Dejin
5741
The Lee is actually not that bad if you play it as a turret-less TD. It’s a very large, badly camouflaged TD, to be sure, but it has a good gun for its tier.
The first time around I just hated the Lee, I thought it was just awful. The second time though, I had to give it some credit. The 75mm cannon does some damage and the Lee is fairly well armored for its tier. As ydejin said, treat it like a TD.
Yeah, I was okay with the M3 Lee once I got used to it. I think most of the hate is from the expectation that it will be a real tank with a real turret.
Compared to that horrid Somua TD, the Lee is a freakin’ Abrams.
Agreed. Could not get out of the S40 fast enough.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I took my KV-2 out derp golfing and killed a full health Lorraine with a single shot. Everyone thought that was hilarious, and the enemy player said that it didn’t actually destroy his tank but the shell killed his entire crew. So awesome.
schurem
5747
I went into the somua prepared by this thread, expecting a complete and utter dog. Therefore i found it not half as bad as I expected. For a stock gun it did fair damage and it looks snazzy. But yea, slow, big, vulnerable. lovely.
Didnt WG promise multiturreted tanks would work when they first gave notice of the french tanks? Having the pewpew gun on both the lee and somua would mitigate a lot of their awfulness i reckon.
Yeah, working multiple turrets is just one of the things WG promised but never got to delivering it. Including smoke, new matchmaker, physics, etc. Hopefully some of things things are still coming but IMO we can forget about turrets.
Adding multiturrets doesn’t make sense from the business point of view, there are no “end game” multiturreted tanks (tier 6+) and it’s not like players will spend lots of gold to get the M3 Lee with two guns.
And, realistically, the M3 Lee turret gun is a 37mm peashooter. It’s practically worthless at its tier, much less shooting at anything higher.
To make the M3 Lee more bearable they needed to give it more speed and few more HP.
pyrhic
5750
Given the general feelings about the lee, i thought it would suck - i ended up liking it: 56% win ratio, and 77 kills in 85 battles.
I never kept it, but i think it’s far more maligned than it should be, and is a far better tank than, oh say…the A-20 or the B-1…
Dave47
5751
Actually, the 37mm would help against fast lights, which can be a major problem for a tank with a hull mounted gun.
Personally, I’m really bummed that multi-turret tanks were never implemented, and am dissapointed that WG.net saw no incentive to follow through on their earlier plans, instead delivering a French line whose early tiers are, by all accounts, are a terrible slog. I don’t really buy the “there’s no point” excuse; I think the more likely explanation is that the developers are sufficiently satisfied with their moneyhats that they’ve become content to just milk their existing game engine as long as possible.
I’m still enjoying the core WoT gameplay, but the longer I play the more I become convinced that the business model is not a minor nuisance, but is rather an active hindrance to my enjoyment of the game. I would love some gated early-war (or pre-war) gameplay modes, with more attention paid to lower tier tanks. But with the business model so centered around convincing people to spend gold to convert experience to skip terrible stock tanks, we see Tier X mediums and heavies, but little work done to improve the lower tiers…
schurem
5752
I remember, back in the day on simhq forums we had a HUGE, HUMONGOUS MONSTROUSLY MEGAÜBERSIZED thread on the il2 sturmovik board called the crap planes thread.
It started out as an ode to the underdog planes in that game. The underpowered, underarmed slobs that would always struggle against the might of the messerschmitts.
It quickly became a repository of historic material on crap planes. It grew and grew and became a forum breaking 185 pages long.
So yea. crap tanks. i love my mighty somua of doom. love its looks, love its crapness. bring it on bitches!
Yeah its like an oversized, underpowered, undergunned, underarmoured hetzer, with an extra verstigal turret on top for attracting attention. I hated it so much.
IMHO the S35 is much better, even though it is not much better armoured; it also looks freakier and has a lot more character… and you even get a pretty decent gun on it!
schurem
5754
cant wait to get my hands on it lol and end up with a tank that makes people go “oh fuck, its a foch!”
The M3 Lee pivots so quickly (one of its few redeeming qualities) that I never had an issue with light tanks. That and I almost never saw them - instead having the problem of seeing too many higher tier tanks in a tier 4 piece of junk.
I hear you, stock tank syndrome does suck. On the other hand, if it didn’t exist, would anyone pay any money at all? Crew training and garage slots can only go so far. The sad reality is that if most don’t pay and play completely for free, then after a while the servers go away and there’s no game. I just wish Wargaming found a less annoying way to generate cash from the game. In two years of playing the got ~$150 out of me. Or $6 a month. I would have happily just paid them a $6 a month, hell make that $10, subscription, and skipped the stock tanks entirely. But how many others would absolutely balk at the idea? F2P is here for a reason …
I for one am totally on board with their style of free to play; and honestly I didn’t mind working up my stock tanks either, it was fun to buy new components for them and slap them on and see the performance improve. I think if there was not that sense of improvement within a tank, it would be a little less interesting.
Yes. I’ve put a fair bit of money into the game, but never directly to avoid having to play a stock tank. It’s mostly been for premium and premium tanks to grind credits to buy higher tier tanks and modules. I have spent a bit of gold on converting experience, but that’s definitely not my primary use for it. You can make the path through each tank take as long, but starting you off worse than the previous tank just sucks.
Dave47
5758
My point was less about stock tanks being terrible, and more about how the game’s financial model is built around a large number of incentives to dump gold into high tier tanks. This focus on high tier tanks then ties into the game’s terrible matchmaker, and has, over time, made the low-tier experience worse and worse as the server population matures.
Which sucks because low tier tanks were fun once, and would be fun again if they didn’t get thrown into so many terrible games.
Yeah, I’ve averaged way less than $10 a month, and would gladly pay $15 to cut out all the freemium BS.
This is sort of my point. I really like the lower tier tanks, but as the game matures they seem to have become cannon fodder for high tier tanks.
I would never pay a monthly fee for a game like this (I’m not sure I’d pay a monthly fee for much of any game anymore, but definitely not for a purely PvP arena combat combat game), and I’m fairly positive that people like me are in the vast majority. But I’m sure you knew that already.
Talorc
5760
I cant say I understand the desire to get multi turreted tanks working. it seems pretty “niche”
For starters i cant understand how you could competently control the multiple guns with mouse + keyboard. How would you fire each gun? Aim each gun?
And secondly, in the scheme of WWII I would struggle to name any twin turreted or gunned tanks beyond the Lee/Grant produced in any numbers or with any tactical significance.
i very much agree the low tier game could use some love though. Ultimately, if the low tier game is no fun it will choke of their supply of new players and thus income.
