I can wrap my head around pre-WWI units (infantry attacks, cavalry does recon and runs over infantry, artillery supports from the back), but as soon as tanks are involved I never know what to build in any given game. Why would I ever not build tanks over infantry as far as land armies go?
This mainly applies to GSG's like Darkest Hour or HOI4, but it's also a concept I've struggled with in a general sense (like in, for example, Wargame European Escalation when I tried playing it). Pic is semi-related; I never really bothered with tanks back when I played SC1 because I usually just vomited out air units instead, but if that game separated land units and air units I'd have probably been shitting out tanks all the time.
Depends on the game I guess but generally tanks are expensive and can't fully replace infantry, not to mention relatively limited in their application.
Any game that allows you to simply build tanks and nothing else is not worth playing.
Can't produce enough tanks to replace every infantry battalion in HOI4 unless it's late game and you're well industrialized...
Yes, spamming tanks is great. But the problem is most nations aren't industrialized enough (or have the resources) to replace every infantry unit with an armored unit.
It's a matter of raw resources + manufacturing time. A gun takes a lot less raw resources to produce than a tank that weighs tons.
This is also why Aircraft Carriers were considered "the first atomic bomb" because of how deadly and decisive they were in naval combat when they were first created. All of a sudden you could use dinky little planes to sink entire ships weighing thousands of tons in raw materials and hundreds in manpower, and you could do this from WAY outside the range of their cannons. Losing some bomber/fighter planes during the attack is no where near the same cost as losing battleships/cruisers.
>Yes, spamming tanks is great. But the problem is most nations aren't industrialized enough (or have the resources) to replace every infantry unit with an armored unit.
Does this mean that in an ideal situation where you had the resources, you'd actually want to just spam tanks? And would you slowly replace your existing infantry with tanks as you industrialize more, or would it depend on how industrialized your opponents are? I can see someone choosing to replace them with mechanized infantry (over the more expensive tanks) in a scenario where they're going against an opponent that can't make mechanized infantry as fast as they can.
Ideally if you had infinite resources and rapid manufacturing then, yes, you would basically want to equip every soldier in an armored outfit aka tank.
That said, however, there are plenty of terrain types where tanks either cannot traverse through or are outmatched by the manoeuvrability of infantry with AT weapons.
So it kinda depends, but the gist of the question boils down to "if you could encapsulate every soldier in an iron mech suit, would you?" and the answer is generally yes.
The other poster who mentioned visibility issues is also correct. But given a situation where you have near infinite resources I would assume that technology has advanced to a point where there are better reconnaissance tools than relying on infantry to relay information back to your tanks.
Literally every other HOI besides 4 solved this by giving you a severe shortage of oil mid to late game if you built too many tanks.
few games account for this but visibility from inside tanks is pretty limited.
though this applies more for games that focus on the tactical level.
in for example the close combat games unsupported tanks can be incredibly vulnerable.
another thing few games account for, that close combat does, is that when a tank is destroyed it doesn't just vanish, it leaves behind a wreck.
in close combat a group of tanks can quickly get into problems as wrecks start blocking roads and hampering mobility of the remaining tanks.
another thing that's tactically interesting (that close combat does not account for) is that tanks have a maximum range they can point their guns up and down.
during the yom kippur war israeli tanks would wait for arab tanks at the bottom of hills etc and the arab tanks couldn't point their guns low enough to shoot back unless they fully crested the hill and massively exposed themselves.
there is a lot of interesting challenges and limitations with tanks that few strategy games bother to model.
All excellent points and you should have added that most games do not account properly (or at all) for terrain, support (field repairs, lubricants), and relatively lightweight AT weapons putting tanks out of commission.
So yeah, tanks are only this good in video games because they are a very rough approximation of reality.
Every game differs, but they usually carry the same concept as reality. Tanks need infantry support or they will get blated by anti-tank. In games that really just comes down to damage type and armour type. You need a mix or they can just counter your entire army.
Playing Wargame or ARMA will help you understand the differences. Foot troops can hide in buildings. Tanks are fast and demolish anything caught off guard
>Why would I ever not build tanks over infantry as far as land armies go?
In Civ 4 tanks are the main unit to attack cities with when they appear, but they don't get defensive bonuses from terrain or city defenses plus they get countered by anti-tank infantry and helicopters later on. So you need general purpose infantry, machine guns, and/or SAM for cover and holding captured cities.
In HoI4 tanks are your breakthrough unit. They're for punching into a defended tile to start an encirclement.
In SupCom tanks are good damage dealers and more durable but are less effective at dodging while mechs don't deal as much damage and aren't as durable, but can strafe and change directions much more rapidly to evade projectiles.
>Why would I ever not build tanks over infantry as far as land armies go?
Terrain
Typically, infantry is more versatile, better at entrenching, and more cost-effective. Tanks are supposed to be for when you want to force an offensive engagement through superior concentration of firepower. Tanks are supposed to be your linebreakers; you use them to push through the enemy lines.
