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Broken wrote: As for the PzKpfw S35 739 (f) / Somua 35, the French actually had more tanks then Germany (iirc) when the Blitzkrieg occurred and some of the French tanks, such as the Somua 35, proved tactically equal to or superior to their German counterparts. The main failings were strategic plans and tank doctrines, not material inferiority of French tanks compared one-on-one to German tanks. However, my WWII history is a bit rusty, so anyone more knowledgeable please chime in.

There were deficiences at the tactical and operational level, too. For example, not all French tanks had radio receivers, whereas all German tanks did ; French tanks also suffered from overworked crew positions (like the Char, which had one person act as tank commander plus gunner and loader for the turret gun)

Which seems particularly absurd given the sheer volume of the Char; why the hell couldn't they fit a two or three-man turret onto something that size?

Simon_Jester wrote:Which seems particularly absurd given the sheer volume of the Char; why the hell couldn't they fit a two or three-man turret onto something that size?

It was originally designed as a self-propelled gun-it was decided a turret was needed part-way through development, and one taken from a much smaller tank was hastily added.

I was in a match where a KV refused to cap despite being right next to the base because otherwise the last guys M3 would "come after him". We still won as a Marder II nailed him but it was still a WTF? moment.

Also has anyone ever seen a Tier 10 in a random battle on the NA servers? I've only ever seen Tier 9s. Do the 10s just hang out in tank companies and not interact with the peasants or something?

Recently I have been seeing quite a few Mauses and E100's in regular battles.

I see E-100s, T-30s, IS-7s and Mice depressingly often, of course I'm normally hiding in a bush and lobing things at them from range.

Just got my first Steel Wall on the Arctic map.

Was in a 122mm KV, at the top of my team- two KVs with Big Turret guns on the other side, plus assorted minor odds and sods. Some good mediums on my team.

The light tanks' rush actually kinda worked by causing enough chaos in the enemy's base that they were distracted and arty-less. The rest of the match, from my point of view, boiled down to a point blank hammering match in that little ravine between me, a Panzer IV with the funny upgrade turret, and the two KVs plus all those other guys. I managed to keep my armor fairly well angled, timed my shots about as well as I ever manage... it was great. The other guy got most of the kills, but it was a really good close-quarter fight.

Also, double XP!

Now I remember why I play this game...

Simon_Jester wrote:Just got my first Steel Wall on the Arctic map.

Was in a 122mm KV, at the top of my team- two KVs with Big Turret guns on the other side, plus assorted minor odds and sods. Some good mediums on my team.

The light tanks' rush actually kinda worked by causing enough chaos in the enemy's base that they were distracted and arty-less. The rest of the match, from my point of view, boiled down to a point blank hammering match in that little ravine between me, a Panzer IV with the funny upgrade turret, and the two KVs plus all those other guys. I managed to keep my armor fairly well angled, timed my shots about as well as I ever manage... it was great. The other guy got most of the kills, but it was a really good close-quarter fight.

Also, double XP!

Now I remember why I play this game...

My favorite battle was a few weeks ago when I was playing the T-46 with the automatic 37mm on the map with the rails running through the middle with a city on one side and a field on the other. I was half-way across the map with most of the players when our base started getting capped. Our team rushed back, I got two kills defending our base. We quickly counter attacked and managed to push all the way to their base and cap for the win. It was awesome.

What is it about Heavy Tank drivers being complete cowards? I just don't get it.

Consistantly I see two or three heavies just held up behind a corner, unwilling to go around and take on that M4 Sherman or whatever just there. Even in places where there's no way in hell there's TDs or anything. The problem is most evident to me, since I drive a Medium and often take a forward position to harass enemy mediums and scouts that try to bypass, but my heavies won't push up even when in the clear. Until the rest of our forces are dead, then they just sit there and die to artillery.

Sigh.

Xess wrote:Also has anyone ever seen a Tier 10 in a random battle on the NA servers? I've only ever seen Tier 9s. Do the 10s just hang out in tank companies and not interact with the peasants or something?

I see them rather often. Then again, one of the ones I see is my IS-7 or T30, so that's practically cheating. They're expensive to run though, and the tier nines are a lot more fun in a lot of ways.


I'd say my favorite battle was either the time I grabbed six and a platoon member grabbed four just for the hilarity of poking fun at our third and his zero kills or something in a Patton. Maybe the Komarin match where I sniped from the middle and got about 23 hits on enemies. The match I won by ramming a tiger to death in an IS-7 (it took three rams) was pretty awesome too.

Nephtys wrote:What is it about Heavy Tank drivers being complete cowards? I just don't get it.

Consistantly I see two or three heavies just held up behind a corner, unwilling to go around and take on that M4 Sherman or whatever just there. Even in places where there's no way in hell there's TDs or anything. The problem is most evident to me, since I drive a Medium and often take a forward position to harass enemy mediums and scouts that try to bypass, but my heavies won't push up even when in the clear. Until the rest of our forces are dead, then they just sit there and die to artillery.

Sigh.

I think one thing that lends itself to turtling and caution is the reload time. A lot of heavy tank guns have long reloads, so if you fire and miss you're going to get hit a couple of times before you can shoot again. After a few rounds of:

[trundle out from cover]
[BLAM]
[miss]
[get shot by medium tank]
[get shot again, is tracked]
[medium tank rolls back behind cover]

You start to get a little wary of what might be hiding in that position everyone wants you to assault. Tank destroyers encourage the same sense of caution, because their guns will break your armor, and you will be the A-number-one target for them if you expose yourself to long range sniping fire. Everyone loves to shoot at heavies from half way across the map; I know I do.

