Csda News

Volume 1 Issue 2 October 2014

CSDA NEWS Monthly Clan Update

Volume 1 Issue 2

T29 America’s Tier VII Heavy Tank

Inside this issue: Commanding Officers Report

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Conflict Resolution

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The T29 Tier VII Heavy

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Having a Plan

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Get Your Mods Updated

7

Web Site Update

7

New Game Mode

7

Clan Snap Shot

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9.3 Is Here!

Volume 1 Issue 2

Commanding Officers Report This is the second installment of CSDA News, I hope that you are finding this information useful to some extent.

Our primary goal for the up coming months is to get clan members platooning and learning better methods of using each individual tank. With that in mind I will continue to expand the training page of the clan with more informational videos and Power Point presentation that should assist every member that may have a questions.

I will also be looking for a dedicated training officer, who’s primary goal is to get everyone into training lessons as needed and to look for more training content.

Another item that we need to deal with is the fact that there are too many inactive users, so I am also looking for personnel to step up as recruiters. As of right now I do not want recruiters going out and making a bold recruitment statement as I would like prospective members to use the recruitment thread on the clan site. Recruiters would primarily act as a point of contact for prospective members and point them to the webpage. Remember that the best recruitment tool is your WN8 rate and victory rate. So, if all members strive to increase these numbers the better chance of picking up new members.

ter and come up with idea or information that needs to be disseminated out, I would function as editor or designate someone to fulfill that role in the future. ~See you on the battle field.

I would also like personnel to step up and take a topic for this newslet-

Conflict Resolution As a general rule, all members of CSDA should be respectful of other members in the clan and the general WOT community. But, from time to time, issues may arise between clan members that may require intervention.

First, never call out anyone in a channel where others can hear it. It is important that any disciplinary actions take place in private. Also, when issues do arise it is better to inform the chain of the issue and allow us to fix it. It is not your job to try and correct the problem, remember you are here to have fun, so have fun.

If after initial corrective actions the situation does not get corrected by the individual then further action can take place.

Normally, actions will take a progressive system where the first step is a warning, continual issues may result in demotion, or removal from the clan.

This rule will apply to all members.

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“It is not your job to try and correct the problem, remember you are here to have fun, so have fun.�

Volume 1 Issue 2

T29 ‘MERICAN STEEL This article first appeared on WOTLABS.net.

The next line readers have asked me to review is the American heavy line. The US heavy line has been among the most popular and effective lines since its introduction, offering a mix of play styles and strengths with an emphasis on positional and hull down combat. This line begins with the fearsome T29. Let’s take a look.

By GARBAD

(~2300)

- Under some conditions cupola can negate your turret toughness

+ Reasonably decent dispersion with good aim time (2.3) - Poor accuracy (.42)

- Soft hull (~160 under ideal conditions)

- In 9.1, dispersion will get nerfed a good bit

- Prone to track damage, prone to fires

The T29′s firepower is a mixed bag. Its alpha is nice – enough to make opponents of all tiers respect you. But…its DPM is pretty poor. Its aim time is great…but its bloom is so-so, making it decently effective but not amazing in a peekaboom. Its depression is superb… but its accuracy is crap. Its best point is probably the penetration – 198 is effective against almost all tier 7 or below opponents, while 245 is enough to challenge even well armored tier 9s.

The T29 is a strange beast. It has by far the toughest individual piece of armor seen on any tank up to tier 7, making it invulnerable at one point… yet its hull is quite soft. The majority of tier 7 mediums can at least potentially penetrate you frontally, and your sides/back are worthless. The tank is also not a particularly effective side scraper. It has high HP, but in general toughness, its not as tough as say the IS-2. However…

MOBILITY AND VISION CONTROL:

FIREPOWER:

On the whole, its effective but not spectacular.

+ Excellent depression (-10)

PROTECTION:

+ Great APCR penetration (245), Good AP penetration (198)

+ Gargantuan Turret strength – 275+ effective armor

+ Good alpha (320), fair effective DPM

+ High hit points

GEAR AND CREW: A note about gun choice – some have argued that the 90mm spamming gold is a better weapon. It features better accuracy/fire control, slightly better DPM, a great gold round, and hopefully a fast enough reload for 2:1 shots. I find it to be less effective than alpha, and way too expensive.

