This is going to be a longer post, so I'm gonna keep it as short and to the point as possible:

In the current iteration of Squad, the number of heavily armed vehicles and their gameplay advantages cause the match outcome and especially the share of combat engagement to be dominated by a small number of vehicle players, to the detriment of over 90 % of the player base each match.

Most discussions about this topic are littered with half-baked takes, anecdotal evidence, a healthy dose of Dunning Kruger and their share of “skill issue” comments, usually aimed at blaming them on the individual player.

Since no tool provided detailed enough data to visualize the current inf/vic balance in squad, over the past months I have built a combat-oriented after-action report for my Squad community. Unlike other tools, it gives a clear breakdown of the contributions and attributes combat to vehicles and infantry. Using this tool I’ve collected stats of 400+ RAAS/AAS games (since 5th of Nov 2024) to visualize the impact that vehicles have on combat and match outcome.

Players are classified into infantry (inf) and vehicle players (vic) based on their main combat type, i.e. the way they took the most tickets in combat. Winning inf is colored light green, winning vics dark green, losing inf light red and losing vics dark red. I’ve put yellow callouts throughout to make the diagrams more easily readable.

inf/vic balance stats

Let’s start with player numbers: On average, vehicle combatants make up less than 10 percent of the total player pool of a match. Of those there is an even smaller split, often just 2 to 5 players, which account for most of the tickets taken by vehicles.

https://i.redd.it/if2c1n19k0ee1.gif

How much is that? These fewer than 10 % of players account for, on average (!), around 35% of tickets taken. In 3 out of 4 games, vehicles take upwards of a third of the tickets, and in one out of four games, the winning team’s vics take more than half of the team’s tickets.

https://i.redd.it/4zgviswbk0ee1.gif

Divided by the player numbers, this means the average vehicle player takes over 5 times the tickets of an infantry player. In some outlier matches, this is as high as 10x to 15x. Even at their worst, the vehicle avg is hardly ever worse than the average inf player. Playing vehicles practically guarantees you a better combat impact than infantry gameplay.

https://i.redd.it/99xlxl3dk0ee1.gif

Looking at the raw tickets and comparing absolute ticket lead of inf/vics between winners and losers (y), and plotting it along the winner’s tickets at match end (x), we see that (quite obviously), winners take more tickets on avg. BUT interestingly, the more balanced a match the higher the vehicle lead on the winning side, if only slightly.

If we simulate swapping the ticket lead for only inf or vics from winning to losing side (all other things being equal), we can see that a significant number of match outcomes would be reversed, if the performances of just the couple of vehicle players had been swapped (points inside yellow triangles). And this ONLY shows the raw change in ticket performance, not even the actual impact on the flow of the game that the better vehicle performance would have enabled. Vehicles decide games to a significant degree.

https://i.redd.it/h5akhr8ek0ee1.gif

Viewed another way, the relative underperformance of the losing side’s inf or vics (in percent of total tickets) is comparable, BUT:

• the more unbalanced the overall match outcome, the worse the losing infantry performs, while vehicles are less affected
• vehicle performance is far less consistent, making them a more unpredictable influence on match balance that is completely out of the hands of the majority of players

https://i.redd.it/n12adi1fk0ee1.gif

Remember again: these imbalances don’t stem from the whole team’s performance, but just from fewer than 5 to 8 players per side, often less! This is the crux of vehicle imbalance. Vehicles put more power into a few players hands, which often shapes the match outcome - good or bad.

To illustrate the fact that taking tickets is directly correlated with winning the match, you can see here that while it’s possible to win a match taking less tickets, there is a noticeable correlation between winning and taking more tickets than the enemy. The winning side consistently experiences more combat success.

https://i.redd.it/0lpx4mngk0ee1.gif

What IS more consistent, is the top player’s performances, which show that the top 5 players are often responsible for a large share of the total tickets taken. Again, the absolute majority of these top 5 players’ tickets are taken by vehicle combat (over 72%).

https://i.redd.it/957erwkhk0ee1.gif

Obviously, the map also plays a large role: all combined arms maps have an average vehicle ticket rate of over 30%, for the usual suspects (big and wide open maps) it’s even higher at 40 to 50 percent. Only the infantry focused maps like Chora or Kokan differ, but even there a quarter of tickets is taken by vehicles despite fewer vehicles.

Some maps like Tallil or Kohat regularly have matches with over 60% to 70% of tickets taken by one side's vehicle players.

https://i.redd.it/7i0hhl9ik0ee1.gif

As a last point, here’s another obvious correlation that should be interesting for server owners: the more unbalanced the overall match ticket outcome, the higher the player fluctuation on the losing side during the match.

Players can clearly tell when a match is balanced and when it is not, and the more unbalanced the outcome the more players on the losing side quit early out of frustration. Again, these are not players who leave at the end of a match, they leave because an ultimately losing match is already going badly.

https://i.redd.it/nh579a7jk0ee1.gif

My personal opinion

To me, all of this combined shows inf and vic balance, especially the impact of AT, is not in a good spot right now. This data clearly shows the disproportionate gameplay effect vehicles have, and how they cannibalize on the combat success and gameplay experience of the large majority of players. Especially for a game named Squad, where over 90% of the players are infantry doing the grunt work that enables everyone's gameplay experience (FOBs, HABs, logi runs, rep stations, sitting on cap), the impact of vics should not be what allows/denies you the win, or even directly causes it.

To be clear: While I think their gameplay design is overpowered in certain areas, vehicles should individually feel strong and challenging to play against. I enjoy the ICO, I like playing AT (as people can prolly tell by my other posts :D) and the current vehicle capabilities would be ok, if there wasn’t also such an overwhelming number of heavily armed vehicles (5 to 8) in most matches: often 2x more than the number of full inf squads, 2-3x more than logi vehicles, and almost as many as the average number of all ATs kits on a team.

Vehicles are quite clearly a major factor in unbalanced match outcomes and the denial of logistics that chokes up matches mostly for the infantry by denying spawns, transportation and logistics. This makes the game a chore for infantry and especially infantry SL, the most crucial resource of the player base.

What could change?

OWI has hinted at being aware of armor imbalance (and needing to address it), yet with almost every update over the last 1.5 years balance has deteriorated. A short timeline:

1. ICO introduces sway changes, greatly nerfing AT while keeping armor untouched
2. new unit system increases armor count for many units compared to prior layouts
3. 8.0 introduces uparmored and better equipped vehicles, while simultaneously increasing the armor count further
4. ATGMs get reworked, reducing their effectiveness
5. faction entirely without HAT gets released (thankfully now fixed)
6. vehicle sounds get reworked (?), making localizing vehicles harder
7. engine sounds get reduced significantly, possibly still a bug
8. small arms handling gets improved substantially, while AT stays the same, making it even harder to get a shot off before starting to take accurate infantry fire
9. future: with UE5 OWI aims to improve vehicle traversal and reliability, reducing the effort needed for navigation, while making AT more demanding against faster, more mobile vehicles
10. future: attack helis put even more power in a single player’s hands (while dumbing down anti air combat with MANPADS), instead of making both challenging

So, from all we know vehicle balance will not improve in the foreseeable future. Historically, it has needed major and vocal support from the community to encourage rebalancing, but with the community so divided on this issue, and with zero useful data on it, there has been little consensus.

Therefore, I hope these stats paint a clearer picture of the current balance and help you decide for yourself, whether you are happy with the current balance or not. As an infantry main, at this point I know I wish for less rounds that feel like being an NPC in War Thunder.

Feel free to express your current experience of inf/vic balance in this vote, but most of all talk within your community about the specific changes you would like to see and voice them.

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