Heavy tanks don't always hide. IF you are playing a german heavy you don't have a good reason to be close to the front since they have good accuracy and ability to see at a long range and for tigers you have little armor. Russian heavies have a good reason to hide, they have no visibility and slow rate of fire high alpha guns. It is the American tanks that do better assaulting out of cover, except that they have no good hull armor.

The Russian heavies are excellent line breakers if only they had good visibility. That is actually why I encourage light tanks to stay with the heavies until they can spot at a bottle neck by darting out and surviving.

But too many people put their own survival first. I've been watching/ listening to my clan during Clan wars and one of the most difficult thing is to get people to actually stick to the plan instead of duck and cover shooting as soon as you make contact.

The US heavy's lack of hull armor is the reason why we prefer assaulting slopes

Simon_Jester wrote: [trundle out from cover]
[BLAM]
[miss]
[get shot by medium tank]
[get shot again, is tracked]
[medium tank rolls back behind cover]

You forgot the end of your story there, since you are in a heavy tank, tracked and in the open

[SPG fires, take 25% damage and knocked out both tracks, viewport, and gun; since this was all splash damage, the game registers this as a "miss"]


High tier arty murders tracked tanks in the open; since heavies take so long to get moving, arty has that much more time to zero you in before letting fly with their orbital death cannons.

A friend and I just had a match in our Panzer III As on Mines where we were literally the bottom two tanks on our team. We played it smart, hung back and then bolted through a gap in the lines while the heavies were busy with each other. We got to the enemy base completely unopposed and murdered their artillery, some light guards and a stupid TD. I even survived after one of our heavies arrived to save me from a T1. The two of us had five kills.

We have also been having fun running our Valentines like heavy tanks, and the crappy gun actually gives us incentive to lead the charge.

I can't really speak to the high tier artillery problem- but yes, I get the feeling that the 8" mobile artillery is probably packing a bit too much firepower for the comfort of heavy tank drivers. Especially given the splash and module damage mechanics, which are designed to give Shermans lobbing HE at an IS a fighting chance of at least weakening it a bit... and which will thus predictably become overpowered when the HE round in question is a 200mm shell instead of 75mm.

In large part the top tier of arty is designed for clan wars from what I can tell. It's set up so that a scout lighting up a heavy can lead to a beautiful coordinated barrage that can kill a tank outright. Helps the balance between offensive and defensive. In pubs, they can be ruinous but they fire so slow that with some care you can be fine most of the time. Also remember that high tier tanks have absolute buckets of HP.

I dislike how this game does encourage players to go for easy kills rather than appropriate ones. This was highlighted tonight when I, as a SU-100 was plugged at by an IS-7, while being the only one in a group of 4-5 tier 8-10 heavies not actively engaging. I ended up surviving that particular shot, and the IS-7 ended up dying before he could hit me again. However, it did make me go 'why would you bother doing that'?

Two reasons. Better to take an enemy out rather than just damage someone, and also that's how you get bigger numbers next to your name. I tend to shoot for the weakest target that can hurt me just to whittle down the number of threats and keep my flanks clear.

xthetenth wrote:Two reasons. Better to take an enemy out rather than just damage someone, and also that's how you get bigger numbers next to your name. I tend to shoot for the weakest target that can hurt me just to whittle down the number of threats and keep my flanks clear.

This.

The mechanics actually are set up so that kills are roughly equivalent to damaging many many tanks, but there are some problems.

One, it's not clearly communicated by the game, so players don't understand that yes, if you damage eight tanks but get no kills, you'll still get piles of XP and credits, and two, there are achievements specifically for piles of kills. Since people respond better to simple reward systems,and the achievements that are supposed to encourage cooperation and teamwork are hard to get, well...

xthetenth wrote:Two reasons. Better to take an enemy out rather than just damage someone.

Like I said, I wasn't actually participating in the battle. I was just hooning about.

Maybe if it recorded the amount of XP you had earned that battle so far, rather than just kills?

Sure he wasn't shooting at someone else and hit you instead? I've done that a few times, killed an enemy tank I didn't even know was back behind the monster I was shooting at.

defanatic wrote:

xthetenth wrote:Two reasons. Better to take an enemy out rather than just damage someone.

Like I said, I wasn't actually participating in the battle. I was just hooning about.

Maybe if it recorded the amount of XP you had earned that battle so far, rather than just kills?

I'd totally approve of this because it'd make for a titanic e-peen.

That would be great. I would love to see that- not least because it would give me a better way to gauge which strategies for XP work best.

Slacker wrote:Sure he wasn't shooting at someone else and hit you instead? I've done that a few times, killed an enemy tank I didn't even know was back behind the monster I was shooting at.

It was a very short range battle with about 20 m between each tank, so we sort of mingled. The fact that every other tank but I was moving, and he had to switch targets to start shooting me, makes me convinced he just wanted a kill before he died. While that he have just spammed a shell into the abyss and hit me, I think that it more than likely was the former.

However, it does highlight for me the sloppy promotion of player behaviours in game. Take, say, Battlefield 3. It immediately tells you when you get XP for killing someone who was killing one of your friends, for spotting an enemy who is killed by one of your friends, for when you heal and so on. Battlefield 3 is a game with plenty of ups and downs, but is significantly better for immediately rewarding players for actions rather than only showing kills and rewarding them post-battle with some kind of hidden rules.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'titanic e-peen' though.

Sorry this post seemed a bit ranty.