World of Tanks

[Zinegata]

I'm personally a bit more inclined to use Tier 5 as a battleground, as most of them at least have the chance to damage and kill higher-tier enemies.

[Simon_Jester]

What I mean is that at Tier 4 you are compelled to learn the skills you will need to use more powerful vehicles effectively- to watch the terrain, to learn to start thinking about the reload time of your gun, and so on. For almost all Tier 2 and Tier 3 vehicles, it's quite practical to just zip around and ping away at things with your two-second reload guns. Mobility is high and you don't have to worry so much about thinking about where you're going to go, very few tanks really have enough armor to deflect 37mm fire from anything but a favorable angle, and so on.

You can learn bad habits in tanks like that. Tier 4 forces you to unlearn them, hopefully. That doesn't make Tier 4 better for play, of course- it's just a useful stage in the player's progression towards the level of someone who can more or less hold their own in battle.

[Scottish Ninja]

What I mean is that at Tier 4 you are compelled to learn the skills you will need to use more powerful vehicles effectively- to watch the terrain, to learn to start thinking about the reload time of your gun, and so on. For almost all Tier 2 and Tier 3 vehicles, it's quite practical to just zip around and ping away at things with your two-second reload guns. Mobility is high and you don't have to worry so much about thinking about where you're going to go, very few tanks really have enough armor to deflect 37mm fire from anything but a favorable angle, and so on.

You can learn bad habits in tanks like that. Tier 4 forces you to unlearn them, hopefully. That doesn't make Tier 4 better for play, of course- it's just a useful stage in the player's progression towards the level of someone who can more or less hold their own in battle.

That actually makes a lot of sense as to why many players have a high level of antipathy for the T-28 and M3 Lee, when they're highly effective when used properly - it has little to do with the tanks and more to do with them trying to transition to a new playstyle.

[Zinegata]

Ah, yes. Tier 2/3 light tank play does indeed do very little to prepare you for higher tier play.

[The Vortex Empire]

I had an awful time with the T-28 until I got the 57mm railgun today. Now it's a killing machine.

[Zinegata]

I had an awful time with the T-28 until I got the 57mm railgun today. Now it's a killing machine.

I've gotten 9 kills on my first match with that gun. It's really amazing given that it's the best gun of the T-34 and you get it a whole tier earlier.

[Simon_Jester]

In the case of the Lee, part of the frustration is that its playstyle doesn't match that of the Sherman or the M2 Medium before it. The M2 medium actually drives... more or less like a normal medium tank, at least with the 75mm howitzer. The M3 drives like a tank destroyer, and a lot of people playing it won't have tank destroyer experience.

I can't understand why anyone would find the T-28 frustrating; it's a decent tank for its weight class even without the 57mm and 85mm guns, and excellent with it- though on balance I prefer the 57mm for the higher rate of fire, since a T-28 isn't survivable enough to stand out in the open and wait for the 85 to reload.

[Zinegata]

I can't understand why anyone would find the T-28 frustrating; it's a decent tank for its weight class even without the 57mm and 85mm guns, and excellent with it- though on balance I prefer the 57mm for the higher rate of fire, since a T-28 isn't survivable enough to stand out in the open and wait for the 85 to reload.

Too many T28 drivers use the 85mm gun without realizing that it leaves them vulnerable to counter-fire, and the T-28 is an extremely fragile tank. Even at full health, it will often be destroyed by a single 105mm HE round. The huge size doesn't help.

The 57mm is its best gun, but do note it also has some issues. Its killing power is very poor against higher tier (7+) tanks.

Also, it takes a while to get the T28 up to speed, and its starting guns are pretty awful.

[spaceviking]

I would disagree, the 85mm is a great gun that allows a T-28 player to routinely fight above their weight class. In terms of counter-fire it is not to bad, provided you are willing to disengage when it gets to heavy.

[Zinegata]

I would disagree, the 85mm is a great gun that allows a T-28 player to routinely fight above their weight class. In terms of counter-fire it is not to bad, provided you are willing to disengage when it gets to heavy.

Yeah, it lets you stay viable against Tier 7s, but as Simon pointed out the reload time leaves inexperienced players waiting out in the open for too long for them to survive. And given the fragility of the T28, the survival time in the open is very, very short.

