generally ro2 tanks are very realistic and complicated, but there is some things that i really hate:
-only 2 tanks
-crews die ONLY if you hit them directly ( they never die if you shoot near them but dont hit directly )
-you cant hit and blow up ammo in enemy tank's turret
-extremely annoying bugs like teleporting, stuck, shells blowing up in air, etc.
2 and 3 make next things:
- it looks like shells dont explode inside the tank. they dont damage anything if they dont hit it directly. Even if you shoot tank's turret with 2 or 3 crews and ammo inside
- usually all tank duels are " shoot enemy aimer/reloader to win "
ro1 tanks' advantages are:
-they arent bugged so much like ro2
-they dont have " shoot aimer/reloader to win "
-megatonns of different vehicles.
And of course,
in ro2 you cant leave vehicle but you can in ro1.
I agree I'm not fond of the inability to leave the tanks and the lack of variety, but RO2 is mostly superior to RO1 mechanics..... in honesty and in my own opinion, ROCA (RO3.3) had better tank mechanics than RO1.
Both RO2 and ROCA use the mouse to aim the tank, which I have always preferred. I hated the turret aiming in RO1 with the keyboard simply because it was jumpy and inaccurate, especially when I was trying to target an enemy from far away.
Some think the keyboard better represented you moving dials/gears/whatever in order to move the turret, but you're not the gear monkey, you're the commander/gunner and you're telling them where to aim the turret. Using the mouse in ROCA and RO2 had that slight delay to the movement as if you were telling the crew to "Aim Here at these coordinates" and they set it up for you so you could shoot. You wouldn't be trying to do everything all at once all by yourself.
And in RO1, trying to use the MG on the Turret to shoot some running infantry was next to useless while trying to move with the keyboard. Often you'd end up shooting up the grass along their feet and then suddenly you're shooting up in the sky above their head.
The other thing I hated about RO1 was the shoddy mechanics regarding the armour and damage. ROCA wasn't so bad as unless you hit the specific spot in the front of a tank, you usually needed 2-3 hits to disable the tank.
In RO1, the T34 and the PIV's almost always blew up in one hit when shot front on.... the PIV's were actually worse because you couldn't angle them like you could with the T34's and thus, have a ping pong match between T34's vs. Tigers and Panthers. Though in ROCA, there was a very small and fine angle the PIV's could use for deflection, it just wasn't as big of an angle as what the T34's could get away with.
The PIV's blew up in 1 shot almost all the time no matter the angle, 2 max and far too often I would see everybody scramble for every other tank but the PIV's because they were such death traps.
And yes, there's the ping pong battles from ROCA and RO1.... though I kind of liked them, they did get a bit excessive especially with the IS2 and Panther.
RO2 got a lot of things right, but the major drawback was the interior designs and animations.... simply unnecessary. Looked nice in previews, but in practice, completely useless and a waste of development time.
Some would say the mechanics and damage physics took more time to do than the interiors, but all that was needed would have been something between what we have now and what was in RO1/ROCA.
Still the drawbacks in RO2 tanking don't outweigh the improvements from RO1 and the returned features from the mod days were more than welcome.
I personally never experienced a lot of bugs regarding the tanks.... the only culprit (which was fixed) was the constant turret hits to the T34 that killed the player and insta-killed the tanks.... that I think turned a lot of players off from the tanking in the game at the start and many just never went back.
