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I'm not going to respond to your terrible post any further than to say that this game is in beta; a closed beta even. Going by the state of the game I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a test for netcode and armour penetration, with whole swathes of the game up for grabs. This is why it's a beta.

If you can't say anything 'bad' about it, not even 'this is a bit dodgey here fellas', you're a useless beta tester. Remember all those games where people say 'how did this get through beta testing'? It's because some beta testers defend the current state of an unfinished game out of some kind of distorted loyalty even though they're there to break it and tell the devs about it.

Your mendacious definition of 'sim mechanic' and inability to create original ideas just show you're one of these people. Coffee is a belligerent asshole (and we love him) but he has a more practical perspective than you.

As I suggested, the leveling (particularly crews) is almost certainly not final, and is possibly the source of a great deal of the dodgeyness, so it's nothing to cry yourself to sleep about. So long as they can tweak the build system (especially such that base tanks aren't so fucking useless they can't climb a hill) and allow crew skill to provide benefit without totally breaking gunnery, it'll be fine. They really need to use a more sophisticated spotting/radio system (ironically even most run-n-gun games don't have such a powerful radar) particularly since this gives them more opportunity to charge Real Money, which is of course the aim of the game.

Oh - and do you even THINK about this game?

And yet another strawman *yawn*
Of course i can say something bad about it. I just disagree with your "it's bad from the core"-assessment.

Level progression is one of those points - some tanks are just too arduous to train up. Match-making is another of those points, tied into the first.
But no - because i disagree with your "either sim or UT"-assessment, it must be entirely without critizism

Since I've never said 'it's bad from the core', that's amusingly hypocritical of you. Since the UT mod I'm talking about is far more sim-like than this game and you didn't even ask what it was, you really are remarkably stupid.

Regardless, it occurs to me that even retaining their magic red outline of doom would be fine if they combined it with the foliage obscuring outlines on your own tank and removed the class badge. You would know where they were and they'd be highlighted, but you wouldn't clearly see them or their profile.

Doubtless there will be server options for much of this; I certainly have little interest in all the hand holding, which makes the game more arcade than Battlefield.

Man, the pz iii ausf a is a piece of shit. So is the pz iii, but holy fuck are half the low tier tanks useless. Except for those fucking bt-7s. Even leading them isn't enough to score a hit at point-blank sometimes.

The PzIII is a death engine. Sick the short 75 in it, load up on HE, and start hitting the opposing team's rear. It's the first real skirmisher that most players can get ahold of moderately quickly. Yes, right off the lot it sucks, but all tanks do. Upgrade it, and it's pure hell on wheels.

I skipped the Panzer III A entirely. The full mark III can be trememdous fun, though I prefer the long barrel 50mm for penetration and rate of fire. Last night I got a full platoon with friends and we all had maxed Panzer IIIs. We blitzed across the islands on Hills and up into their base were we curb stomped the single medium on guard duty and then slaughtered all the artillery. Their team did not seem to notice, so we capped the flag and won the match in about 2 minutes flat with at least two thirds of their forces still alive and in visual range. That said we had plenty of raids that only managed to get us all killed. We also learned valuable lessons about circle strafing around a common target in the same direction.

It would be nice though if new tanks did not suck quite so badly before upgrades. It did not bother so much in the lower tiers, but you have to put up with it much longer as you climb. I got the VK3001(P) over the weekend, and it was plain not fun until I was able to research an engine upgrade and the second cannon. At least I finally have the 88. I can reliably damage heavies and one shot Panzer IIIs.

Trying out artillery so I can see first hand what's wrong with it. So far I think the claims of uberaccuracy are a bit over stated, but being able to hit pretty much anything on the map without even needing spotters is completely fucking broke. I killed several TDs that I couldn't actually see just by looking for where their shots were coming from and dropping on the bush they were hiding in. Also, the eye-in-the-sky view is pretty fucked up (turns out in this game's version of WWII they had UAVs). Over all though the advantages of arty are kind of balanced by them having armor made of wet paper and the hilariously long reload times mean if anything gets a bead on you you're probably going to die.

The top-down view is actually pretty useful for scouting in towns etc where your team is constantly detecting and losing enemy units - its a great perspective to allow you to work out exactly where someone is going and tell your mates. Not really intentional, but funny.