Starcraft 1 tanks are basically artillery. The real tank role is served by Battlecruisers and Ultralisks, and neither of them is fast enough to make good tanks.
Incidentally, heavily armoured knights or cataphract in pre-gunpowder games serve the same role as tanks.
As illustrated by the third Reich, tanks and other war machines are useless if you run out of fuel
Because tanks die in one hit to a slavBlack person with an RPG.
Of course, RTS never does that, and instead you need 20 missiles from "anti-armor" infantry to kill one tank, while vehicles also always get overtuned anti-infantry APCs (which an also survive 20 missiles).
Play a real rts like Blitzkrieg and watch your light tanks die to 3 shots from an anti-tank rifle *~~)
>Because tanks die in one hit to a slavBlack person with an RPG.
So do infantry. The point is would you rather have 1000 tanks or 1000 infantry
infantry can take advantage of cover (depending on the game) while tanks can't
Combined Arms > Vehicle specialization
Vehicles are force multipliers. They are less effective than troopers without a tank if they're unsupported. If you'd like a video game example, try Foxhole.
What if I put my infantry into an open top Schützenpanzerwagen to go along with the tanks?
Yeah, that's exactly what a force multiplier means. Consider that every person driving the tank is one that could, otherwise, be utilizing a man-portable anti-tank weapon.
No it's not, get your terminology straight.
A Panzergrenadier Regiment has a much lower combat strength per total personnel, because you have to have a much larger logistical and mechanic tail for the vehicles. All to have the infantry keep up with your Panzerabteilungen. Your typical landsers have none of that to deal with, so their ratio of combat personnel to auxiliary personnel is much higher.
>If you'd like a video game example
Would be cool if there was a book example. I've brought similar questions up in threads on here and /k/ over the years, and have been told to just read up on specific wars if I want to know more about the technology used during a specific time period, but I don't know where to find such books since most books focusing on wars (that I'm able to find) tend to be from the perspective of a soldier dealing with their situation instead of a logistics autist explaining how to supply tanks.
>Wargame European Escalation
Wargame is very much a combined arms game. Tanks wreck shit, that's their whole point. Most non-tank units are going to die to a single shell - that means crucial AA, artillery, infantry without cover, scouting vehicles, ammo transport and light attack vehicles. So you use tanks to create a frontline, ideally within the cover of a treeline. A line of cheap/midrange tanks annihilate unarmoured troop transports. Your expensive tanks mop the floor with cheaper tanks. But tanks die piteously to a well-placed AT round, so you have to cover your flanks both on attack and on defence. An artillery round will penetrate most tanks' practically non-existent top armour, and so will AT planes. And guess what, you have to use all kinds of non-tank units to accomplish these, but tanks will generally be your shield and spearhead.
Wargame is honestly pretty good at forcing you to have a truly diverse army and that makes it a blast to play. Take a look at these guides if you want to get a better picture of the role of tanks in Wargame. Don't forget that it's a series focused on PvP, the AI is hot garbo.
(Also, balance patches supposedly fricked up EE's campaign, that might have contributed to your problems. Red Dragon is the latest Wargame.)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=247884292#267809 (Units: Tanks: Overview)
https://www.reddit.com/r/wargamebootcamp/comments/4wworv/boot_camp_guide_14_tanks/
>Red Dragon is the latest Wargame
There's also Warno, but I haven't tried it yet because
>Early Access
SC1 works on weakstrong + mobileslow axes. Siege Tanks are slow as frick and need time to deploy into Siege Mode, but they rip arseholes, so as Terran you abuse their absurd range while defending, that part is straightforward. While attacking, you generally want to use your mobile units (Vultures) to scout ahead and send _some_ of your tanks forward while the rest remain in Siege Mode and slowly leapfrog towards the enemy base, but then you'll have to keep in mind that tanks can't shoot up so you want to avoid air attacks, usually by taking some units that can shoot up (Goliaths, Valkyries), and they also have a minimum range, which means that if they get surrounded by (melee) units it's game over, so you make sure to cover the flanks (Spider Mines with your Vultures, for example) and hopefully snipe anything that might help other units get closer, such as a Defiler that can cast a cloud of ranged-immunity, usually with Science Vessels that can irradiate Defilers for a guaranteed kill. You basically never make tanks without other units to complete your army composition.
>Why would I ever not build tanks over infantry as far as land armies go?
In SC, massing infantry against Zerg is standard play. They're way cheaper, you can start rolling them out earlier, and marines are pretty decent units on their own as they can shoot both land and air and do very nice damage in large numbers & with Stimpacks.
Zerg doesn't have a good area-of-effect answer to marines until the midgame, by which point you can simply transition into a tank-oriented army or just add tanks to your infantry-based army. Protoss, on the other hand, has such effective AoE units that this tank-oriented play is standard to the point where you don't really make infantry after the early game.
It depends on the game and its idiosyncrasies, ultimately.