My apologies for the misunderstanding, I did not bring up TS to judge you by your stats or anything of the sort. I just wanted to say that since you’ve used the Maus a lot, and to good effect, you probably already know that the 75mm coax with HEAT and 5sec reload makes it infinitely more capable against light vehicles than most heavies at and around the era-breaking BRs.
For the same reason why you’d play or not play anything else. Do you enjoy it?
If you don’t enjoy it, not playing it is the correct decision. I don’t really care for top tier gameplay and haven’t really ventured beyond 7.7 except for the occasional battlefield challenge. On the other hand, 6.7 is my favourite BR in the game.
We get different enjoyments out of different things in the game. That’s okay.
Leopard 1 is 8.0, so your 6.7 American lineup (which I’d argue is as strong as German 6.7 and a bit more well-rounded perhaps) will not see it. The T29 might. Then again the T29, like the Tiger II, is the sort of vehicle whose gun remains formidable even in a full uptier.
The German Patton, yes, you can see it, since it’s at 7.7. But Pattons have pretty bad armour. The KwK 43 goes through them like butter.
Usually when I play the Tiger II in a full uptier, I treat it like a medium tank and flank. It works pretty well.
My favourite vehicle in the game is the Jagdtiger, and I always get weird “looks” when I say that, because it is objectively an incredibly situational vehicle. When I started playing the Tiger II more, the number of nukes I was dropping compared to the JT increased… and not really because I’ve improved that much in a short period of time. It’s because the Tiger II is simply great.
What people underestimate is that it’s not just that the gun is good, but the gun handling is superb, the reload is very very good, and the turret rotation speed is great. So what you can do with some great success, especially with the better mobility of the Sla, is get reasonably timely and aggressively into a chokepoint or pretty good corner position, and hold it even against multiple enemies, because yes, you’re a heavy, but you have the reactivity of a medium tank.
I am yet to get a nuke with it at 7.7, I’ve only done it at lower BRs, but I’ve come close many times. And I’m hardly an exceptional player, in fact I’ve had a string of terrible matches recently alongside the nukes (been distracted by RL stuff and ended up playing with my brain turned off).
Still, how many heavies would be able to say the same? Many are literally useless in a full uptier, not so the Tiger II. That’s why I’m always so sceptical when people tell me it’s not competitive or meta anymore. Maybe you don’t enjoy using it against its current opposition, that’s fair, but it’s also subjective, whereas saying that it isn’t competitive is an objective statement… if it wasn’t competitive, I wouldn’t have net positive stats in it. Simple as.
That is why I have 3k matches in the Jagdtiger. Again a lot of people look at that sort of thing and just think “oh god, average German main” or think that I’m insane. And the latter is partly true. But I’m just a somewhat obsessive-type personality and I want to absolutely perfect my understanding of a vehicle I really like before I move on. When I can shoot planes out of the sky with the 128mm with one eye closed, then I’ll be satisfied. 😁
That doesn’t happen at any BR. 1.0 is extremely anachronistic as it is. And a lot of design compromises and functions our vehicles have, were designed with threats in mind that don’t exist in the game, mostly infantry, small arms, even mines.
Be aggressive with the Jagdtiger and your match will be very short. The true key to that vehicle is knowing when is the time to hang back and when is the time to push. It’s a difficult judgement call to make.
Not so the Tiger II.
When I first started playing the Tiger II and the Sla, I was still a noob and didn’t have a clue how to use them correctly. I had read the wiki articles, which recommended to sit back and favour engagement ranges above 900m to maximise the armour profile and the gun’s great ballistics, and since I hadn’t yet realised just how incomplete the wiki can be at times, I played the Tiger IIs very passively. Sat back and sniped. They were okay at it, but of course I ended up preferring the Jagdtiger because it was better at that particular job, and that’s how my love story with it began - and evolved considerably as I became better as a player over time, of course.
I only really came back to the Tiger IIs a few months ago. I was playing with this friend of mine who had returned to the game after a long absence. He’s someone who’s done plenty of tournaments and competitive stuff, so when I was introduced to him I was eager to learn from him. Our very first match together was on Sun City. I had an okay match in the Jagdtiger. He spawned the Tiger II H, and dropped a nuke.
Alright, I thought to myself, the friends who introduced me to him weren’t kidding. And I’ve seen over time playing with him that he’s the sort of player who’ll casually turn up one evening and drop thre nukes in three out of six matches and just make you understand in a very real way how far you still have to go to be really good at the game.
But I digress. At that point, all my nukes bar one had been with the Jagdtiger, and the other had been in a Dicker Max (yes, yes, I know). So that very same evening I opened up the replay of Sun City to see what this guy had done with his Tiger II to get the nuke.