IMHO, the 85mm may be better if you bother getting a full 100% crew and some modules (i.e. rammer), as it will drastically improve reload and aiming time. But in general, if you're grinding the T28 to get to better things you won't hit 100%, and the general-purpose 57mm is better with a less experienced crew without a rammer.

[rapidsquirrel]

I had an interesting fight in my KV last night. Managed to get Scout and Steel Wall medals at the same time. Was playing on the new Swamp map and drove somewhere I shouldn't have (at least not with the slow KV) and promptly got hit and tracked. Half the other team (which is apparently how I spotted them) spent the next 3 minutes shooting at me as I would fix my track, barely move and get tracked again. I'm amazed that the other teams single arty didn't hit me, he mostly seems to miss and just do more track damage.

All said and done, I finished the match with 15 hit points and haven taken 51 hits. It was pretty epic.

[Simon_Jester]

Too many T28 drivers use the 85mm gun without realizing that it leaves them vulnerable to counter-fire, and the T-28 is an extremely fragile tank. Even at full health, it will often be destroyed by a single 105mm HE round. The huge size doesn't help.

Oh, boy do I ever know all about this... my point is really that for a Tier 4 vehicle the T-28 is pretty good; it has firepower superior to almost any other Tier 4 vehicle.

The 57mm is its best gun, but do note it also has some issues. Its killing power is very poor against higher tier (7+) tanks.

Yes, but then as a Tier 4 tank, the T-28 is rarely matched against a significant number of Tier 7 vehicles- the most you're all that likely to see is a couple of Tier 7s at the top of the match. By contrast, a Tier 5 vehicle will see Tier 7 on a regular basis. So that's more of a drawback with putting the 57mm on the T-34 than on the T-28...

Also, it takes a while to get the T28 up to speed, and its starting guns are pretty awful.

I found the 76mm acceptable- not excellent but acceptable. Even stock, it's broadly equivalent to the 75mm howitzer on the M2 Medium and M5 Stuart, which is not a bad gun at all for fighting Tier 2-5 targets. But you're right about the speed. Like a lot of medium tanks, the T-28 is rather sluggish in its stock configuration, which impairs its ability to fight as a medium tank.

I would disagree, the 85mm is a great gun that allows a T-28 player to routinely fight above their weight class. In terms of counter-fire it is not to bad, provided you are willing to disengage when it gets to heavy.

It's a question of playstyle. I have a strong habit of continuing to shoot when I feel I have a good position and a good target. This has drawbacks in a medium tank, ones I'm very familiar with and don't need explained to me. But it works tolerably well as long as the medium in question can reload its gun quickly.

I never quite got used to the model of "shoot once and move automatically to clear datum, no matter what's going on." Which is really what you need to do with the 85mm T-28, if you don't have a supremely optimized reload rate.

[The Vortex Empire]

My problem with the T28 is that it has worse armor and slopes then some lights in the same tier range. Which is why in my T-127 I have absolutely no hesitation about charging T-28s head on, and usually kill them with only minor damage. Plus, in order to get the 57mm or 85 mm, you have to slug through a bunch of incredibly shitty guns before it. Like the stock tier 2 gun.

[Agent Sorchus]

In beta the T28 with the 85 was worth it, but I think the 105 armed M4s (and american TD's) have spoiled it a little. But that doesn't mean the 85 is inferior, rather it must be played like a KV-1s and is The first step down the long path of Soviet heavy tanks.

[Zinegata]

I never quite got used to the model of "shoot once and move automatically to clear datum, no matter what's going on." Which is really what you need to do with the 85mm T-28, if you don't have a supremely optimized reload rate.

The real issue for me is that even if you practice shoot and scoot very well, the 85mm still has a pretty atrocious aiming time. You really need a 100% crew so that your gunner can reduce aim time down to the minimum, while your loader & rammer improves the reload time to make up for the fact that you will be taking a lot of suboptimal shots and hence miss more.

The 57mm is inherently accurate aside from being fast-firing, so it doesn't really have much of a problem with that regard.

[Simon_Jester]

Just updated to 7.0, and I have a problem.