+ Good view range (380) + Decently good top speed (34), enough to waddle about - Very poor camo, useless even in bushes Continue on Page 4

The Importance of Having a Plan This article first appeared on WOTLABS.NET You load into Ruinberg in your Leopard 1. Easy, you think to yourself. I know where to go – field! Two minutes later, you find your tank in smolders. Your teammates, nowhere to be found, are all in town. What went wrong? You’re a Leo. Field does seem like the natural choice.

I see this happen all the time in non-unicum players. The problem is that you skipped over steps in your thought process. What’s important is not what your initial deployment is, but rather what your plan is and what advantage you want to abuse to win the game. An initial deployment is simply a location that optimizes something. The plan is generally

By: Kraftlawrence what that something is. If you skip over looking for your advantage and formulating a plan, you will often times find your initial deployment to be bad, or at the very least, suboptimal.

In this particular game, you likely had way more heavies than they did and way less mediums. The advantage you want to abuse is your city advantage.

Therefore, in a Leo1, there should be Continue on Page 5

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Volume 1 Issue 2

T29 Continued - Fair horsepower per ton with poor pass ability = sluggish acceleration

down – ridges, cresting hills, wrecks, rubble, and much more.

- Poor turret and hull traverse, although this is somewhat negated by Whitman turning

As you can see, with a bit of creativity and knowledge of your opponent’s location and height, you can get a lot of cover out of seemingly unimportant terrain. This turns the T29 into a true beast, AND just as importantly allows you to beast in a wide variety of different positions and circumstances, including while pushing. Consider a camo sniper – even on sniper friendly maps, there are only a few places where you can hope to have good cover/camo with good draw range/angles/line of sight.

This confines the sniper to those few places, or lose his edge. By contrast, you can find an opportunity for hull down virtually anywhere, allowing the T29 to push, flex, or fight where the circumstances of a given match give the greatest need and rewards.

The T29 feels like a true heavy tank – very solid and strong. Its slow and sluggish, but not unplayable. Its moderately high top speed is enough to get where you want to go, but changing directions or flexing is a difficult feat. The T29 has very poor vision control capacity. Its camo is so poor that it should avoid view range whenever possible. I only run optics as insurance against Russian heaves and to inflate my experience when trying to light my own targets in peekaboom wars. Don’t rely on vision games at all in this tank.

LEVERAGING YOUR STRENGTHS: 1. Peekaboom Hull Down at EVERY Opportunity

Everything I have written so far makes the T29 sound like a mediocre tank – unimpressive firepower, situational armor, and meh mobility. All that is true… yet the T29 is not a generalist. Its a hull down specialist, and in its niche its monstrously powerful. Many people think of hull down in a limited way. In truth, basically anything can be used as hull

2. The T29 is one of the tiny minority of

tanks that can fight higher tiers than itself without fear. Take advantage of this.

A properly hull downed T29 is highly resistant to any opponent it sees. At the same time, the T29 APCR can penetrate and do substantial damage to any opponent it sees. It also has the advantage of being tier 7, and thus, having decent HP

even compared to tier 9s. Think about that. What other tank can hope to bounce shots, penetrate, and realistically compete against tanks two tiers above it?

As all tankers know, the bane of many a great tank is facing its peers two tiers above it. For example, a KV-1 — although a god in its own tier — is slow, unarmored, low HP fodder fighting against a potato in a tier 7 heavy.

Even a superunicum will probably find that fight impossible. The T29, however, changes that. With proper hull down and APCR spam, a T29 can routinely defeat tier 9s. On a microscopic level, that means the T29 doesn’t need to avoid so many tanks in high tier games, helping it stay in the fight, influencing games. On a tactical level, this means your low tier t9 can often tie up or even defeat tier 9s…leaving your tier 9s to fight against their tier 7s. This is a huge advantage in many pub matches.

