No health bar on tanks

[Desertfox]

I honestly don't care if it's gotten rid of, but If is gotten rid of there has to be an replacement. Perhaps a loud sound mechanical grinding or something of the sort to alert the person.

[Kurb King]

I say keep it.  Tanks are capable of absorbing a lot of damage so there should be some way to gauge the status of your tank.  If there was more feedback as to tank health (different engine sound, thick smoke, reduced top speed/handling) then I think the health bar could be removed.  But as things are now I think it is needed.

[Tedacious]

I like this idea, having healthbars does remove a bit of immersion, for example if as paasky wants (health bar for infantry) then it would feel MORE like a "game", much more mechanical than what it currently does.

same thing for tanks!
problem: how to know how much damage you've taken.
Well, what happens when you take damage as infantry? you start to bleed.
When taking damage in a tank there could for example be more smoke to the front of the tank (parts that you can see from the cupola view when looking straight ahead), not only in the engine at the back.

I say we take this suggestion one step further and remove it for planes as well, smoke DOES arise at the plan engine when there is any substantial damage.

But as earlier said, when someone repairs a vehicle with a wrench it should come back. to now the status of the repairing

[djinn]

I like the idea too

A tank gets hit, its like COD2... you stay out of trouble, you get to patch up the damage, put out the fire...

I sure wish there would be some way, like planes of killing the rabbit behind the wheel once in a while leaving the tank only marginally damaged or completely unscathed

Say by use of a flamethrower for instance

[blue]

I feel as if I want some indicator of how my tank is doing. I know many dislike health bars, but in general it is often the only way for me to know what is happening to the tank. Rockets and shells sometimes have bounced off, without it I wouldn't have a clue. Sure you may be able to get out try to repair, but it seems like it will make game play needlessly annoying.

I think tanks work fairly well as it is, I'm not sure why they need to be nerfed. This will just make tanking more difficult for beginning tankers who will simply waste or ditch vehicles, since they don't know how they are doing.

[djinn]

How about this:

1/ No health on tanks
2/ Below a set point, as is now, the tank begins to smoke - At this point, if not further damaged soon after, the tank will 'repair itself' to full health.
3/ Below that, it begins sparking and this is equivalent of a bleed in humans (ie. health begins to fall)- Passengers either need to bail or get out and repair it (AHEM or use the hatch and repair it) - Screen begins flashing red or something from the crew in the tank so they know how bad it is , besides the sparks seen from outside
4/ As it falls further in health, it begins to burn as currently exists (on the engine plate) - but by this point, it will be too late to reapair as it will be repaired slower than it self-destructs, even with you in it (It takes a while to blow up, but it has to be abondoned no two ways - So after really bad battles, youl would have tanks lying across the battlefield, not blow out yet, but abondoned for good reasons - And more so since you cant tell how long you have till cookout)

5/ Shermans etc, basically smaller tanks, will thus have a chance to keep their crews among the living while being rendered unusable (For all intents and purposes) and yet, remain not completely blown up at one hit from an 88 tank or cannon shell

*You get to know how badly your tank is hit from the 'bleed effect', the fricking cannon that hit you should be a clear sign too

And we get a more real-to-life representation of tank combat and tank damage

[General_Henry]

I like the idea of having tanks "bleed" when severely damaged, with perhaps the effect of disabling it.

[Slayer]

Tanks repairing itself is a big no-no for me.

[HadrianBT]

Tanks repairing itself is a big no-no for me.

You know, djinn has a point. Although it might look weird at first (and I did feel myself so for a while), tanks repairing by themselves is not such a bad idea. Such a system would serve two purposes:
1) Often tankers were shoked by heavy shells which didn't in fact penetrate the armor. It took some time for them to recover
2) Similarly to #2, a strong hit could leave you cannon itself, its rotating mechanism, the motor, etc. disabled. Therefore self-healing would simulate the quick repairs done on the tank.
3) Tankers would be forced to back away more often.

However, this idea also has its disadvantages, so it is just a question of whether this approach could be beta-tested by our battle-hardened testers or not...

[Slayer]

OK, I see what you mean, but I'd be like WUT?? when I saw a tank on the batllefield starting to smoke from damage only for a few secs, as it it then started to auto-heal.

And I think it is too much magic for Lobo to deal with.

[djinn]

Well, I can imagine it took a tad longer, but yer... I doubt real tankers who had an internal fire from a hit and survived the battle, kept going with a little camp fire to boot...

The idea of autoheal is to represent engineer repairs on small damage ... I guess we could make all the heal-thing something that only happens IF you have the right kit - kinda how, IF you are the commander, you can use your assets at the 2nd seat of the scout plane (Something I think BF2 might support already)

But the main point of my idea is to aid tanks have that sense of 'Not every shot was a cook-out' and not all tankers died or became casualties from a tank defeat... I think we need to dispense with the idea of sitting in your tank until death as was the philosophy beofore... And ironically, this idea would acually prevent players bailing as soon as they see a superior tank... they'd only bail when the tank is definitely beyond their repair-capabilities...

Not to mention the added advantage OF... using the enginner/ tanker kit more often

I think its expanded quite comprehensively in my thread as an addendeum to Suggestion 3:
http://fhpubforum.warumdarum.de/index.php?topic=2994.45

[General_Henry]

I actually think the tank bleeding idea(djinn's idea) would actually be helping to balance the Sherman-Panther thing, as if the Panther takes 2 shots to be finished off in the back, it would be really nice to have the panther "critically damaged"(cannot move for a while... etc etc) so the Sherman would have higher chance of winning if hitting the back of panther first.

Autorepair isn't a very bad idea as long as it don't bring it up to full health, e.g.

Panther <15% health = critically damaged    - lost mobility, can only transverse turret, "shock" effect for a few seconds

Then after a while it would bring it back up to 30% health through autorepair(but very slow compared to wrench repair), it would not help the panther to survive another shot but the effect of being critically damaged would disappear.

Why 30%? because it would certainly be stupid if you ram a fence when you have only 22% health and then being "critically damaged", it would certainly be very stupid.

but, when health is <5%, it should be soon self-destructing so the crews must bail or just die with the tank.(I would prefer the latter, though)

[Torenico]

Theres no way to simulate Shock in a game, you must be shocked, not the virtual player.

[djinn]

Well, here's the whole idea outlined in every conceptual nitty-gritty - Its moved to page 2 of suggestions so I figured a link was neccesary for perspective
http://fhpubforum.warumdarum.de/index.php?topic=2994.45

[von.small]

I just had the idea...
What if the tanks were just like the infantry,no health bar?
It would add to the inmersion because,a subjetive point of view of how strong a tank is would be introduced...
People tend to think that health bar represents the armor or something like that.
Anyway,that is my point...
What do you think,would it add to the inmersion and would be good or not?

imo, it adds to the battle awareness I'd like to keep it in.

the health bar tells me how visible I am to other tanks, remembering that if you get hit smoke billows out of the back of your tank, hiding behind a hill roll is not going to cut it, unless you climb out and take a look at the tank you are then left with virtually no situational awareness as a tank driver/gunner.  Fair enough you can switch positions but with only seconds to spare in a situation where you need to reload - swapping seats is not cool m'kay.

If, the health bar is to disappear, then it needs to be balanced with an external camera (1x pointing back camera NOT nose cam, flyby etc) view so that you can check how screwed you are at any moment.