I think that arty isn't really that broken in terms of mechanics, just that the German line (which is all I ever see in the higher tier battles it seems) has such a overpowered gun compared to the Russian line. Sure the Russian SPG's have excess armor, but it isn't that much of an advantage.

Coffee are you doing the German side of the arty or Russian? (Yes I have a SU18 so I know how underpowered the arty on the Russian side is).

Agent Sorchus wrote:Coffee are you doing the German side of the arty or Russian? (Yes I have a SU18 so I know how underpowered the arty on the Russian side is).

German side. Just fucking around with a Wespe right now, and since I'm pretty close to the XP for it I'll probably go ahead on up to the Grille here soon.

Well, i have no direct comparision to the german artillery (since i am not playing any german tanks), but i have found that little bit extra armor (health?) useful.
Mostly because i can often actually fend of attackers, at least light and medium tanks - a single shot is often enough to destroy them, and artillery is really accurate with direct fire. And that armor can occasionally give me another shot at that.

Mr. Coffee wrote:

Agent Sorchus wrote:Coffee are you doing the German side of the arty or Russian? (Yes I have a SU18 so I know how underpowered the arty on the Russian side is).

German side. Just fucking around with a Wespe right now, and since I'm pretty close to the XP for it I'll probably go ahead on up to the Grille here soon.

Word of warning - the Grille is slower than a three-legged cow going up a hill of molasses.

Can't be worse than the SU-18.

The Dark wrote:

Mr. Coffee wrote:

Agent Sorchus wrote:Coffee are you doing the German side of the arty or Russian? (Yes I have a SU18 so I know how underpowered the arty on the Russian side is).

German side. Just fucking around with a Wespe right now, and since I'm pretty close to the XP for it I'll probably go ahead on up to the Grille here soon.

Word of warning - the Grille is slower than a three-legged cow going up a hill of molasses.

Yes it's such a step down from a Strum II. I wish I could skip right over the Grille. However the Hummel makes up for it.

*Edit
I now have two gold crews. IE a 100% and climbing tank commander and 80%-85% crews. It's not made much of a difference on my Strum II, but on my Luchs it's made a huge difference as that little 50mm seems to hit targets at 400 meters while I'm in motion at least 50% of the time. So I tend to run out of ammo most battles as I shoot all 50 shells off trying to get hits ending most rounds with at least two kills. Except in the rounds where my blind ass crew fails to notice the moving KingTiger until I ram it frontally at full speed and kill myself.

Mr Bean wrote:

The Dark wrote:

Mr. Coffee wrote:German side. Just fucking around with a Wespe right now, and since I'm pretty close to the XP for it I'll probably go ahead on up to the Grille here soon.

Word of warning - the Grille is slower than a three-legged cow going up a hill of molasses.

Yes it's such a step down from a Strum II. I wish I could skip right over the Grille. However the Hummel makes up for it.

The only good thing about the Grille is it's back up to 20 shots. With the Sturm II, I had a nasty tendency to run out of ammo.

The Dark wrote:The only good thing about the Grille is it's back up to 20 shots. With the Sturm II, I had a nasty tendency to run out of ammo.

It's ok, I'm only a few thousand XP away from the Hummel through my PzIV.

Stark wrote:The top-down view is actually pretty useful for scouting in towns etc where your team is constantly detecting and losing enemy units - its a great perspective to allow you to work out exactly where someone is going and tell your mates. Not really intentional, but funny.

It'd be a really handy tool for Battlefield-style commanders, if such a thing ever crossed the minds of those in charge. Eye in the sky tells you where to go, you commence going and with any luck he's got the right idea. If not, then well, wecome to every other game of WoT.

What I'd like to see regarding the map is having a different color for the blips on the map that are the other guys in your platoon so we don't have to spend the bulk of the countdown looking around to see where everyone is at. Even better, if they could make it so that platoonmates spawn next to each other it'd be a great change and make coordination your efforts a lot easier (instead of wasting the first 30seconds or so of the match forming up you could just roll out).

I'd actually like the ability to move around in the spawn zone during countdown for the same reason - your squadmates should be highlighted in some way, but randomly spawning heavy tanks at the back of the spawn area is super lame, especially on the maps where it's easy to get sniper LOS to the spawn area.

