I’d disagree.
You can chose to play an M1 cautiously and slowly or fast and aggressively, meanwhile, the Soviet MBT’s in question can never play fast and aggressively because they simply don’t have the mobility to do so. They’re at all times being held back in their potential.
I don’t see any reason why the M1 cannot play more defensively given it’s excellent potential in hull-down powerpositions. -10° of depression in combination with a 5 second reload and extremely rapid ability to reposition and re-peak make it quite well suited to the job.
And to give you a better picture of just how gigantic the mobility gap is between a M1 and a T-72B:
Armour is a passive advantage, you cannot depend on it because it relies on your opponent having poor aim. The second you face an enemy that knows basic weakspots you’ll be screwed, even in the best armoured MBT there is.
Mobility is an active advantage, you can actively use it to out-play opponents, especially if there’s a major capability gap between the two in this regard (I.E., M1A1 -vs- T-72B3).
That’s why mobility is far more important than armour is. Armour is just icing on the cake and situationally useful.
It’s why the Strv 122’s are so strong: They’re already decent-excellent at gun handling, survivability, firepower and mobility, and then their armour being the literal best is what makes it the most complete package at top-tier.
First hit kill/cripple means spotting first, hitting first, disabling/killing first.
This is exactly what Soviet/Russian tanks are bad at, implying this somehow plays into their favour makes little sense given their major lack of mobility, turret traverse, vertical gun traverse and reload rate.
Imagining a head-on isn’t fair because the more mobile vehicle shouldn’t find itself head-on with less mobile opponents, and even then, the nature of APFSDS is that it can penetrate side armour and consistently one-shot Soviet/Russian MBT’s even at a 75 degree angle.
You’ll almost never find your opponents at a perfect head-on angle of attack, a while back I took the time to record each and every shot I had taken against a Russian MBT:
74% of shots were through side armour, even if they were theoretically facing front-on.
Hull down favours the vehicle which can reach the powerpositions first and utilize all of them with good gun depression, another reason why the M1’s are massively superior to the T-72’s mentioned.
It’s not nit-picking because Statshark is infinitely more accurate in it’s data.
I don’t tend to base my opinions (solely) on winrates, case in point: M1A2 SEP vs M1A2T stats.
It’s best to compare vehicle stats (I.E., reload rate, reverse speed, turret traverse, etc.), winrates are often more representative of the playerbase using it rather than the vehicle’s actual worth/capabilities.
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Great breakdown of my point here. Huge respect for taking the time to challenge my points.
You’ve convinced me of a lot here. I am still relatively new to ground (formerly an air main) so I evidently have a lot to learn.
My only remaining points are that:
- the M1A2T is still very new and the average causal player will likely not have their hands on it yet. I’ll look back on stats in a couple more weeks. I’m willing to bet that you’re right though.
- Russian winrate is still inexplicably disproportionate.
- While not directed at you, most 6.7 American heavies do not need to go to 7.0 and the T-72B does not need to go to 10.0 (like Scorpions insists upon).
- Historical armor for the Abrams is still a good idea, since the current layout is an exact copy-paste while weighing much more.
Again, thank you for taking the time to educate me on these matters. Have a great day.
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It doesn’t if people know what they are doing, 3OF26 to the “Doghouse” (Gunner Primary Sighting Complex), CROWS or commander / loader HMG will reliably overpressure the Crew regardless of variant.
And it’s not like the M1’s get access to XM943 STAFF, or M1147 AMP to return the favor.
Just going to point out that this is best case and only looks at a single surface, once things are off road they are much less dramatic, also using km/h, isn’t great, it’ be better to know the difference in Tank Lengths per second of Escape velocity since its easier to conceptualize that way. To make the point, the M1 outruns the T-72 by about half a tank length per second at their top speed so it’s not that much slower.
Now an example; lets take a exemplar map, “Advance to the Rhine” and do the classic “South” (Blue) team tactic of B > C “Flank” down the “10-I” N-S road, though to the “10-E” corner each Grid square represents 150 meters and is 600 meters which can be expected to take a minimum of ~ 20 seconds, and the only way to bail out is into the courtyard ~200-250 meters at about 10-12 seconds. You are still committing a lot if anyone is watching from any of the relevant features from"10-D / -C" or “9-D”
"Advance to the Rhine"
You can also easily fuck up if you don’t know what you are doing since you can easily outrun your team and bumble into multiple enemies or get suddenly pinned due to unseen threats turning up late before you get to your intended position since they were expecting someone to rush.
