ShivaX
1841
Ok how about a group of 3 Heavies?
How about one medium?
How are you not getting the core issue here?
Yeah when they outnumber you 3 to 1 mediums can be scary… to TDs… yeah. Only the game doesn’t work that way. A medium takes one slot. A heavy takes one slot. There will be like 8 heavies, 3 arty, 3 mediums and a light. Only one of those mediums will likely have a gun that can actually hurt anything in the game.
Consider this scenario:
Team 1 top 4:
IS-3 IS-3 Tiger 2 Tiger 2
Team 2 top 4:
T-44 T-44 Panther Panther
Which team is going to win that match?
Won’t happen much longer. The increased weighting system for heavies will prevent the game from thinking a matchup like that is fair.
ShivaX
1843
Supposedly, but it was already weighted for heavies and it still did it.
They increased the weighting, but honestly I still don’t see a Panther being worth more than an IS, so I’m not sure it will matter.
How is this really going to make a big difference when it’s still always 15 on 15? One side gets two more tier 8 heavies and the other maybe gets three tier 5 heavies? Guess who wins?
The side with the three russian tier 5 heavies!
I’ve never even bothered trying a heavy yet, but I endorse Wombat’s views. Because this is tank vs tank combat, the (specialist) heavy breakthrough tanks and TD’s have an obvious advantage over mediums. In rugby/ american football terms, the game is mostly about the scrum/ line of scrimmage, not the free-running, broken play phases. Now and again, I manage to make good use of a medium’s better mobility, but not that often.
Also makes the US/ UK lines difficult - because heavy breakthrough tanks didn’t feature in Western doctrine. There were some in the early 50’s, but abandoned quickly. So we are stuck with verging-on-the-fantasy prototypes rather than tanks that saw combat to give any sort of in-game parity. Heh - no wonder they are going French fantasy first - for the UK basically jumped from the Cromwell cruiser/ Churchill infantry tank split straight to the Centurion universal tank without a true heavy tank in sight. So that’s T5 straight to T8/9, with maybe some upgunned T5 tanks as T6 (Black Prince/ Firefly/ Comet) In game terms - the M26 Pershing is a medium tank line, not heavy.
Oh, and the HP thing also penalises the high velocity medium guns. IRL a 75L70 or 17pdr is “enough”, as penetration usually = kill. But here, getting through a heavy tank’s armour with a 3" gun only knocks about 10% or so off rather than killing it. You need a large calibre to give effective after armour effect - which again makes Russian tanks, with their large calibre guns more effective in game vs other nations tanks
Cammo/ Binocs/ Rammer is now my default module choice for just about all tanks. I’ve still got repair/ stabiliser/ gunlaying on my T44, but that’s a throwback to the “brawling” days. I’ll have to switch repair to binocs when I have spare caps
My goto tanks are the T34-57 and M7 6pdr, because (1) they are fun and (2) the 75mm guns are pretty much useless. The specialist AT or HE guns >> the general purpose guns.
PS - whoever mentioned the Ferdinand as a monster. I was surprised to see one get 5 kills, and be successfully extremely aggressive on the attack rather than hang back. Guess it had the engine/ track upgrades!
I do like the IS line, though. I only have the basic IS with the upgraded 122 and turret, but it’s a fun tank. I think Wisbechlad though nails it with his analysis. This is a fun game but it has about as much relationship to WWII-era armored combat as I do to Johnny Depp.
Yes, obviously, this kind of IS-3 vs T-44 matchups are fucked up (and are supposed to be fixed in the next patch), no one is arguing about that. The argument is whether mediums have a role in a regular game when the balancer doesn’t have an obvious seizure.
Most games don’t include 8 heavies and 3 mediums on one side. Also I have never ever seen a scenario you described, where 4 high tier heavies are balanced by 4 high tier mediums. Never. At most, one team would have one (or two at most, if ever) IS-3 balanced by a T-44 (or two again) on another and the rest is change. 4 vs 4? Never. Boy do we like to exaggerate.
More than that. When I am in a game where an IS-3 is balanced by a T-44, I don’t know who is going to win. My Ferdi (which is usually ranked right under that T-44 and matched up by something like a Tiger on another team but who likes to look at the second row when we can whine about the first one, right?) can kill an IS-3 in 4 shots and if anyone at all is helping me, IS-3 has a pretty good chance to die within 15 seconds of getting into my sight. Just yesterday, my Ferdi, friend’s stock (almost) Panther and IIRC a Hummel have obliterated a column consisting of T32, IS-3 (or was it IS-4?) and Tiger II. They have attacked us frontally on Prokhorovka and the rest of my team was either dead or flanking. Yes, they’ve made some mistakes but we were awesome, used those mistakes against them and won. So pure tiers and heaviness is not everything.
And another thing, if those 3 heavies were supported by one or two mediums on another side of that field, we would have been soooo dead. This was one of those situations when a couple of mediums could win them a game but they preferred to stay at their base.
So mediums do have their role. It’s hard to pull off for most people (that’s why we see so many mediums die in frontal attacks) but it’s there.
Except for M3 Lee. That freaking monster is in its own category and has no role other than to die.
Which is exactly what developers wanted. In their words, it’s not a game about WWII, it’s a game about Counterstrike on WWII-era tanks. Maybe some of us would like things to be different but it’s not the case and never was supposed to be.