To be honest, I think they should use the Bad Company system to push people into squads, because even if you're soloing it's still good to know who is what. XP bonuses for working together and actually needing spotters to actively spot (ie not just magically highlighting everyone in range) like BC2 would encourage that sort of play, as well. Basically the difference between a session where everyone is squadded or at least cooperating and your standard pub game is huge, and it'll only change if there's some reward for doing so.

What bugs me most about this game is this very simple fact:

Every time I get a new (supposedly better) vehicle, it feels like a downgrade, instead of an upgrade.

Case in point: Going from a VK3601 to the Tiger. The Tiger has about as much armor, is a lot slower, less maneuverable, and until you get the experience together for the final gun upgrade, is just as well armed as the VK3601. The one advantage? You have more health (which means you die just as fast or faster as module damage kills you anyways - I've died to one hit from a medium tank after my tank catches fire, spreads around killing every module until the ammo rack explodes...).

I went from a VK3601 in which I could reliably kill anything up to my own tier, have a good chance of killing anything one tier above me, and can hurt stuff two tiers above to a Tiger in which I can only reliably kill anything up to two tiers below mine, and can hurt stuff above that.

Now, I hope that will change once I get the final gun for the Tiger, as that has a lot more penetration, meaning I should finally be able to penetrate the front armor of tanks a tier below me. The problem is getting there. It requires about 26k experience. I am currently averaging a whopping 300xp per game, killing about one vehicle every second game and losing two thirds of my games (after winning 60% on the VK3601) because the tank is that fucking useless on the battlefield.

But hey, once I've grinded those 80-90 games I will (hopefully) have a great tank, winning a lot more, killing a lot more - until I upgrade again and the whole thing starts all over...

Yeah... it's still sad how much of a downgrade going from my Luchs to an A20 is. The A20 76mm penetrates way better, but it's inaccurate as hell and slow on the reload on the run. I'm only on the A20 until I can get to the T-34 and run over to the Su-85.

Also... save your gold. Best damn thing you can do is go Premium with your free gold. 5 days free gold worth equals 1 week of Premium. Keep saving and buying the one week, the upgrade to premium is a godsend in every sense of the word. It's to the point where I have to say premium should be the default state of the game instead of being premium. Which needs to be more premium.

I always try saving it, but then end up buying one day premium for platooning anyway

However I think some of the other guys are close to being on permanent premium (which only works when buying the whole month, not if buying for a week).

And FUCK the fucking Tiger, getting one shot by a fucking T34 is fucking wrong (on fire - burning - boom ammo rack). At least the patch on Monday or Tuesday is supposed to tone down the ridiculous amount of module damage a Tiger gets ...

Oh yes, and it will finally remove the warping tanks at a distance "feature".

I got permanent premium, so if I'm on and you want to platoon, just let me know.
I finally got my T-44 and it really takes the suspension upgrade to shine - without it, it's just a T-43 with a smaller profile more prone to module damage. I still need to upgrade the turret, gun, and radio before it's a true T-44. It's great fun though, never mind circling heavies to death, I've managed to circle stationary mediums. Slapped on a Vertical Stabilizer and Improved Ventilation so far, haven't decided on the last slot yet. Just about the only thing I won't engage in a 1v1 with are IS tanks.

Whelp, all I can really say about the Hummel so far is that it can hit really hard, but the reload times and the expensive ammo mean you really need to take the time to line your shots up, which isn't always possible. Also, while I can still underatand that most artillery player sare retards that almost always have their guns pointed the exact wrong way to support you, I can also say that the bulk of tank drivers are yammering zerglings (Anyone in a light/fast tank) or huge pussies (everyone in a Tier 7 heavy or bigger, Oh noes, you might actually get your big tank shot at, who knew!), and they rarely think "Gee, maybe we should post one or two mediums to hang bang and make sure the artillery doesn't get raped".

Also, if you know the map you probably know where the artillery is hiding at, so it's a lot of fun just watching those spots to play counter-battery and rape the other guy's artillery before the scouts get anywhere near them.

Mr. Coffee wrote:Also, if you know the map you probably know where the artillery is hiding at, so it's a lot of fun just watching those spots to play counter-battery and rape the other guy's artillery before the scouts get anywhere near them.

Which is why smart artillery fires a shot and GTFOs. I've learned to use the spacebar to stop when I reach my shooting position, so the moment my shot's out the barrel, I'm accelerating at maximum away from my shooting place.