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[World of Tanks] Our track is broken! Get out and push!
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Thank you!
On topic....captured Panther? Awe yeah! On the other hand, I could have had a T-34M! I have no idea what a T-34M is like, but I have a suspicion that it's going to be superior to the T-34-85.
You need to play the M3 Lee like a tank destroyer. It's pretty solid defensively but not good on offense. It should be used to ambush, defend, or support other tanks that are advancing. It shouldn't push out on its own unless you are desperate because as with turretless tank destroyers if it gets tracked, it's toast.
Unfortunately it is very tall, and its gun is placed low, so it's not that good at hiding and can't really go hull down. As compensation as someone else pointed out earlier, it actually has a very good gun for its tier and can do some real damage.
I actually ended up with a very decent win-loss record with the Lee (54%/43%) so I don't think it's particularly underpowered for its tier as long as it's played to its strengths. But I'm happy to have moved on to the next tier. The Sherman which comes next is a very solid all around tank for its tier.
Which is a better idea? I like the idea of a fast decent skirmishing medium, I just feel like if I peek my head out of cover and try to move around, I'll get tracked and murdered.
I haven't gotten passed the M4A3E8 on the American side, but the T-44 was a heck-of-a-lot of fun during Beta. Have not tried the T-54, but from all accounts it's a bit overpowered, which I'm sure is fun when you're playing with it and bad when you're playing against it.
As far as getting tracked, bob and weave, and as soon as you can start leveling your crew on the repair bonus skill. You could also try buying a repair toolkit for the tank, which should further increase your repair speed. With 100% repair bonus, you can get back and running fairly quickly, probably faster than the artillery can reload (although you'll still be in trouble if you've got multiple artillery on you). Also with the upcoming 0.6.4 changes, tracking should be less frequent.
Seriously, shit happens every fucking time and it's always the first shot that hits. It's BANG! TRACK HIT! or WE LOST A TRACK! and then I fucking die. No matter the goddamn distance or how much I bob and weave.
I can pretty reliably hit/track any of the T5 lights with a T6 medium. It's silly easy to track people right now, which makes scouting a game of "does this side have anyone on it who doesn't use auto aim"
My new PzIII/IV is a little better, but not by much.
EDIT: "We're immobilized! Get Out!". I think I'm going to have that engraved on my headstone at this rate. Getting sick of being tracked and then immediately killed by a hidden KV at the start of every match.
Pokemon White FC: 5415 0662 9442
EDIT: I can turn settings down to low and get 45-60 FPS, so it is playable, but meh. The auto-detect is giving me 1920x1080, no antialiasing because of advanced post processing, 8x anisotropic, vsync off, triple buffering on, object LOD and draw depth high, high foliage quality & medium foliage density, texture compression on. There also dosen't seem to be a way to run it at any other 16:9 natural resolutions; it's got 1600x1024 and 1400x1050, and separate options for "widescreen" - guessing it's for FOV?
The auto-detect feature is kind of wonky at the moment.
The single biggest FPS boost you can get with this game is done by editing the Preferences.xml file. To access the file, open up an Explorer window, then type in "%appdata% in the address bar. Then go to \roaming\wargaming.net\WorldOfTanks\ . Once you locate the file, open it in a text editor and look for a line that says Terrain_Mesh_Resolution. This setting affects the number of polygons used to draw the terrain. Change the number to either 1 or 2 depending on how high you want to increase your FPS. The file will need to be re-edited anytime you update your graphics drivers.
Doing this allows the game to run tolerably even on laptops with crappy integrated graphics...like mine.
Awesome story time, shameless self-promotion, and why I'm willing to pay $15 a month for this not-quite MMORPG. Scoreboard behind spoiler (1920x1080):
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I'm playing this afternoon and I've got a Grille using the second gun, 90% crew and a Gun Rammer. The map is winding down and I've gotten 5 kills, the last of which is a direct fire kill against the Panzer IV. We have a single Panzer III on our team left, and me, versus the two M7 Priests (one of which has 5 kills) and that Sturmpanzer II. I'm asking the PzIII in team chat to please just scout and NOT play hero and try to engage, lest he get tracked and buy it. Sure enough, he engages the Sturmpanzer II, gets tracked, and one of the priests finishes him. He is FURIOUS in teamchat after I bitch at him for not taking the smart move.
I wind up going across the southern bridge and find the first of the Priests in the castle. He's facing towards me, I'm traveling at a good traverse to him, he overshoots me and I get right up to him and pull the trigger.