As above, what is an M1 trying to cap “C” to do about a T-72 sitting in cover in “10-C” if it goes up the inside lane it’s still in its frontal arc, if it flanks to the “outside” it’s got to run a gauntlet for a third of a minute. If it crosses the other-side of the park and flanks the “long way” around it goes past the Red team’s spawn in order to come up behind it. None are all too attractive options.
There are a multitude of other examples where there are no other options, due to map design forcing specific encounters.
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Would you like to see screenshots of me playing as China and losing 15 matches in a row?
I’d like to point out an inaccuracy: due to issues with the win rate calculation algorithm, the win rates on WT DATA are often statistically skewed—either exaggerated or underestimated. Therefore, when it comes to overall win rate data, StatShark is generally used as the reference.StatShark
i definetly agree that there has been an increase in suspect behaviour, mostly bots in my experience, cheats are simply too hard to spot ingame unless someone is extremely blatant
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You should also keep in mind that most players are still dealing with it’s stock performance, it could drop off a bit but I don’t expect it to ever become equal with the US M1’s or even fall below it.
The only reason I could see that happening is if China somehow gets glued to a nation that has had a massive influx of premium one-death-leavers due to a recent same.
Only because of the recently added BMPT, which is overpowered.
Prior to that, Russi1 9.7 - 11.3 has been on deeply negative winrates for years and years now.
I also expect next month’s stats to drop for the 12.0 - 12.7 bracket given the T-80U-E1 sales.
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Every book has letters in it, not everything with letters is a book. Additional armour comes with addition weight, not all added weight must come from armour.
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The armour changes substantially between variants in-game:
- M1’s turret = 350mm @ 60° frontal arc.
- IPM1 & M1A1’s turret = 400mm @ 60° frontal arc.
- M1A1 HC+ turret = 600mm @ 60° frontal arc.
I’ve had this conversation regarding armour with about a thousand people before, and they’ve never been able to present a single compelling source that indicates the hull armour was improved for these relevant variants.
There are minor issues such as the gun shields, special armour skirts, turret ring and turret side protection for the SEP, but if these were fixed to correct values it would not make a significant difference in-game because 95% of what’s fired at you is main gun APFSDS, which would still be capable of penetrating each of these areas.
Of course, that’s not to say it shouldn’t be fixed, merely me tempering expectations.
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True, but I don’t see where 7 tons would come from. Also, what about the turret ring? The bug report I referenced has been confirmed for 2 years and nothing came of it. It is currently 50.8mm when it should be >200mm. Not a huge change, but it would at least make it more resistant to autocannons.
M1 Abrams: 55.7t
IPM1: 56.8t > Received extended turret cheeks with improved armour composition.
M1A1: 57.2t > Recieved M256 120mm gun.
M1A1 HC: 61.2t > Received steel-encased depleted uranium packages in the turret cheeks.
M1A2: 62t
M1A2 SEP: 62.2t
M1A2 SEP v2: 63t
M1A2 SEP v3: 66.8t > NGAP/NEA armour package that improved both turret and hull composites.
As you can see, the significant steps in weight increases coincide with the known armour improvements.
The relatively minor weight increases can be explained via add-on systems and changes during production runs which aren’t related to armour protection (I.E., CROWS, APU, UAAPU, Thermal management system, wiring, TUSK, CITV, stowage racks, NBC protection, etc. etc.)
My source indicates around 320mm, unfortunately I’m not certain if I can share it, so I’ll refrain from doing so.
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Ah okay. Makes a lot more sense. I saw the weight jump from the M1A1 to the M1A2 pretty significantly and couldn’t find differences on the model. Thanks for correcting me.
How does it possibly get to be this inaccurate? This would make it literally invulnerable to the 2S38 frontally.
Most likely because they used this source:
no, in fact
one apfsds or heat right at the front armor and boom
plenty of videos on yt, but yeah the devs neither play their game nor engage with it on social media it seems
i can see why germanys winrate is so bad at most brs. First they get no or few light tanks, then also they get artificially nerfed to shit and until the 2a4 they have no armored cold war vehicles so any russian or french light tanks can just rape whole groups of their tanks with an autocannon from the front.
Playing the t72 around that br is very relaxing btw, you survive obscene amounts of bs and never even have to aim for weakspots, but that’s gaijins balance for ya.
And since gaijin almost exclusively adds city maps and ultra narrow corridor maps (the korea one for example LMAO), the light tanks often have to frontally engage.
Yay.
Stats paint totally different picture.
What stats? The abysmal win rates across basically all brs?
Totally abysmal.
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Only the lower part of the turret ring (the part covered by the hull) is 200mms. Some of it is visible outside of the hull