I was astonished at how aggressive he was with it, because it went against the grain of everything I had been told about the vehicle. Oh, your armour doesn’t matter, oh, just sit back and snipe, etc etc. Then he turns up and does exactly what I described above - push aggressively, let people come to him after the first engagement so he has the advantage of reaction time, relocating a bit after each 2-3 kills, and just use the turret rotation, reload, and gun to hold a portion of the map and score multiple kills. And by the time they finally do get him, he has the nuke already.
I started trying to emulate that playstyle… and it works.
This is a long essay, I know, and very personal, which maybe nobody cares about in the slightest, but I think there is a lesson here for those who care to hear it. You can tell me the Tiger II isn’t competitive a thousand times, but I’ve seen what it can do, and when the stars align and I have more brain function than usual, I’ve approximated that achievement too.
Like I always say when clapping cold war vehicles with it… grandpa’s still got it.
I find that heavies like these make for amazing anti-flankers. Not surprising when you think about it, since you are forcing light vehicles into the frontal engagements they were trying to avoid by flanking.
With the Maus you just have to be very deliberate about which maps you decide to flank on or not. And even then, sometimes just trying ridiculous stuff in the game actually ends up working. On old Fields Of Poland I once flanked with the Maus all the way from the eastern spawn to the A point (a drive of over 2km) sticking close to the border of the map. It took me thre business days to get there, but I dropped on the enemy team unawares, got five kills and the cap. Because we had C and B was contested, that ended up swinging the match in our favour at the time. Try it five more times and it’ll end in disaster, but hey… it worked that day, and it’s one of my fondest memories of playing the Maus in RB (as opposed to SB). :D
You can delegitimise my opinion as parroting, if you so wish. It doesn’t make the underlying argument go away. The IKV is bad in every respect except the ammo. Why would you ever take all the tradeoffs it offered, if it didn’t offer at least one outstanding feature, its firepower? Same logic as the Sturer.
That’s a bit disingenuous. Look at my play history. I usually am the heavy or medium from WW2. So, don’t try to make it personal… I’ve never had the situation of trying to flank a Tiger II in a Hellcat. I play as the Tiger II clapping the Hellcat.
Just because I identify with other players and try to understand the perspective, doesn’t mean I’m arguing for the game to be made easier for me.
Literally none of the combos you have listed above are possible by normal BR matchmaking. Are you being hyperbolic?
That said…
The war also didn’t happen with the Germans having access to as many Tiger IIs as they wanted to, unlimited fuel and ammo. T-34s didn’t get a nice situational awareness without their commander cupola, and the models without turret baskets couldn’t reload unless the turret was facing straight on.
The war didn’t happen with no infantry and no tank-killing arty.
The war never saw massive tank battles in Antarctica or the American desert.
What kind of comment is that?
I won’t touch the CAS issue because this comment is long enough as it is, except to say that I do believe CAS has a balance problem, and yes, that it can be a crutch for players who would have to get better at ground otherwise.
It never, ever was.
Sim battles are RB battles with extra steps. They have less arcadey controls, but they’re not historically accurate by any stretch of the imagination, unless you think it’s historically accurate for a Maus, a Wiesel and a Conqueror to fight T-54s on Pradesh.
They don’t. Just the two vehicles I’ve based my examples on in this comment, the Jagdtiger and the Tiger II, play super differently. And they’re same BR, same lineup, same base chassis.
There is a discrimination. Performance.
No thread on this forum will change anything in this regard, because what you have working against you is all the times that Gaijin did try historical matchmaker (WW2 Chronicles, World War Mode) and it failed disastrously.
I’ll give you a piece of genuine advice. If you do want to create change, this is what you should do. There are Discord servers and player communities out there who organise historical roleplay matches, with incredibly accurate and narrow lists of vehicles allowed where, and what vehicles are allowed to do or not (they even have rules about which parts you are allowed to repair and which damage you should consider to be a mission-kill instead). It honestly looks incredibly interesting and I want to take part in it one day.
So, here’s what you do to test your hypothesis. Join one of these communities to play fully historical battles, or create one of your own. Create interest and buzz around it. If people like it, and start flocking to it, and it gains attention, Gaijin will see that there is an interest from players, they’ll swoop in, and make their own versions.
I’ll leave you with the overall rules used by one of these servers, War Thunder Ultrasim, and the preparatory document for the event they held to recreate the Battle Of Smolensk. Just reading them tickled my roleplayer fancies.
Rules: War Thunder Ultrasim Event Rules - Google Documenten
Smolensk: WTU - 1st Battle of Smolensk - Google Documenten
