Hetzer forever!

In World of Tanks, I passed a new milestone yesterday: 10,000 battles completed.

And appropriately, my favourite tank, the Hetzer, fought and won the 10,000th. Go me!

So what have I been doing for 10,000 battles? As you can see from my ratings, I'm a pretty average tanker. And I've mostly been using low tier tanks: there doesn't seem to be any advantage in advancing to higher tiers, as the tanks are much more expensive, and so is the ammo, and you can still be facing opponents two tiers above you. Well, up to tier 9, anyway, when only tier 10 is above you; and tier 10, where nobody is above you.

Tier 5 or 6 tanks seem to be a sweet spot for earning credits (for non-premium tanks). In fact VBAddict shows that the top 10 tanks are all in those two tiers, so there really isn't much incentive to go into higher tiers where net income is lower, or even negative.

It's taken me two years to understand what I should have been doing with my premium tanks. Every now and then, wargaming.net holds a World of Tanks event where the prize is a premium tank Premium tanks normally can only be got by spending real money to buy them. You buy an in-game currency called `gold` with real money, and then you can spend that gold on buying in-game items. Premiom tanks can only be bought with gold (not with the other in-game currency 'credits' that you can earn by playing the game), and so are often referred to as "gold tanks". I've won a fair few of them now. The latest such event was Togtober, and that would net you a British heavy TOG II* premium tank if you completed it. It was while I was trying to earn it, that a clan-mate happened to mention that there is no penalty for putting crew from similar tanks** in a premium tank. That's when it clicked.

Let me first explain that crew members are trained for a particular tank. For instance, if you look at my Hetzer commander in the picture above (Stabsfeldwebel Krammer), you'll see that he's trained to 105% in the Hetzer (the 5% boost comes from some extra equipment I've added to the base tank model: "Improved Ventilation"). If I were to take Krammer, and put him in another Tank Destroyer (my Marder, for instance), he wouldn't be as effective. He would suffer a 25% penalty due to being unfamiliar with that machine, so he would be effectively at 75% (+5% if I were to add improved ventilation to the Marder). Crucially this penalty is NOT suffered if I move him to a premium tank**

Once I realized this (two years is all it took), I knew at once that I should never give my premium tanks their own crew. I should always put crew from other tanks into them, because I can transfer them from their main tank to the premium and back again at no penalty: the premium tank becomes a training vehicle. I immediately kicked out all my premium crews, and put a bullet in the head of most of them. From now on, my TOG II* is dedicated to training my British heavy Black Prince crew.

Sadly, most of my other premium tanks were light tanks, and I'm not really a fan of light tanks, except at tiers 1 and 2. So the next thing I did was to review the tech-trees for every nation to look at what premium tanks were suitable for training purposes. And of course, I came across the Russian tier 5 heavy tank, the Churchill III***. This tank was ideal for training the crews of my Russian heavies. It's rock solid. Slow moving, but hard to penetrate, and with a decent gun. It can stand toe-to-toe with most tier 5s.

Then I took a look at American tanks, and bought a tier 5 heavy T14. I'm not so comfortable with this tank - my play-style doesn't suit it. It's more nimble than the Churchill, the gun is decent, but the armor is a little thin. Faced with a KV-1, it had better run! Now that I write this, it seems obvious that I should play it more like a medium tank. Anyway, the good news is that I now have three heavy premiums for the three nations that most of my heavies belong to.

The German tree faces a disadvantage, though. Firstly, it has no tier 5 heavy premium tank. In fact its first premium heavy is the tier 8 Loewe. That doesn't concern me too much, though, because I prefer the German TDs. But there is no German tier 5 premium TD, either! The first is the Tier 6 Dicker Max. Tier 5 premiums cost 1500 gold (the currency that is paid for with euros or dollars). Tier 6 premiums are more than double that, at 3200g. So I'm going to hold off buying it until it's on special offer.

Up until now, I've been spending gold only on garage slots and barracks bunks, since these (and gold tanks) are the only items you can't buy them with credits. All the so-called "gold" ammo (APCR and HEAT) that I have was actually bought with credits, not gold. But with the purchase of the Churchill 3 and  the T14, I have officially gone pay-to-win.


