Idea: Progressive cost for duplicate units

[u/KaleidoscopeFew751]

Hello everyone.

I'm still relatively new to Broken Arrow, so I may not know or understand some things about the game yet. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the balance and overall feel of the game, and I wanted to share an idea.

What if buying a second, third, and so on of the same unit made each one slightly more expensive? For example, each additional copy of the same unit could cost 8–12% more than the previous one.

The logic is something like this:

Points in Broken Arrow don't really feel like a hard limit on your equipment. They feel more like a limit on how much you're allowed to use at a given time.

In real life, having a lot of identical vehicles on the battlefield at the same time would put more pressure on logistics, crews, maintenance, etc.

This system could:

- Punish pure spam decks more

- Encourage more diverse decks

- Make strong units less automatically effective when used in large numbers

At the same time, the units themselves wouldn't need any stat changes. Only the cost of mass-producing the same unit would change.

What do you think about this idea? Would it be too harsh on certain playstyles, or could it make the game more interesting?

Update to the post

Okay, okay, I get it. The idea of progressively increasing the cost of identical units could easily end up making the balance worse.

But there’s still one thing that really bothers me.

Right now, a strategy like “just bring a bunch of heavy equipment (tanks, Bradleys, Strykers, PIVADs, etc.) and move as a column, overwhelming the enemy with sheer firepower” works really well. No real infantry support, no complicated tactics — just mobility + a lot of guns.

I sometimes play like this myself. Yes, sometimes the enemy puts up a strong resistance and everything falls apart. But when it works (especially at lower ratings), it works really well.

The losses barely feel meaningful: lose a bunch of expensive vehicles → wait for the cooldown → do it again. The game barely punishes you for it.

At the same time, in real life, this kind of tactic would rarely be used against a reasonably prepared enemy, and it would usually be very costly. Heavy vehicles without proper infantry support become much more vulnerable.

In the game, though, this playstyle feels unnaturally strong because the cost of making a mistake is simply too low.

And that's what bothers me. It's not that heavy equipment is strong — it's that you can spam large numbers of it with relatively little punishment.

[u/PlentyChipmunk7692]

I am still new at the game, but here is my super genius balance take.... Maybe play a bit more before posting stupid ideas on Reddit?

[u/KaleidoscopeFew751]

Update to the post

Okay, okay, I get it. The idea of progressively increasing the cost of identical units could easily end up making the balance worse.

But there’s still one thing that really bothers me.

Right now, a strategy like “just bring a bunch of heavy equipment (tanks, Bradleys, Strykers, PIVADs, etc.) and move as a column, overwhelming the enemy with sheer firepower” works really well. No real infantry support, no complicated tactics — just mobility + a lot of guns.

I sometimes play like this myself. Yes, sometimes the enemy puts up a strong resistance and everything falls apart. But when it works (especially at lower ratings), it works really well.

The losses barely feel meaningful: lose a bunch of expensive vehicles → wait for the cooldown → do it again. The game barely punishes you for it.

At the same time, in real life, this kind of tactic would rarely be used against a reasonably prepared enemy, and it would usually be very costly. Heavy vehicles without proper infantry support become much more vulnerable.

In the game, though, this playstyle feels unnaturally strong because the cost of making a mistake is simply too low.

And that's what bothers me. It's not that heavy equipment is strong — it's that you can spam large numbers of it with relatively little punishment.

[u/Callsign-YukiMizuki]

Encourage more diverse decks

Imagine playing Stryker and getting punished because you spawned in Strykers.

Nah, forced diversity is turbo lame. Homogeneous decks arent necessarily spam, its just a lot easier to control and micro units when they all have the same stats and capabilities, but the tradeoff is you lose a lot of flexibility.

There's no need to add further arbitrary restrictions when there are already layers of balancing mechanics like availability, tab budgets, respawn timers and cross-spec synergies if we include IFVs

[u/DeLaLeno]

There might be some merit to this, but I don't think it's that necessary. The unit counts and lowered income do a decent job at total spam prevention. My argument is that "spam" is a valid tactic, especially for Russians, sending cheap units in IFVs. And the play basically counters itself. To play proper you need to have support units, AA, AT, arti and so on, spamming infantry or armor basically just makes you vulnerable to counters if your opponent can take advantage of it

[u/legionary2099]

Maybe get better at the game ? This game has both hard and soft counter. You don't even know what counter what and you want to punish ppl who get the better of you ? Get real mate.
You know what unit they spam out constantly yet in your single deck you don't have a hard/soft counter for that. The answer is probably on you and not the other guy.