Monday Musings - 4/3/17

Happy Monday tankers, it's time for some more musings...

The Garage

Another good week (and especially weekend) of battling and the path to the garage is going well. If you want the details you can read back to some of my previous posts but the TLDR is that I've allocated my 14 garage slots as: 3 Heavies, 3 Mediums, 3 Lights (you see where this is going, right?), 3 TDs and 2 Artys. I already had most of those handled but was grinding towards the KV-1 and T1 Heavy (and eventually thru the M6 to the T29) in the heavies. In the mediums I wanted to add the M4 as my third medium. In the lights I wanted to add the AMX ELC bis.

Over the last week I've managed to get the T-28 upgraded to the KV-1 and this weekend I managed to grind the M3 Lee to the M4 and, finally, the AMX 40 into the AMX ELC bis - more on that in a moment.

I've only got a few battles in the KV-1 so far, I've been easing into it as I wanted to get the crew trained and get some equipment upgrades on it before I battled with it too vigorously. So far, I like it. I'll like it even more when I upgrade to the 85mm gun, I think, but so far it's the solid HT I expected it to be.

The M4 I've only taken out twice. As with the KV-1 I didn't want to rush it into battle until I had at least a 75% crew and a few equipment boosts. I think I won both of my first two battles in it and I'm pleased with its performance so far. I'm really looking forward to trying out the big DERP gun in the next few days. 

I haven't completely finished with the M3 Lee though...I still need to battle that one to XP up to the T1 Heavy. I figure that's going to take me about a week - since I probably only drive the M3 once or twice a day. Sometime next weekend I should be moved up to the T1 Heavy and the garage will be essentially complete.

So that brings me to....

Incroyable!

The AMX 40, despite my kind words about it's armor and upgraded gun, is a detestable pile of rubbish. It's agonizingly slow (It gets outrun by O-Is) it struggles to see the end of its own gun and the armor, while not awful for a Tier IV...medium(?) is still pretty easily over-matched by Tier V and VI tanks. The AMX 40 experience can be summed up by a battle I had on Steppes (encounter) on Friday...it took me almost 4 minutes to drive to the cap area, where I was promptly 1-shot by a Hellcat I couldn't even see.

But finally, agonizingly, I managed to get the XP for the AMX ELC bis and I've realized that the AMX 38 and AMX 40 are the price you have to pay for this delightful little machine.

As I've mentioned earlier my preferred tanks tend to be either scouty LTs or snipey TDs. The AMX ELC bis is a lovely blend of both. It's fast and scouty, but (especially with the 90mm gun which I don't have quite yet) it's a powerful bush-kemping sniper.

I've had half a dozen or so battles in the ELC so far and here are my initial comments:

• The upgraded engine makes a BIG difference. I took the ELC out with the stock engine the first time. The countdown went to 0 and I mashed down on the W key expecting it to shoot out of the gate like a rocket ship. It didn't. In fact, it drove very much like my T21 in that first battle, which was something of a shocker. I'd always watched other ELCs darting around the battlefield like hummingbirds and I figured it would be a sportscar. Instead...it felt a little heavy. It wasn't slow...but it wasn't electric either. After that battle I upgraded the engine and the difference in the next battle was dramatic. NOW I have the little race car I expected.
• Having only two crew makes a difference in terms of training and skills. Many the skills, like Camo, get averaged across the entire crew. If I have a single crew member with 100% camo in my Chaffee I only get 20% of the effect...because it's averaged across the entire crew. In the ELC a single 100% skill would give me 50% of the effect, since there are only two crew. As a result I might experiment with starting the Commander on Recon and the Driver on Camo. Eventually I'd put Camo on the commander too, of course, but it may not be as urgent given the split of the boost.
• I'm debating a bit what equipment to put on this ELC. Normally I put optics on my scouts, along with camo net and vents. But I notice in replays that most of the best ELC players have binocs - probably because of it's TD nature.  Right now I think I might go with vents, binocs AND optics...but I can see maybe replacing the optics with the gun-laying drive for faster reloads. That 90mm has a 12 second reload. I'll have to see how much of an issue that reload time is for me - especially with a 100% crew and vents.

O.K., that's enough for now. I'll probably have a mid-week post of some kind this week. In the meantime, go have fun!