When this thing was added along with the French Ground Forces it was a menace. Not because of its gun/ammo, but because it was nearly impenetrable at it’s 1.0 BR.
After that update that universally changed armor penetration of shells the french tanks armed with the 37mm guns became worthless as the shells barely could pen enemies from the side and the post-pen for both the 37mm and slightly less for the 47mm was atrocious. You would side pen an enemy and make 1 crewmember yellow. Needed 2 pens to make it orange, 3 pens to make it red and maybe, just maybe after the 4th pen you would kill. Not the tank, but the crewmember lol. The 47mm was slightly better since first pen would likely orange/red that one crewmember. Still bad.
Nonetheless, since the pen and post-pen became so bad with that catastrophe of an update, Gaijin decided these tanks were bad for the game (as they tortured the players) and removed 3 french tanks (AMC 34 YR, H 35, FCM 36) and 1 japanese tank (Ha-Go) from the normal tree (instead of fixing them).
At that point FCM 36 also became more easily penetrable by some rounds, still could bounce things. Obviously it was really hard to kill anything for the above mentioned reasons.
Over time a plethora of updates improved the shell pen and post-pen for various shells. Also crew isn’t as survivable anymore. These 2 improved the ability of the solid shot 37mm shell to actually deal with enemies. The H 35 would be now playable if not for that bug of a traverse.
But what of the FCM 36 you ask? No, this cute tank only got worse with the time. The slow improvements on the shell maybe made its gun better, but everyone’s gun is better now and also the post-pen RNG seems to help T-26 and BT-5 (its preffered enemies) survivability against that gun. In H 35 it doesn’t matter as much since its armor (that has lower value than the FCM 36 btw) likely helps it survive a first enemy shot. The FCM 36 at 40mm slopped armor (some of the best at its rank) doesn’t survive anything now.
I know there were some armor updates. I noticed other tanks get more survivable, some are helped by post-pen dispersion RNG too, yet none of it was applied to FCM 36.
Please @Smin1080p, help the poor little tank.
P.S: If someone’s wondering, the other 3 mentioned tanks are playable. Barely.
The AMC 34 YR and the Ha-Go have filler shot and was a chore to even pen after that disaster penetration update. But now they’re fine as they can pen stuff and, again, filler shot. The AMC 34 YR suffers from the bad traverse (needs updated imo). The H 35 has the same gun and solid shot ammo as FCM 36, but as mentioned before its armor is tanky (even if on paper it’s worse), still the traverse truly is bugged and it was since it was added.