Match-up Melee

Hello fellow members of Team 169! I'm Hellsau. I've done a lot of tournaments, and would be willing to call the battles. If anyone else has a good strat they want to run, and has some calling experience, just say so and we'll follow you. Lord knows I could use less stress in my life.

So, this tournament allows up to 15 people in a battle, and up to tier two tanks, but we can only bring 15 tier points into battle. This means we can bring seven tier twos and one tier one, fifteen tier ones, or something in between. I suggest we start by bringing at least five tier twos - the two group stages are both Encounter battle mode on city maps, and we'll need the vastly superior guns on tier two tanks in order to quickly kill enemy tier twos. The most important thing is that everyone pilots a tank that they are comfortable in, since that will make the best use of our player's skills.

Here are the tier two tanks that I believe are useful, and why. Before I begin: the highest view range on a tier 1 is 310m (the Ltraktor) and at tier 2 is 330m (most TDs). Having poor view range (260m or less) is fatal if we send the tank with poor view range in without support from higher view range friendlies.

The best tanks:
Cruiser 3 - The PomPom gun is extremely good - it can kill enemy tier twos in one burst, it has very good penetration, and even at long ranges at least a few of the four shots will hit. The downsides of the tank being huge and having poor armor is worth the gun. We also can use the 2pdr on it, but I advise against that.
Pz2 - Good mobility, good gun with adequate penetration and good damage output, and the armor is very useful on such a mobile platform. It can kill tier 1s without taking much damage, and stands a good chance to bounce one of the Cruiser 3's shots and reload to finish it.
T1 Cunningham - The machine gun will chew up other tier 1 tanks, and the semiautomatic will chew up tier 2s from close range. Low HP is an issue, but hopefully the tier 1s won't be the first tanks out.
Ltraktor - 310m view range, very good stock gun, tons of ammo for destroying houses, and good camo. Will not win a brawl with a tier 2, can win a brawl with a tier 1 due to 130 HP.


Good tanks:

T7 Combat Car - Poor armor, very poor penetration, bad view range, and a long reload. For all those downsides, this tank is fast and the gun WILL kill lightly armored tanks before they can react.
H35/Pz38H - The premium German version is better than the French version, but they both are quite heavily armored. Tier 1s and machine gun tanks will struggle to pen them, but Cruiser 3s will eat them up. The speed is a big downside.
T18 - Yeah it has been nerfed badly, but it still can oneshot enemy tanks and has good front armor against low pen guns. Nearly no view range is a problem, but we won't have you trying to snipe with the derp gun anyway.
Other TDs - If you have a very good crew in a TD with 100% camo and 330m view range + view range skills, a TD can hold a line very well without being spotted in return. Unfortunately, this will not matter on the maps we're playing on for the most part unless we plan on camping. Very low priority.

Bad tanks:
Regular tanks with regular guns - things like the Tetrarch, Pz35t, and T-26 are just not what we want to be doing in an organized environment. If we make an organized push with Cruiser 4s, we can burst damage multiple enemy tanks dead immediately, and then reload to finish them. If we try to do an organized push with regular guns, it requires an extremely high level of control to focus fire on the right tanks to kill them optimally, and the defenders will be much better positioned to fend us off, especially if they have autoloaders or machine guns themselves.
Artillery - remove arti from the game. Also we're playing city maps, tier 2 artillery are really awful, and even if the T57 is a good TD, it only has 80 HP!
Everything else - strictly worse than another tank. The Cruiser 1 is hilariously poor compared to the Cruiser 3 (150 horsepower engine versus 395 horsepower engine!), most other machine gun tanks are clearly inferior to the T7CC or Pz2, and if we really need an armored brick the T18 or Pz38H are our best options.

So, that's our tank options. If you are in doubt, get a Cruiser 3. We can't have enough high penetration guns. Here's some other things you should do in order to help the team the most:

1) Sixth Sense is overpowered! This is the most important crew skill you can possibly have on any tank. Please have a crew with Sixth Sense, it will help us greatly knowing whether the enemy knows where you are.
2) Camo skills are very good when the enemy view ranges are low, so if you have Sixth Sense and 100% camo on a crew, it'd be smart to use that one.
3) 100% crew is not optional. If you're credit retraining a crew from some other tank, please play until that crew actually reaches 100%. Or just use gold. No need to cheap out when we're positioned to win 10000 gold!
4) Farm some credits beforehand, AT LEAST 500,000! We must shoot premium rounds since every bounce we avoid puts us more and more in a winning position. If I call correctly, no one should need to spend more than 20k in one game, and <10k per game is going to be the average. We have two group stages back-to-back, so we all need enough credits to not run out.
5) Related to the above: Large Repair Kit, Large Medkit, Automatic Fire Extinguisher. There is NO reason to lose a game because your engine and tracks got shot out, and you didn't have a large kit. Automatic Extinguishers are laughably better than manuals and you should have all your tanks equipped with automatics once you're over ~3000 games.
6) No drama! If someone messes up, chide them a little bit and move onto the next game. If you mess up, own up to the mistake and move onto the next game. One loss doesn't matter - the group stages are really just to help us get used to working together, get used to the tournament format, and work out a good strat. Everybody just chillax.
7) Attendance is the most important thing for our team to win. We can have 10 skill crews, the perfect strat, all the hacks in the world, and can be bribing the tournament organizers, and we will still lose if we only have four people! Please, check out the tournament page for the start times. The first group stage will start 18 hours after this message is sent if that helps.
8) Related to attendance, we need a way to communicate with eachother. The ingame voice comms are legendarily awful, so please download Teamspeak 3 and join your fellow tankers in the fancy cyberspace of voice-over-internet communication. You don't need a microphone, as long as you have headphones or speakers to hear us and can type answers if needed.
9) I have access to the Goon teamspeak but...uh...I think it may be best if we have a different teamspeak. If anyone has another option for a teamspeak (preferably someone who has admin priviledges on said teamspeak) then please reply, and I'll send the info out to the rest of the team.

I think that's all. If anyone has anything else, speak up. Other than that, if no one's got a better option for teamspeak servers, I'll contact you all with the Goon TS IP address and get everything setup. I'll try to contact everyone in-game before the battles so we can gather together and see what our tank options are. Hopefully everyone who signed up for this will actually show up! If you won't be able to make it, please say so in advance so we can plan for that. Just knowing that we won't have another person showing up can be very helpful.

See you all in less than 24 hours!