Effective Armor on Qwai? Who knew.

[Eyre]

I was playing DVB's server last night for the first time since the .61 update. After a few rounds including Mestia and Sunset City, the map rotates to Qwai River. Now, I have nothing against this map, in fact its usually one of my favorites, but I think it feels a little unbalanced because the US does not have any heavy armor support and has to rely on a TOW HUMVEE and their HAT kits to smoke the Chinese tanks. With that in mind, I think the following example proves that the asymmetric balance on Qwai needs a tweak.

I am playing with a friend of mine on TS. Generally, he plays as a Squad Leader, and I function as the leader of a second fire team (the second fire team being whatever squad members I happen to have with me while separated from the SL). Nothing fancy or terribly organized. However, after two rounds of dealing with pubbers in the squad, we decide to form our own locked armor squad using the Chinese tank.

Now, to let you know where everything stood, our team was simply atrocious at working together. The Chinese squads were scattered all over the map, and spent the entire round (at least the first 1.5 hours that I played of it) chasing Fishing Village, Estate, and Local Temple as the US team kept making incursions into our side of the river. We never got infantry on the Govt. Office flag, let alone captured it. By all rights, the Chinese team should have had all their flags capped out within the first 30 minutes of the round.

What then, you might ask, stopped the obviously superior USMC team from wiping China off the map? Well that, my friend, would be the 54 ton battlefield monster known as the Type 98. More times and I can count, my friend and I used the long range advantage of the Chinese MBT to decimate advancing forces. While our team was busy chasing white flags, we relentlessly put our tank into hull down positions to effectively block the USMC's route to the next flag and chew up their infantry. We kept our undefended main base from falling not once, not twice, but three separate times because our team evidently thought a yellow defend marker meant 'Don't go here'.

As I said before, by all rights the US team should have captured every flag and killed every Chinese soldier in a relatively short time. They were certainly coordinating and working together. The only positive comment I have about the teamwork on MY team was that random blue guys were fairly quick to respond to requests for repairs. Deadlocked as we were, the match was being decided for the most part by ticket losses through kills and not from a bleed.

Some highlights I remember:

Lining up for a shot on the US TOW HUMVEE, firing, having connection problems, missing, and then watching my easy kill get wasted because the driver of the HUMVEE drove over one of his own team's mines.

Chewing through 2 or 3 enemy APCs in fairly rapid succession with APDS rounds because for some reason they thought they could take out a hull down MBT, one at a time.

Providing over watch on the hill north of Fishing Village only to have the enemy TOW HUMVEE saunter out of the trees 30 meters from us, facing the wrong direction, and completely ignore us. In total disbelief of my luck and the HUMVEE driver's stupidity, I wasted him nearly point blank with a HEAT round.

Being assaulted simultaneously from 3 directions by engineers that had snuck within 20 meters of us and had C4 packs in hand. I killed two, and the third would have managed to place his, but my driver switched to the cupola .50 and tore him apart.

Exploding a fully loaded .50 cal HUMVEE at 400 meters with a single HEAT round. Satisfaction.

Imagining the look of abject terror on the face of a Marine that crested a hill in the road only to narrowly miss rear ending our tank. Luckily, I happened to have the barrel of the main gun watching behind us, and placed a HEAT round within 5 meters of his vehicle. Seemingly unphased, he swerves around us as I pepper the HUMVEE with 7.62 rounds from the coaxial, reloading another shell. The enemy driver panics, and bails out of his vehicle going full speed. My driver and I laugh as his body bounces off the ground in a heap.

A one-man enemy LAV opens fire on us, scoring half a dozen front armor hits with his AP rounds. He then tries to retreat...into an open field, with no cover. You can guess what happened next.

We place our tank outside the Chinese main hoping to stop the enemy infantry that just took Local Temple from moving on our main. We discover they have APC support in the ravine that forms the nearby tributary of the map's main river. We do not have an angle for a shot, but infantry are swarming around the APC. 3 bursts of coaxial 7.62 kill roughly an entire squad. The APC then has the bright idea to try to climb out of the ravine, exposing his weak bottom armor to us. This ends as you would expect; With a violent explosion that kills several more infantry with splash damage.

Immediately after the above bit, we relocate to another position watching the approach from the ravine, because enemy infantry are still streaming out of the area. We wait behind a small ridge for them to move out and head for our main. 3 crest the ridge near a tree and are rewarded with a HEAT shell. I take out another 5 or 6, most of them engineers trying to get close enough to put C4 on us. The area is now littered with dead bodies and mines. I lob a shell into a rally point, killing it. We take 2 or 3 LAT hits as an enemy squad attempts to get organized and fight back. Laughing it off, we kill the rest of the infantry in the area. I spot a rifleman prone in a depression ahead of us. I can't depress the gun far enough to get a shot with the coax or the cannon. My driver guns the engine to run this fool over. Somehow, he passes under the tank between the treads. Incensed, my driver backs up, revs the engine, and this time drags the poor fellow's body under the right track for a good 10 meters, pinning him against a hill and killing him. Satisfying.

We leave the above area believing it to be clear. Within a minute we are being called back because more infantry have appeared spotted on the minimap. Damn rally points. We spend another 10 minutes mopping up infantry before we get our tank into a position that can fire on their rally point.