As mentioned before, I play the game on a laptop with limited screen resolution- highest setting 1366x768.

The problem is that the client can't get it into its head that the screen isn't as big as I'd like- the window is so tall that the bottom bar (including stuff like the chats and announcements buttons) is invisible below the lower edge of the screen. I can't resize the window small enough to *see.* This wasn't a problem in 6.7; does anyone have a guess as to what the heck is going on? Or if there's a way to fix it?

[Simon_Jester]

Ghetto Edit:

Yeah, I just checked the forums and other people are having the same problem- they can't pick a window size smaller than X by 768. No one seems to know of a fix yet, and one post indicates that their tech support is stonewalling.

This is stupid and annoying, and it actually gets in the way of my use of the program to some extent, because I can't see the shit at the bottom of the screen like my ammunition count, or the lower edge of the mini-map, or a big chunk of my tank status indicator.

[Alkaloid]

In the case of the Lee, part of the frustration is that its playstyle doesn't match that of the Sherman or the M2 Medium before it. The M2 medium actually drives... more or less like a normal medium tank, at least with the 75mm howitzer. The M3 drives like a tank destroyer, and a lot of people playing it won't have tank destroyer experience.

Yeah, it's a bastard of a thing. I hated the Lee to start, and then I got used to it and loved it to the point where the game before I upgraded to the M4 me and another bloke in a Lee took apart 8 mediums and a heavy in the space of two min in himmeldorf, most fun game I've had. Now I'm in the M4 its a bitch to wait for the 75mm to reload and I still tend to hang back with the TD's to support them rather than go flanking like I should.

Which is why in my T-127 I have absolutely no hesitation about charging T-28s head on, and usually kill them with only minor damage.

The T-127 is crazy. Me and another one must have fired a dozen rounds each at each other over the harbor in fishermans bay and every single one bounced. After about 3 min we both got bored and went hunting something else.

[Simon_Jester]

That reminds me of a 20mm duel my Panzer 38t once had with another tank.

It took about 150 rounds fired to figure this out, but it turns out the 38's frontal armor is immune to 20mm. The other guy's... wasn't. He never did have the sense to run away, though.

Of course, I had another adventure with a 20mm-gunned light tank while I was driving the Lee. I'd had another one of those crashes I used to get all the time because of my graphics driver. So I had to log back in and reload the game.

When I got there, my tank was still parked behind a hill, but there was a light tank going BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM over and over into my rear armor from point blank range with a 20mm. No damage. I sat there for a moment, then typed the comment:

"Stop humping my leg."

[The Vortex Empire]

Damn, the Panzer III/IV is good even stock. This thing is gonna be a monster once I've got it upgraded with a good crew.

[Rekkon]

Oh yes, I just used my III/IV to run rings around a Tiger P and T-43. Got in at least a dozen hits with only one returned by hiding around corners, plugging them and immediately retreating around the next corner. Rinse, repeat.

[Broken]

Damn, the Panzer III/IV is good even stock. This thing is gonna be a monster once I've got it upgraded with a good crew.

It was even better before War Gaming changed it. IIRC, they removed something like 20mm of armor and made it slightly faster a few patches ago. Was still a very fun tank though.

[Zinegata]

I got 250 gold by killing a Bulge courier. It was fun

[Simon_Jester]

Could you explain that for the more casual players?

[Zinegata]

"Courier" events are held regularly by the developers. Essentially, a couple of players (who are Wargaming employees) play in random matches for a couple of hours. You can identify them by the fact that they belong to the [WG] clan, and they have "Courier" somewhere in their name.

The most recent courier event was the "Battle of the Bulge" courier event. You'll know that you're in a courier match because the courier will also announce their presence at the start of the battle and explain the mechanics of the event.

Mechanis are simple. If you're in the enemy team and manage to kill the courier, take a screenshot to prove this and win 250 gold.

I've been in a few "Courier" matches before, but I was usually on the same team as the courier (you aren't allowed to kill the courier if you're allies).

Last night, I finally got a match wherein the enemy team had a courier. I was in a Type 59, he was in an M10. There was a KV-5 trying to protect him, but I eventually killed the M10 courier and damaged the KV-5. That earned me 250 gold.