The US market dwarfs the EU market which dwarfs the Russian market, they need to prioritise potential income, not current income.
Really? For PC games? Do you have any link to support this? It’s an honest question, I seem to remember reading somewhere that EU PC games sales are actually higher than in the US.
True enough, though one has to wonder how serious they are about a long-term stay in the US. Sometimes I wonder.
Of course. The problem (ok, not a problem but an observation really) is that when you build a game around a defined historical element, in this case WWII armored warfare, with defined and very specific components, in this case, WWII tanks, and when that historical element already has a hugely dedicated and obsessive following, you are asking for trouble with each and every deviation from expectations. That’s inevitable and in fact not terribly important, but it is real.
If this was a 'mech game, with giant robots doing exactly the same thing, no one would care (ok, BattleTech and Transformer or whatever fans would accuse them of ripping something off, etc.) or at least not so much. But because it’s a Panther or a Tiger or a T-34, stuff people have years and years of experience reading about, modeling, playing with, speculating about, etc., well, it’s understandable that you get some flak.
It’s still fun, and I’m fine with the general idea. I just think from a gameplay perspective they haven’t fully developed what can be done within the framework they themselves are embracing.
ShivaX
1854
Actually thats a pretty normal number. Its extremely rare to see a match with less than 6 heavies. 7 and 8 is pretty common.
Also I have never ever seen a scenario you described, where 4 high tier heavies are balanced by 4 high tier mediums. Never. At most, one team would have one (or two at most, if ever) IS-3 balanced by a T-44 (or two again) on another and the rest is change. 4 vs 4? Never. Boy do we like to exaggerate.
I dunno… play more? I see it. Its not overly common, but it does happen and its not like its so rare that its magical when it does.
And another thing, if those 3 heavies were supported by one or two mediums on another side of that field, we would have been soooo dead. This was one of those situations when a couple of mediums could win them a game but they preferred to stay at their base.
What if they’d been supported by one or two more heavies? I suspect that would be far, far, far worse. Medium “support” usually consists of absorbing a couple shots instead of a heavy.
So mediums do have their role. It’s hard to pull off for most people (that’s why we see so many mediums die in frontal attacks) but it’s there.
Except for M3 Lee. That freaking monster is in its own category and has no role other than to die.
Its hard to pull off because you die when you get hit. If the first shot doesn’t take 60%+ of your life, odds are it tracked you anyway so you’re dead.
And the Lee is a POS, but its not super terrible. Its just a visible TD for the most part.
Edit:
And since you’ve never seen it heres an example.
8 heavies on one side and 10 one the other. Two meds on one side that could potentially damage something. Three on the other.
Double Edit: Also consider most of those players are going for heavies, they just have to play mediums to get there. The only people actively choosing to play a Medium are the T-44 and the T-34/85 (and the 34/85 might be a backup tank, thought the T-44 likely isnt).
About the screenshot. Firstly, I didn’t say I’ve never seen it. I said mostly it’s not the case. You are mixing up the topics. What I’ve never seen is 4 T-44’s balanced by 4 IS-3’s.
Secondly, and your point is? I could make a screenshot of an all-medium game yesterday that I was in. Literally, zero heavies, Panthers at the first line. Or a screenshot when we had 11 TD’s on one side and no TD’s on the other. The only thing these screenshots prove is that the balancer is fucked up and no one is arguing that.
Its hard to pull off because you die when you get hit. If the first shot doesn’t take 60%+ of your life, odds are it tracked you anyway so you’re dead.
Everyone dies when they get hit. My Ferdi kills a KV in the same 2 hits as it kills a T-34-85. And it takes the same 3 hits to kill a Tiger as it takes to kill a 3002DB.
What if they’d been supported by one or two more heavies? I suspect that would be far, far, far worse. Medium “support” usually consists of absorbing a couple shots instead of a heavy.
What if they’d been supported by a nuclear strike? That’d be even worse. You missed the point of the “what if”. A “T-34-85” (or even a T-34), seeing his heavies charging in, could react to it, move fast into position, go through the opposite side of the field, flank us in time and kill or distract us. Most of the heavies would be too slow to accomplish that. Good luck flanking like that with a KV or Tiger.
Again, the topic here is whether mediums have a role. In a “screw this flank, I’ll attack on another” situation or a “shit someone is about to rape our arty, need to go back and defend” situation or a “it seems all their tanks are on the flanks, I’ll slip through middle” or a “that JagdTiger is controlling this road and killing our team’s frontal attack, I’ll quickly flank him through that hill and kill him” situation. In all those situations mediums are much better suited than most of the heavies.
And yes, IS-4 is better than any medium at everything but not everybody is driving the IS-4. Yet. :)
I had an awesome round in that screenshot, for the record.
Actually, no, it was an assumption based on most other markets. Either way, each is more valuable than the Russian market, for now.
Which is, again, an assumption made based on whatever. :) We have no idea how big Russian WOT market currently is, what is its growth potential there and how big it’s going to be in EU or US. The last I heard (IIRC) is the 500k (*) of active customers (whatever it means), which is not too shubby for a niche (by all means) PC game.
*I might be pulling that number out of my ass, don’t have time to check it now.
Boo and hiss. Mobs and pitchforks and such. Well at least I may be able to understand the majority of the chat after the split anyway.