* I've no idea why the Tog II* has an asterisk in its name, either.

** No penalty, as long as the vehicles are the same kind. So Tank Destroyer crews can be moved to premium Tank Destroyers and suffer no penalty, but will suffer a penalty if moved to a premium Heavy Tank, for instance. And obviously, they have to be of the same nation.

*** Lend Lease

Hetzer heroics

I'd a nice time over the Winterveil festival. Not a lot of guildies around, so no guild events. Same story with my raid team: we've basically taken 3 weeks off raiding. That suited me well. I spent a lot of time relaxing and unwinding with my family in Earth Online, where the Christmas holidays were a lot of good, chillout fun. All the same, the weather was a bit miserable. We'd go out for walks and come home wet and cold (can you believe it? On Earth, rain and snow make you cold, which is a stacking health debuff that can actually kill you if you have it for long enough. Anyone who spent their time in Northrend wearing the Black Mageweave set knows how unrealistic that is). So as well as the usual eating and drinking and being merry, I spent a fair bit of time in the World of Tanks. The new physics engine is great! There are no invisible walls, tanks can drown themselves in lakes or fall down cliffs (and sometimes even survive the fall)!

My sweetest moment was when scouting in Province underneath the winding path above our base (at J7). From here, I can shoot at enemies going up the other winding path, above their base (they rarely seem to notice where the shots are coming from). Even better, it enables our snipers camping on the opposite hill to see enemy tanks above me, so they take a lot of fire without even seeing who's shooting at them; and it annoys the hell out of the enemy tanks above me, who can see me on the map, but can't shoot at me. Some of them get so annoyed that they try leaning over the path to try to get a shot; but I'm always tucked in tight, and generally ignore them for our snipers to take out, while I shoot up the opposite windy path. After one such duel with an enemy who spotted that I was shooting at him, I finally managed to kill him and looked up from my gun-sight, to find an enemy tank directly behind me, dead, vertical with his gun barrel in the ground and his rear in the air. A self-kill.

I've been playing World of Tanks very casually for quite a while, deliberately sticking to tier 2 tanks. This is great fun in light tanks, because you're usually fighting against other tanks in tiers 1 and 2, with only occasionally a tier 3 tank in your battlefield (tier 3 tanks are hard for tier 2s to damage, unless you do a lot of manoeuvring to bring yourself up behind them, or at least shooting into their side. Shots hitting their frontal armour usually bounce).

I've got pretty good at tier 2 tanking, and even when my side loses (which is 50% of the time), I'm usually near the top of the table for experience earned.

My style of play is not suited to scouting (rushing forward to detect enemy units for your team-mates to blow up, relying on great speed to avoid being hit). I prefer more static play. I can find a hidden spot from which I can snipe at targets our scouts light up, put on my camouflage netting, get out my binoculars and wait to kill tanks that can't even see who's shooting at them. So I thought I'd probably enjoy artillery; but it turns out that artillery play is a different game altogether from sniping. So I next tried tank destroyers. I chose the German line, beginning with the Panzerjäger I. This suited my playstyle well, but there are two problems with it.

Firstly, the problem with tier 2 tank destroyers is they are in a different battle tier to other tier 2 tanks. The World of Tanks matchmaking is a complicated affair that picks teams based on a battle tier. Tanks from different vehicle tiers can end up in the same battle tier. There's a simple-looking (in fact over-simplistic) chart on their wiki that covers it. But what is hidden in this chart is what decides what battle tier you go into. From the chart, you can see that a (vehicle) tier 2 tank destroyer can end up in battle tier 2 or 3, the same as any other tier 2 tank. Well, it aint so. My Panzerjäger nearly always seemed to end up in tier 3 battles, specifically Prokhorovka and Ensk, fighting tier 3 tanks.

The second problem with the Panzerjäger is that it has no turret, and it's gun has a firing arc of -10°/+10° That, combined with its so-so rate of fire, means that by the time you've fired and reloaded, your target has moved out of your sights (if he has any sense), and you have to resight him by turning the vehicle itself.

