What about desanting soldiers?
Infantry add a whole new and awesome aspect to tank warfare. It's really too bad that a lot of the better video games that feature armored vehicles don't also have infantry. Infantry don't always have tanks, but you (should) never find tanks without infantry.
Lermfish pointed this out to me and I was super turned off by the schoolgirl horse shit and the bad history (Shermans catching fire easily is a myth) but this is starting to look too fun to pass up.
It is explicitly a sports game. Adding infantry to it would be like adding tanks to football: It would be interesting, but kinda completely changes the game from what it was intended to be.
The Sherman catching fire wasn't a myth, at least not these versions. The placement of the ammunition racks was a problem that was mostly solved by wet stowage...which is an upgrade you can get. If anything, the myth would be "German Tanks
don't catch on fire as easily", they didn't have a huge difference in fire-catability, but it was something like 80% of penetrations set it on fire.
Here is is what Wikipedia has to say about the subject:
Research conducted by the British No. 2 Operational Research Section, after the Normandy campaign, concluded that a Sherman would be set alight 82% of the time following an average of 1.89 penetrations of the tank's armor; in comparison they also concluded the Panzer IV would catch fire 80% of the time following an average of 1.5 penetrations, the Panther would light 63% of the time following 3.24 penetrations, and the Tiger would catch fire 80% of the time following 3.25 penetrations.[93] John Buckley, using a case study of the British 8th and 29th Armoured Brigades found that of their 166 Shermans knocked out in combat during the Normandy campaign, 94 (56.6%) were burnt out. Buckley also notes that an American survey carried out concluded that 65% of tanks burnt out after being penetrated.[94] United States Army research proved that the major reason for this was the stowage of main gun ammunition in the sponsons above the tracks. A U.S. Army study in 1945 concluded that only 10–15 percent of wet-stowage Shermans burned when penetrated, compared to 60–80 percent of the older dry-stowage Shermans.[95]
At first, a partial remedy to ammunition fires in the M4 was found by welding 1-inch-thick (25 mm) appliqué armor plates to the sponson sides over the ammunition stowage bins, though there was doubt that these had any effect. Later models moved ammunition stowage to the hull floor, with additional water jackets surrounding the main gun ammunition stowage. The practice, known as wet stowage, reduced the chance of fire after a hit to about 15%.[96] The Sherman gained grim nicknames like "Tommycooker" (by the Germans, who referred to British soldiers as "Tommies"; a tommy cooker was a World War I-era trench stove). The British and German[5] took to calling it the "Ronson", after the lighter.[97] Fuel fires occasionally occurred, but such fires were far less common and less deadly than ammunition fires.[95] In many cases, the fuel tank of the Sherman was found intact after a fire. Tankers described "fierce, blinding jets of flame," which is inconsistent with gasoline-related fires.[94]
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M4 Sherman Armor, the last two paragraphs))
Besides, school girls make everything better always, and questioning this fact is a sin punishable by the harshest punishments.
As for burning Shermans, they did indeed have extreme flammability at the beginning of the war, but if you look at tank upgrades there is wet stowage as an upgrade which reduces fire catching chance by 75%
That's true, but early in the war the Pz. IV also had nearly identical rates of failure due to fire, so the Sherman shouldn't be singled out since it's not much more vulnerable to that risk compared to other tanks.
Yeah, but it was really *only* the Pz.IV by the above. So if anything, it would make more sense to give it to the Pz. IV too.
It is specifically an M4A1 ('42-'43), so I guess that makes sense. I think I'll look into fire prevention measures in the other tanks to see where parallels lie. I wouldn't want to assume that just because tanks from other nations are from the same year that they didn't have better/worse fire prevention or ammo storage than the Sherman.
Since this is arena combat, the crews can avoid improperly storing their ammo (i.e. storing it outside the armored racks) unless they decide they need the extra ammo. Not to mention no one has any reason to be carrying HE since there are no infantry, so the likelihood of a catastrophic ammo cook-off should be severely reduced for all tanks, shouldn't it?
Well they might not be from the same year? Its possible that the Panzer IV is a late war model while the Sherman is explicitly an early war M4A1. There is nothing suggesting that they came from the same year. And anyway, the "Sets on fire easily" thing is actually an advantage for the Sherman in this game, in that it halves the price of the tank, allowing for double the amount to be fielded.
There are probably rules in place for the storage of ammunition, I would imagine the bloodsport is the kind of thing people watch for fantastic explosions. They are probably the kind of people to require you to have HE ammunition just so that it can blow up in your face
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