Heavy Weapons Platforms
There are five different HWP units available to you as an X-COM Commander.
General Information
Tanks are divided into two distinct chassis types, the standard miniature tracked tank and the hover tank. The tracked tank chassis is the weaker of the two, however it is relatively cheaper on materials and can be purchased off the market. Our engineers can also reproduce a replica of the tracked tank in the workshops for the purposes of mounting our proprietary heavy laser turrets. The hovertank, a hybrid of human and alien technologies, must be built in the engineering labs. It is the most expensive, especially on exotic resources, but it comes with superior internal and external subsystems, a generous amount of armour, and comes with the ability to hover in the air much like a Cyberdisc or Ethereal.
Tanks use turrets to fire. These turrets can turn independently of the tanks themselves. For example, if you tell a tank to fire behind itself, the turret will turn and not the tank. The turret will keep its new bearing relative to the tank until it is told to fire again. Moving the turret costs 1 TU per directional change. However, the turret itself does not contain any optical perception sensors, so it cannot see an enemy if the tank cannot see it.
With the exception of the Tank/Laser Cannon and the Hovertank/Plasma, you must have sufficient ammunition in your stores before loading the tank onto a transport craft. However, if one of your bases is attacked and you do not have ammunition available, any tanks will be granted with a full payload of ammunition. Any rounds remaining after a successful base defense will be added to your stores.
Advantages
- Tanks are very rarely affected by morale loss. In order for a tank to panic, your squad must take a severe amount of losses during a given turn. (Tanks have 110 bravery)
- Tanks are not affected by stun, nor can they receive fatal wounds.
- Tanks are not affected by psi attacks.
- They tend to have a greater amount of TUs then normal soldiers making them excellent for use as scouts. They also carry their internal weapons with no penalty, as opposed to weak soldiers who struggle with Rocket Launcher+ several reloads.
- Tanks start off with fairly decent stats, except for their Reactions, which are horrible.
- Tanks are counted as items, not staff. This lets them be stored in general storage instead of Living Quarters.
- When starting up a new base and fearing alien attacks, it's convenient to buy/send a couple of HWPs there on guard duty. You still need at least one soldier on duty there for a base defense though.
- They can take fairly heavy damage before being destroyed.
- A damaged tank is instantly repaired at the end of a mission.
- Other units can fire over the top of a tank without the tank getting hit in the crossfire.
- Tanks carry more ammunition than a soldier can. In particular, Hovertank/Launchers and Tank/Rocket Launchers carry more ammo than a soldier carrying a launcher and ammo can.
- More importantly, the ammo loaded in the tank one does not count towards the 80 item limit, unlike the ammunition for man-portable Blaster and Rocket Launchers.
- The tank does NOT have to manually reload its weapon. It doesn't even have to use any TUs. This is important for the Blaster and Plasma tanks. Basically, it uses a clip with many many shots, as opposed to soldiers with many 1 shot clips. Makes a difference.
- Tanks do not draw salaries. While their initial cost is large, you don't have to keep shelling out cash every month for them. Of course, for the blaster, rocket and AP tanks, the ammunition cost can far outstrip a soldier's salary.
- As expensive as they are, everything is included in the cost of the tank except ammunition. You do not need to buy weapons, armor or equipment for them. Furthermore, two of the most useful tanks-- the laser and plasma tanks-- do not require ammunition at all.
- Tanks cannot be implanted by Chryssalids. Their bite may well destroy the tank, but at least you don't have to worry about the tank turning into a Zombie.
- Hovertanks, like all flying units, can avoid physical attacks- most noticably Chryssalids- completely by staying above ground level.
- Losing a tank affects morale the same as losing a newbie - much less than the death of a soldier of somewhat similar stats, who would probably have earned a high officer rank. Despite being a significant economic loss, the destruction of a tank doesn't trigger the panic wave the fall of a Colonel would.
Disadvantages
- Tanks are much more expensive than soldiers - eg $420,000 vs $40,000. Their cost and usefulness are inverse with time. Ie, by the time you can afford them, they are a lot less useful as attackers. They will continue to remain useful as expendable scouts.
- They do not gain experience during combat.
- Their extra size makes it difficult to get them to certain areas - through most doorways, for example.
- It's possible for a tank to be "halfway" (one square) past a wall and be visible to enemies and vulnerable to their fire, yet unable to spot those same enemies and, needless to say, unable to return fire. A similar problem can cause tanks to get stranded in walls if they try to drop off ledges in the wrong compass direction.
- They take extra damage from explosives due to their size.
- Tanks have very low reactions. In other words, tanks draw fire. Aliens will prefer to react against tanks more often than your troops because tanks have low reaction levels - all the time.
- Many commanders consider this an advantage, however, knowing they can bring a tank in to distract the enemy from vulnerable troops. This works by making the enemy use up their remaining Time Units on an expendable decoy.
- Tanks do not have any Auto-Fire capability, a big liability in close combat.
- Most tanks have weaker weapons than their man-portable counterparts. Only the Tank/Cannon and Tank/Laser have weapons that surpass their handheld counterparts in power.
- The Tank/Rockets have missiles that are stronger than small rockets, but are weaker than large rockets.
- The Hovertank/Launchers are weaker than Blaster Bombs - 200 power vs 140 - and unable to breach outer walls of UFOs as standard blasters can.
- Plasma hovertanks are poorer than Heavy Plasmas at breaching UFO inner walls, due to a 5 point power difference (see Destroying Terrain for more details).
- Tanks cannot carry additional equipment and cannot reload once their ammunition has run out.
- The aimed shots on most tanks are not worthwhile. The gain in accuracy does not nearly match the extra time units they require. This is epecially true on the Hovertank/Plasma.
- Once destroyed they are unrepairable and unrecoverable.
- Although rare to happen, Tanks can also go bezerk. If this happens to a Tank/Rocket Launcher the results are usually catastrophic.