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The reason why I figured that they needed to be up-tiered was because I thought that having something like a, say, Leopard C2 MEXAS at tier 3 where it could potentially face tiers 1 to 2 would be rather unfair to those playing bottom-tier vehicles. Then again, that would likely only apply for PvE, so I guess this would go into the whole discussion as to whether or not there should be a difference between PvE and PvP balancing. I think one compromise would be to just view each tank individually; a Leopard 1A3 or 1A4 would unlikely offer enough of an upgrade over the Leopard 1 to be up-tiered, but a C2 MEXAS might need a little more testing to see how it would actually work in a game. Your second point was kind of what I'd like to see in this game, where instead of having variants of the same vehicle being separate and distinct vehicles, you'd instead have the base vehicles in the trees and their variants as upgrade packages. It would, as you say, reduce the number of unique vehicles by quite a bit, and I would even say that you'd have to cut down the number of tiers as well. It could even morph into a Generation 1/2/3/4 sort of system which more-or-less reflects real life classifications. I'd reckon it would also make it easier to introduce tanks as they appear in real-time, since almost all future tanks are lumped into Generation 4 at this point in time. However, as a starting point, I think this system would be best for tiers 1 to 5. I really only thought hard about this when I realised that having a lack of a players in low-tiers would not bode well for the development of new tech trees.