically rewarding.

To prevent abuse through permanently staying inside the 100% income range, we introduced a cap of 1500 reserve points. Interestingly enough, some players managed to discover an exploit involving refund cashback that also applied to supply inside transports. In other words, a supply crate parked near spawn can literally function as a bank account, allowing players to deposit and withdraw resources whenever needed — while also transferring points between teammates.

Naturally, the concept itself is hilarious, but it will obviously be fixed in the future. We will also continue gathering statistics and analyzing your feedback, adjusting stage thresholds and decay scaling where necessary. Before wrapping things up, let’s briefly clarify some terminology in case we accidentally managed to confuse anyone: ⠀⠀

Other Changes That Received Positive Feedback

Besides tanks and economy, there are also several other important changes that are generally moving in the right direction, even if they still come with their own set of associated issues: ⠀

Overall, this is exactly what the first PTE iteration is for. Many systems still have not been fully revisited yet, including tank pricing itself, although we already have fairly concrete plans for several directions moving forward. We will continue covering all of this in detail throughout future Devblogs.

Thank you for helping us. — Steel Balalaika Studio