Moving from the direction of our main base to suppress enemies at Local Temple, we use the tank's extreme range to snipe infantry sitting on the hills around the temple. 5 or 6 kills later, they learn to keep their heads down. The commander OKs a supply drop, effectively giving me unlimited HEAT rounds for now. We remain stationary, well out of range of all but the most skilled TOW or HAT players. After 10 minutes of harassing any infantry foolish enough to stick their head out of Local Temple, our team is finally mustering some troops to head that direction in an assault. Suddenly we are lit up by a missile warning tone. We duck behind a ridge and pop smoke, effectively shielding us from Local Temple. The tone continues and we are hit by a HAT round on the right flank. Our tracks are damaged, but the turret still works just fine. I swivel and see a HAT soldier 30 meters away in a ditch. Damn, he must have spent that entire 10 minutes sneaking towards our position to flank us. Oh well. A HEAT round to the head proves that he was wasting his time. We are repaired nearly instantly by a passing friendly engineer, and its back to covering their approach on the temple.

When this round began, my driver and I planned to quit as soon as we were killed in the tank. It was already getting late, and we both had things to do in the morning. This proposition turned into a 1.5 hour Marine slaughterfest, until, tired of killing grunts, we decided to stop repairing our tank and give the US a chance to actually kill us so we could go to bed. Yes, everything mentioned up to this point happened in one life in the same tank. A rarity on that map, as far as I am concerned, because the Chinese never seem to use their tanks appropriately or to any effect. When we finally succumbed to damage, it was because we took 3 LAT hits, about 12 AP rounds from an enemy APC (before killing him with a well placed SABOT round), a dozen or more frag grenades (which sound hilariously and pathetically weak with the new sound occlusion while inside an armored vehicle), and finally 2 more LAT rounds before we suffered damaged tracks, a disabled turret, and caught fire. Effectively finished with the round (even though each team had over 250 tickets left) we allowed ourselves to be killed when the tank finally burned down and exploded. I don't think I have ever had a 44/1 K/D ratio before. I realize PR is not about Kills, and appropriately it rewarded my driver with nearly double the score I had, even though he had only 1 kill (a road kill with the tank). Bravo in that respect.

Edit: Link for screenshot of scores when I disconnected http://www.wob.050104.com/images/BF2%202007-09-27%2021-56-53-98_2.JPG

[ArmedDrunk&Angry]

Don't ya just love rounds that go so well you don't even realize how successful you have been until the end of the round.
Great Job !

[Outlawz7]

[Dunehunter]

Feels really great during the round...until you have to wake up

Cool story, was a nice read

[IronTaxi]

exactly how qwai is meant to be...no imbalance in my opinion...a smart team can easily diable both chinese tanks..they dont really have much room to drive around of you havent noticed...

[Outlawz7]

Yeah, but it usually ends with solo Chinese tanks driving around, hunting down solo APCs and camping around. No one will bother with Heavy AT, since everyone thinks, someone will do it, when nobody does.
TOW Humvee will be used by Mr. Spec Op for personal taxi and the LB pilot will constantly use Hydras against the tank, until shot down or actually destroys the tank after tons of strafing runs.

So in long term, PLA should always win the map, since tanks > apcs > jeeps > infantry
There's a few times, when someone manages to sneak on a tank and destroy it, though...but probably after a pile of dead C4 wielding engineers around the tank...

Of course, that's how it plays on worst case scenario btw

[IronTaxi]

id have to say that in all the times ive played qwai it has come out pretty 50/50...

now TBH i have probably played it maybe 30-40 times total...where others are getting into the hundreds...hehe

[Outlawz7]

Well, last night on Tactical Gamers, USMC won the whole map.
I was on PLA at start, and couldn't believe having an armor VoIP squad, which didn't have tanks, because some guy was driving one alone around the map, while the other was abandoned at Fishing Village. Then the solo tank got disabled by two roadside C4's and abandoned the tank, just as two US APCs came and he got killed and the tank destroyed by an APC...

The whole PLA team was at Government Office and yet they couldn't capture it and I got TK'd by the same guy, who drove that tank alone, when the idiot shot the whole Spec Op gun clip into me on sight, then realized, that I'm friendly
When I teamswitched, the USMC team was already on standby at Estate and Temple and when we captured Outpost, the PLA team started pulling back from the Gov office and got decimated along the way...

[Sabre_tooth_tigger]

I think Qwai is a great map and I like its 'imbalance' but I do think its still biased to china still. The mine is a great looking base and I always thought it was a waste that this side of the map was not used in most games (on 0.5) but the Mine base is being used against USA most of the time.



China has the slow power and USA the mobility and air superority so I think a base that was more like a hill fort with elevation would have benefitted them much more.
Something like airdrop on Road to Kyongan Ni



Unfortunately where mine is involved it is a liability to the usa team not the asset it could have been.
Its a factor whenever office is not captured fully, so thats the start of the game and whenever Office is greyed or red.



I'd like to see office & Mine both be viable flag captures at the start of the game. Even better, have Mine allready captured at the start and facility the first flag.



China can attack mine at the start of the game, occupy and hold it. They stall any progress by USA, none of their sides benefits are any help with capturing mine but Chinas tanks are.



In fact if both sides swapped ends of the map so pigfarm was a china HQ and temple and estate were USA at the map start, USA would be pretty hard to beat. The bias would be reversed but Mine would then be Chinas fortress



Anyway just some feedback, sorry for the thread hijack I couldnt see any more appropriate thread