Part 15: LAV/IFVs and Floodzone w/Scarf

LAV/IFVs and Floodzone
Guest: Scarf

So the bigger problem with uploading this video wasn't getting the file late, it was that my internet completely died. I was told the upload would take 68,000 minutes when I tried to put it up last night. Luckily, the problem with my internet affected everyone in a 15 mile radius according to a friend at Comcast so they fixed it while I was at work.

The Map

Floodzone is recognized as one of the worst combined arms maps in the base game for good reason. For one, it is more or less an infantry map due to the number of accessible rooftops and those holding all the flags. I can think of a few maps in the game where you need to get out of vehicles to cap points (Paracel with the boats comes to mind), but few of those maps make it so vehicles feel near useless for the majority of the round. I will give the designers some credit, though. We don't see it in this map, but the freeway on the map is completely driveable, so you can use it to speed from one end of the map to the other in short order if necessary. That's a cool little feature in an otherwise dismal map. Why? Well...


Yeah, so this map suffers from Siege of Shanghai Syndrome bad. There's a single tall building that lets you float to a couple points and gives you a commanding view of much of the infantry operational area. Getting killed by a sniper up there is like a right of passage at this point. That, combined with the Levolution on the map making it so you need to swim everywhere as infantry is enough to slow down the pace of the game and kill enough of the fun in the most hectic areas that the map comes off as half baked at best. If there were advantages to the points I could see the map getting a bit better, but you only earn an AMTRAK by taking the gas station, which is way out on the edge of the map, so why bother? You are better off trying to take the "Gimme" point your team has and then B and C than fighting over F. If the game gave you more than LAVs and scout choppers for offensive vehicles this may have gone better, but fighting LAVs in an LAV is a chore rather than a compelling reason to seek each other out. Speaking of LAVs...

LAV/IFV
The Infantry Fighting Vehicle, or Light Armored Vehicle as I term it is a pretty intimidating thing if you are infantry. I've piloted a couple of these things in other videos, but never really got into the details of the things. If you looked at them and thought of them as stripped down tanks you wouldn't be completely wrong. Instead of a slow main cannon the LAV/IFV has a magazine fed gun that can fire three types of shells. Also unlike the tank the LAV/IFV can carry up to five people, including a driver and a gunner manning a 360 degree turret, making it excellent for either moving a full squad around the map or getting a full squad killed horribly. Let's talk about the LAV in a bit more detail.


The main weapon on an IFV has three options as I just mentioned. I use the APFSDS-T shell, which is more or less the sabot round for IFVs. It is called the Alphabet Soup shell by some due to the giant acronym or can be called by another term, the Kinetic Penetrator(note to self: start band called Kinetic Penetrator). Like the tank's sabot shell, this has no explosive damage and little drop, making it slightly better than the 25mm standard shell for distance engagements, but requires a deft hand against individuals. The 25mm shell has a pretty good explosive radius that can be used to take out ground forces, and does good damage against other vehicles, there's really nothing wrong with any part of it. The Canister shell is more or less a shotgun for the LAV. It fires pellets that do some decent damage against infantry , but are less effective at a distance and against vehicles they seem to do very little. I've only seen someone using this once and I just destroyed them by backing up.


The LAV comes standard with the LMG secondary weapon. It's useful, no denying it, but if you take either the TOW missile (same as the one discussed in the past) or Zuni Rockets (decent damage against vehicles, heavy drop over even short distances) you are ready to take on other IFVs or even full on tanks. I like the TOW because I can guide it over longer distances instead of trying to angle up with Zunis to get distance shots. If you still use the coaxial LMG you can be very effective vs. infantry, so it isn't a bad choice by any means, but most infantry aren't going to make it so you can just gun them down with the thing.


These are literally the exact same countermeasures as on the Tank. Run AP, never look back.


Upgrades should look familiar as well. These are all the same ones as on the Tank, not much point in discussing them more unless you want to hear about what reactive armor was in BF3 and how DICE ruined the game by not letting me take a rocket to the side without taking any damage.


Can we get some new stuff in here? Look, optics on every vehicle are the exact same, they never change. In this case the driver and gunner share optic options, which is why you won't see it mentioned below.


OK, so this is all the same stuff from the tank gunner upgrades. We're done here.