The matchmaker shat on me, giving the other team tier 9 heavies against our t9 arty/mediums, plus they got a few free tier 8s. They are vastly heavier/harder than we are. On a brawling map like this, that’s a serious issue… except the T29 can waddle right to the decisive spot, hull down, and easily crush multiple tier 9s and 8s while being supported by two oranges in AMX M4s. The game ends early in a capfast, but you can see I cut through multiple high tier tanks without even breaking a sweat.

3. Avoid Vision Games, including Sniper Wars. Hell, avoid everything except for hull down.

Although the T29 has good view range, its camo is terrible. It also has soft Continue on Page 5

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Volume 1 Issue 2

T29 Continued body armor…and notably inferior DPM/Alpha, particularly compared to its common IS/IS-6/ etc. peers. Finally, it has crap accuracy, making it a poor sniper. So although it’s great hull down, it’s pretty mediocre at…well basically everything else.

Although my team are as dumb as rocks and I have almost no support, the crushing hull down strength of the T29 repulses a large enemy attack. In fact, the only tank that gives me trouble is the hostile T29! But although I cleave a path through their team, this game also demonstrates the weaknesses of the T29 – thanks to low DPM, I couldn’t kill their blob faster than my pubs could drown in their own drool, and that left me fighting a crossfire, the bane of hull down, which inevitably led to taking shots into my soft belly.

Fortunately, the T29 rarely is forced to fight in a situation where no hull down is possible.

Sometimes you are compelled to do so (such as an emergency reset). But be aware – if you

AREN’T actively seeking out hull down, you are just an inferior version of your peers and are throwing away one of the greatest strengths of any tank. You better have a damn good reason.

4. Fear Arty, the Bane of Tactics There are many reasons to hate clickers, and here’s one more. Hull down provides no protection at all against arty – in fact, you are generally MORE vulnerable because you will be spotted most of the time as you crest to fire. This means the clicking retards will ruin your day, and thus, replace skill based tactics with random clicks.

For those who don’t play encounter, this map is almost always determined by who can hold the middle ripples and force the perimeter campers to push into them…but WG decided that was too based on skill and so decided to let arty bypass position, cover, and skill and just roll the dice instead.

Although the T29 overwhelms the lesser tanks, who are unable to figure out how to flank or rush me, the game isn’t over that easily. The clicking retards force me to keep moving and rushing out of my defensive position, which completely shits on the idea of encounter mode. Fuck arty.

The little ones are almost as cancerous as the big pricks.

The T29 performed well. Interestingly, compared to my Tiger H play earlier this patch, it performed almost exactly as well…but the T29 happened to have much worse luck, and got a lot more tier 9 games. While both tanks are comfortable fighting higher tiers, the T29 is much stronger on many maps due to the ubiquity and strength of hull down.

CONCLUSION: The T29 has long been one of the best tanks in WOT. Although its been nerfed multiple times and is about to get one more tap, it will remain so, thanks to the overwhelming turret combined with good enough firepower and mobility.

It’s a must play in WOT. RATING: 9/10 ~With that said, please be aware that most of these article have other informational pictures or replay videos which I highly recommend you to view.

A Plan (Continued) no reason to walk into a disadvantageous field situation. Push your city advantage. It doesn’t matter if the Leo has no armor.

Here’s a replay I played recently of this situation occurring to me.

For me, the advantage I feel I

had was the number of heavies I have on my team. My plan was to go city and help enable these pubbies to crush the city as hard as possible. I expect to lose the field, so the enemy mediums will likely come flexing around later in the game. I’ll not flex

into them too early. Instead, I’ll provide vision on them when the push into our heavies’ firing line so that my heavies don’t get camo sniped, and in an ideal situation we’ll have multiple heavies fighting mediums frontally. That’s my plan.

Continue on Page 5 5

Volume 1 Issue 2

The New KV-85 In Action.