I head back towards the two capture points / center bridge and find the Sturmpanzer II still where he was when he killed our PzIII. Same deal, good traverse, he overshoots and I can pause for 2-3 seconds to aim and shoot. "That's how you fucking do it!" Teammate pipes up. "You're not done yet noob, you're prolly going to lose it for us, smartass general."
At this point, the last remaining enemy, one of the Priests, starts capping. I haul ass back to the center bridge, get there with cap timer at about 50/100. I cross the bridge and we detect each other, but he's behind a building. I run between two buildings, he fires and overshoots me. Cap at 65/100. I back up, aim, fire, and MISS. Cap at 75/100. He fires again, tracks me! Cap at 80/100. I repair kit, turn, aim, two, three, four, and fire. Cap is at 90/100. WIN.
Back in garage. Open contact list, find contact, open channel. "NOW I'm done."
tl;dr - 15 shots, 8 kills, stopped cap at 90/100. Playing a Grille like a tank destroyer is entirely possible due to good matchmaking for it's class, really good mobility for an arty, and a damn powerful gun. Just get up to point-blank and make it count.
I tried this on my HP dv2500 (set to "2"), and while it did seem to improve performance, I don't think I could actually play the game....guess we'll find out during my vacation.
Fuck the T-28 and T-46. Fuck these thinly armored moving piles of shit. Absolutely worthless in every goddamn situation. The god awful grind is bad but having to do it with these shitboxes to get the KV is torture. Why the fuck is the T-28 classified as a MEDIUM tank anyway?! Better question. Why is the damn thing in the game!?
"Hey I'm a medium tank the size of a bus and just like the T-46, I have no armor and my treads fly off at the drop of a hat! But that won't be a problem cause you're facing things that will one-shot you!"
They suck so very very much.
Hopefully the next patch should greatly improve their life-expectancy, what with supposedly harder tracking.
Also, got into the VK(P) last night, and goddamn is it a bad tank stock. Should I bother upgrading it, or just head straight for the VK(DB)?
Pokemon White FC: 5415 0662 9442
Pokemon White FC: 5415 0662 9442
A handy reminder: some Soviet tanks suck. Like with all the countries.
They're like the M3 Lee. But longer and not as tall.
The Jagdpanzer is close to a technological waste of time--once you get the 8.8, it's not that big an improvement over the other gun choices (the 10.5 Howitzer and the 7.5 Panther gun), and you still have its poor handling characteristics and the like.
As I suspected though, so I'll just ignore the upgrades and try to get out of it as quickly as possible. So glad I was able to skip it after the softwipe in beta.
As a corollary, here's an image of what the matchmaker thought would be a good idea because half of both teams were in platoons. I made is as far as the hill in the middle of the map before that SU-14 thought it would be damned funny to one-shot me.
Pokemon White FC: 5415 0662 9442
Every time you hit one of these seemingly-stupid tanks, remember that WoT is a free game, not something you paid for and is properly balanced with that in mind. They aren't unbalanced, they're just incentives to encourage people to buy gold.
The T-28 wouldn't be as mind-numbingly godawful if it wasn't for the fact that the game insists that I go up against tanks like the IS, Tiger, JagdPanther, T29, IS3s and various other monsters of the battlefield. Damn thing rarely survives an encounter with a tank in its weight class and the game wants me to mix it up with tanks that have guns that weigh as much as my tank!
But anyway all of this is almost behind me and I can move on to something better.... maybe.
Edit: It's hard being the big fat decoy in that situation! Which is pretty much how I play in the T-28. No one can resist the big fat easy kill.
EDIT: Also not really understanding the hate for the tier IV T-28 - it can mount the same 57mm that the T-34 uses (tier V cannon and tank), and the 57mm is effective even at that tier. Not withstanding that, the t-28 gets access to the tier VI (!) 85mm gun F-30 cannon. It's literally less than 3k experience to get the 57mm gun, which you could reliably use to grind the 13k to the KV and be done with the tank; or you could detour 4k XP and get the 85mm for a true glass cannon.
DO NOT spend your free xp on anything but weapon upgrades, once you get a new tank use it to help defray the cost of a new cannon. A lot of people say to only upgrade tracks or engine first, but really, unless you need new tracks to take the weight, you should be spending free xp on cannons or on turrets needed to slot them.
