A retrospective on the state and value of vehicles in 2042

On a regular conquest server, the infantry per team number to 32

Each of these infantry if they are an engineer they can carry a shoulder mounted launcher and Sticky explosives or AT mines.

Outside of the regular gadgets one of the specialists can shoot TV missiles while another can do a "hack" that can practically immobilize an armored vehicle or **bleep** an aircraft that comes too close.

An honorable mention should also go to the anti materiel rifles and the Railgun rifle (someone in my platoon loves to snipe pilots out of stealth helis with it). Just these alone could do scary things in the ideal scenario where enough players actually focused fire with them on one vehicle at a time

Depending on how seriously they take the anti vehicle role a vehicle will either thrive due to being ignored or will not be able to do anything other than trying to escape.

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Now let us look at the vehicle spawn system.

There are limited slots so you will not have for example 20 tanks per team. They also have a long respawn after they are gone.
For some reason DICE decided to add an extra respawn penalty to try to prevent people from taking the same vehicle type after they lost the previous one. This has never been addressed by any official source and it is really annoying. Imagine having a period where you could not use Recon because someone just killed you when you were just playing Recon.

I believe that more often than not there are too few available (worthwhile) vehicles for the amount of infantry that they may have to contend with. 

I do not think I got to have my fill of a good vehicle in 2042 due to how often they are taken, destroyed or how some random thread is cutting my run short and good luck getting the same vehicle again.

The ground vehicles which have any sort of considerable protection from the outside are slow, have relatively narrow vertical turret angles and even after several improvements, their turrets still turn slowly, unlike those in BF3/4
Their acceleration leaves a lot to be desired. Especially when considering how many rockets they have to dodge and how easily they can get stuck on small bits of terrain.

The ground vehicles often depend a lot on infantry to be their meatshields which is more or less the reverse of what a tank is for.

The aircraft in general have having a better time the smaller they are because they are much harder to see from a large distance and are much more agile. Meanwhile the larger ones are often clumsy easy targets.

The planes are fast enough that it is quite hard to make out and do anything on infantry and even when they do, their high caliber weapons are mostly just scratching the  small meatbags on the ground. Any vehicles or vehicle weapons that were reasonably effective at hitting infantry with splash have gotten one or more nerfs. (the attack jets nerf on its HE rounds is the latest example)

The helicopters are in a better state where they can still be strong vs a mostly lazy enemy team which is trying to ignore them so they can focus on the few diligent people who will try to them off with liz missiles etc with various levels of success.

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In general I am a player who has enjoyed and used vehicles a lot in previous titles.
But in 2042 I have often felt that it was just not worth it to try to fight other for the vehicle slots only to have  a minimal effect in the outcome of the round and having to wait a long time for a chance to get the next spawn of the vehicles I want.

In Conclusion
Vehicles in 2042 are mostly lousy and weak. I hope that  DICE has learned some lessons about that and makes them significant (but not OP ofc) in BF6.
But if engineers can carry both AT and AA launchers at the same time in BF6, I think that wont happen