A Plan (Continued) Conversely, here’s a replay of where I didn’t really have a plan and just thought about where I could get the most damage. I did 5k damage, but you can clearly see how useless my damage is. We had much less heavies than they did, so we pretty much should win the northwest corner, but I didn’t commit in with the Obj 140. Instead, I didn’t help push our advantage, but farmed useless damage in the south. Had I pushed in with the Obj140, cleared the northwest corner of the map as well as the northern ridge, we would have had many tanks available to come back and defend the cap after we were done with our flank.

Some Advice for Creating your Plan I’d like to clarify the idea of a plan fur-

ther by saying that you don’t always want to think too reactively very early in the game. If you think “if the enemy team does A, I’ll do B” kind of mentality too early, then often times it leads to very choppy play. You put out fires here and there, and in the end, nothing ends up getting done. You really want to make sure your advantage gets abused early.

Also, you should not change your play to adjust for differences in skill. I see many people severely alter their play style if their team is full red against a team of greens and blues. They’ll play super aggressive to try to make big plays, or super passive and try to farm damage. Similarly, I see people pushing blindly onto reds because they expect

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the reds to just play badly and bounce every shot. There is absolutely nothing clever about playing shitty against a bad player. You should play as well as you can against all players.

Sometimes, you will have multiple advantages that you can choose from.

Picture if you will, a Malinovka game where you are platooning 3 tier 10 mediums. The enemy team has zero tier 10 mediums. You have nearinfinite amount of ways to play this, but which one should you pick?

You should pick the position with least risk, but still controls vision. Why? This brings us to the theory of the better player. The better player wants the game to extend the game as long as possible, because this gives both play-

Volume 1 Issue 2

Get Your Mods Updated!

New Game Mode Coming!

Unless you have been living under a tree. World of Tanks update 9.3 is active. There are many new things in the game and you really need to look on YouTube for all the information available.

There is a new game mode coming called Tank Rally. It’s basically a race mode that can be played as an individual in a random team or in a platoon setting. There is more information is ASAP Episode #25 if you are interested.

Odem Mortis mods are up and running. So if you are looking for an easy way to install mods I highly recommend this method.

Check the site from time to time as they are always updating or fixing bugs.

ers the time to make more decisions.

On average, the better player will make more correct decisions than the worse player. In this case, there is no reason to end the game with a southwest yolo (which happens so often nowadays). That’s a play that lets you “win big”, yet there’s no need to “win big”. Ultimately, it’s important to realize that a one-sided match carries the same weight as an epic struggle. After all, the match results only in a win or a loss; there are no “degrees” of winning. In other words, it’s much important for you to not lose than it is to “win big”. With 3 tier 10 mediums, you could easily just win this game through vision control.

Hopefully, you have learned a few things about how to establish a plan before the game starts. As you become better at this, your win rate will follow. After all, we’re all here to win.

Web Site Updates I have started to add training Power Points and PDF to the training page of the site. Everyone should take a look at these as they could help your game play and survivability.

I have added a link to the Odem Mortis mod pack. I highly recommend it to all clan members, as there are many mods that are very useful.

The following subjects have been added: Angling The following videos have been added: How to improve your game-3, 4, & 5

Conclusion

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Volume 1 Issue 2

ON THE WEB AT HTTPS:// CSDA12.SHUTTERFLY.COM/

CSDA is an exclusive online gaming community with a focus on maturity and teamwork.

Cynder's Shadow Dragon Army (CSDA)

Persus (Commander) Billy_Barue (Deputy Commander) Lvl4unown (Deputy Commander)

E-mail: csda1@comcast.net

(Recruiter) Osifo (Treasurer) "Wear your shadows well, and bend them to your will."

Clan Snap Shot Here is a quick snap shot for the month of Aug.:

Last Played

As of today we have 53 current members.

Average Win Rate: 47.3 Average WN8 Rating: 529 Average Efficiency: 752 The best recruiting tool available to the clan is your individual rating. Improvement of your stats improve the clan’s averages, which in turn will attract new members. Please make this your priority.

26% 24 Hours

7 days

48% 2%

30 Days 60 Days

24%

Since the last update we lost one player. I also have an Alt account that I do not play and is not accounted for in this information.

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