Yeah i know,the title is a little bit exaggerated,but follow me here.
Days ago i had a conversation about how strong the Raketenautomat is in AB,and a RB player was speechless when he discovered that in AB the stats regarding engine HP and turret rotation are very gimped. This result on a tank having two completely different behaviours in game: it can be bad in RB but absurdly strong in AB or vice versa (this will be related to another post in the future).
Now,i want to share to every other RB player out there another thing that it’s gimped in AB to the point of being a menace: autoloader tanks
THE LIST
So,first of all,which are the autoloaded tanks in question? I’m talking about all of the Top Tier/ near Top Tier tanks,so every T-series tank from the T-64 onwards,all of the Leclers,the Type-90 and the Type-10 (with its variants) and every chinese tank from the ZTZ-96 onwards. Plus i might add the M1128, the 2S25/M, the CV90105/120 and finally the Obj 292.
Now,what are the 2 things in common every tank here has? Namely having a crew of 3 people (Driver,gunner,commander) and having a fixed reload speed (due to the lack of a human loader) ranging from 4 seconds of the Japanese tanks to the 10 seconds of the Obj. 292.
P.S.:i know there are more autoloaded tanks,but let’s stick to the point
SURVIVABILITY AND THE CREW REPLENISHMENT
We all know that both the Russian and Chinese tanks and all of the light tanks mentioned are very easy to kill, from basically any direction,due to having an easy ammo-rack to hit. By removing all of them,the only tanks remaining are the French Leclercs and the Japanese Type-90/10. They sport “less” armor than their Russian/Chinese counterparts, but they are NATO tanks,meaning their first-order ammorack is not sitting under the crew,but is located behind the turret,covered by a blowout panel
Now,RB players will say “they are easy to OHK,just hit the pilot and most of the times either the gunner or the commander also dies” and they would be absolutely right, but let me introduce you to the gimped AB mechanic of Crew Replenishment
See,in RB Crew Replenishment can only be activated onto a cap and can’t save you if a shell drops your crew count from X to 1. In Arcade, however, Crew Replenishment is activated without limitations,meaning that not only you can activate it “on the move”,but that you also have a proper “Last-man standing”.
Now,for most of the tanks this is pretty much futile,but for the NATO tanks mentioned earlier? If you shoot one of them like we have said,and either the gunner or the commander are killed with the driver, the gun is still operational and can fire at you every 4 to 5 seconds. Killing both the gunner and commander is extremely difficult from the front,and from the sides you need to be lucky that the breech doesn’t absorb the spall. Couple this with the aforementioned gimped turret rotation speed,and you’ll have in your hands a tank that performs extremely well even when the game punish you for your lack of attention.
“So how do you kill them?”. Fun question,in my experience killing a fresh NATO autoloaded MBT is almost impossible,the only tactic i have achieved is shooting at the floor of the Leclercs,they have fuel tanks there and they’ll blow up 100% of the time. For Japanese tanks, shooting at the frontal ammorack is not always the answer because many experienced players tend to have that rack almost empty,making the spall generation even more hard to achieve.
If you kill 2 of the 3 crew members of one of those tanks and the gun is still operational,my advice is to just leave the area and wait for the enemy to advance again, don’t waste any shot on them because the moment you peak up again, they’re gonna maul you.
For a final note for my curious RB players: go see the stats of someone who uses those aforementioned NATO tanks in AB,the minimum K/D ratio they have is 2.5 with most of them having a ratio of over 3. One day i even met someone with a 8 K/D ratio in AB and only a 2 K/D ratio in RB, it’s insane.