Putting these two problems together meant the Panzerjäger wasn't the greatest fun on earth. I could lie in wait for enemy tanks, but when I shot at one, I was unlikely to kill it outright, unless it was already damaged. In fact at long range my carefully-aimed shots were likely to bounce right off their armour. Meantime, if they've spotted me, they can one-shot me, since I'm in an open-topped tin-can. If they miss, they've plenty of time to move off, forcing me to rotate using my tracks, which knocks out the aiming for a couple of seconds and undoes the camouflage cover of the netting and whatever bushes I'm in. So the actual rate of fire is far less than the quoted rate, and survival time once spotted is on the low side.

Meantime in my lumbering French tier 2 Hotchkiss H35, I'm fighting tier 1 and 2 tanks. I can play the tank destroyer in them, and while I can't one-shot enemies, I can still snipe at them from camouflaged cover, rotate my turret to follow them if they try to run for cover, and if they get close, I can stand toe-to-toe with them in a firefight.

Rather than abandon tank destroyers altogether, I moved up to the next tier beyond the Panzerjäger, the Marder. This was a huge improvement, once fully kitted out. It's PaK26 gun can penetrate anything it might find itself up against, and deliver reasonable damage, its range is excellent, and best of all, it's firing arc is -32°/+25, so there's a good chance of hitting a target twice without having to move the tracks. This is more like it. But it's still an open-topped tin-can. Hey, if the next tier up was so much more fun to play, let's try again, with the Hetzer. That looks awesome. How many times have my shells bounced off that sleek beast? So I moved up to the next tier again, to the tier 4 Hetzer.

Each time you buy a new tank, it's initially a bit of a step backward. You've to learn its strengths and weaknesses, and upgrade its modules (the modules it comes with are always poor), so when at first the Hetzer seemed like a step down from the Marder, I expected it. The sloped armour is great, deflecting all but the highest penetration shells from the front. I read up about the gun upgrades available. The 10.5cm StuH gun (the derp gun) delivers a heap of damage but not great penetration and accuracy compared with the 7.5cm PaK 39 gun. The 7.5 seemed like the sniper's gun. So I researched and bought it, and got my Hetzer fully kitted out. But I still wasn't having great fun. The Hetzer just isn't great as a sniper, due to the poor gun arc, which I didn't think of when I moved up from the Marder. Plus, the 7.5 can't deliver much damage at range

I thought about moving back to the Marder, but first I tried out the derp gun. What a revelation! It has completely changed my style of play. I'm not a sniper any more. The 10.5cm StuH 42 is more like a bazooka than a sniper's rifle. Less accurate, slower to fire, but if you're hit, you're dead. This beast of a gun just blows away anything it penetrates. Since it's not great at penetrating thick armour at range, the best tactic is to use it as a blitz support tank, just behind the first wave of tanks, so that you can take on enemy tanks at close quarters and perhaps from the side or rear. This big gun usually sends anything it penetrates clean into orbit.

The downside of the Hetzer is that I can now face tier 6 tanks such as the KV-1S and M6. With their thick armour and heavy guns, they can easily swat me away. When I have one of these in my sights, the likelihood is that I'll be dead within the next ten seconds if he sees who's shooting at him.

But that's okay! The Hetzer is still storming fun to play. It gets into 2 types of battles, essentially: those in which it cuts through the enemy ranks like hot lead through butter (it's not hard to rack up 3-4 kills, 5-6 kills is not unusual even if the battle is eventually lost); and those where it's gunned down within the first two minutes by a tier 6 tank, and you skip on to the next battle in another tank. Plus it brings in loads of cash. I'm definitely not giving this one up!

Wouldn't this be great, though: imagine that in the 30 seconds before battle, after you've seen your enemies, you could change the modules on your vehicle to suit the fight you're about to go into.

I do want to go back to the Marder, though, which I think I should have played for a bit longer before moving to on. Despite its poor armour, I enjoyed the sniper style. I have a British Medium 1 in the garage that's not yet got a good crew, and doesn't really play any differently from the Hotchkiss I mentioned earlier. I think I'll dump it for the Marder.

Also, though, I want to get the next tank destroyer after the Hetzer. Only great things are said about the Sturmgeschütz. I fear another of my tier 2 tanks will have to be scrapped to make way for it.