Double-Edit: Seriously, the tier IV t-28 mounts the OVERPOWERED Tier V 57mm gun the t-34 uses (Russian devs, iconic gun and tank - they were showing some affection for it) or the Tier VI 85mm. To compare and contract, German Tier IV medium tank (Panzer III) are limited to tier III guns, and the American Tier 4 medium (M3 Lee) uses the underpowered Tier IV M1A1 cannon and has no turret.
Current matchmaking graph is there; I'm too inept to get it to hotlink.
To keep things simple: which tank is better, the KV or the T1?
That said, with the redesigned trees the Americans get two new tanks after the T32, which could be really good. Or not. If you go Russian, you'll also probably want to get into the KV-1S rather than the KV-3, as that line leads to the IS-3 and IS-7, while the KV-3 will instead lead to futher KVs, and eventually, the IS-4.
In short, go whichever way you damn well please, it'll make no difference in a few months.
Pokemon White FC: 5415 0662 9442
Something to consider, too, is what those tanks lead into. The Soviet heavy line once you get into Tier VII and above is generally regarded as being more well-rounded than the American line - the American line is kind of based off a weird gimmick of having this little square of invulnerable armor on the front of the turret, and moving your tank into a position to only expose that bit of armor and fighting from there.
Ironically, the Soviet heavies become the more mobile ones (the IS-7 does something like 50kph+) while the American heavies are positionally immobile, and the German heavies are just HUGE and slow. The Russian IS-4 / IS-7 are widely regarded as being the best tanks in the game, both for good stats and the intangible help of having REALLY good armor sloping (deflects shots + improves relative thickness of armor) and a relatively small profile.
1. Your tank sucks, that unless you pay your going to be stuck getting your ass kicked pretty bad at times, especially starting off.
2. If you don't pay then it's grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind why aren't you paying for this instead of chasing that carrot in the next town.
I'd say the KV, as a matter of armor and armarment. It's also got the handling characteristics of a boat by comparison, so keep that in mind. That being said, the T1 isn't horrible, I think.
Belarusian. Not Russian. Like Canadians and Americans. Does no one read the OP? *look of despair*
I'm debating which way to go on the T-34-85 after the 85 mm myself, though--isn't the 122 mm on the '85 a howitzer?
Hmm... maybe I should go soviet then. I'd rather have the armor and firepower, instead of speed. My experience in beta was that speed wasn't too useful, since most battles focused on hiding in cover.
I'm almost positive the T-1 handles much better--but it has some serious things going for it. Its turret is small compared to the rest of the tank, which means a faster rotation (a much faster rotation), that means you have to rely on the body armor instead of thicker turret armor. Likewise, it's on the tall side. I don't think the T-1 has anything to compare to the infamous 152 mm "derp" gun on the KV.
But another way, I'm much less afraid of T-1's than KVs. On the other hand, I've never driven a T-1.
Synthesis, the 122mm (derpcannon minor) is a howitzer, yes. It's suprisingly useful though. With a rammer and 100% crew I manage maybe one round every 8 seconds; definately slow but not nearly as bad as an arty or the KV's 152mm. It's so nice to hit something, anything, and damage it. You don't ever have to worry about pen - if you can hit it, you can kill it, and you'll very likely crit it every time. 0.5 accuracy means you need to be close(ish), though.
Edit: That being said, this is not a gun for stand-up fights, but you really shouldn't be playing a T-34-85 like that, anyways.
I've gotten way too used to using both the T-34 and T-34-85 as mobile sharpshooting tanks (with the S-54 on the T-34, I'm basically as accurate as a German TD, and far more mobile), so it's hard to adjust--even though I travel in groups, whenever I get up close in either tank, it usually ends really poorly.
That being said, I am not looking for to the T-43, so I'm spending a longer time with the T-34-85 anyway.
Scouting will yield you 50% of the XP value of any damage done to the target you spotted.
Damage against a tank of the same tier is normal, bonus damage for tanks above your tier.
Critical hits are worth xp.
Hitting a target and not penetrating or bouncing gives no xp.
Credits are tied to damage done, with flat bonus rate credits for kills.
Adding on to what Che said, you get experience for winning by base capture, equal to the amount you would have gotten for killing the remaining enemies. Capping xp is split up among the team members according to how much xp they earned before capping. The players doing the capping get an additional bonus on top of that.
Winning gives a +50% bonus to xp. Killing teammates causes a -50% penalty to both xp and credits.
Because of complaints about people going off on suicide runs during the beta, there's also a certain minimum amount of damage you have to do. If you don't, your xp and credits for that battle are gimped.