itzjustrick

So, after seeing tons of screenshots flowing around and taking it out in the test-range I made the impulsive and dumb decision to buy the Lynx Skyranger. So here a quick and dirty review of the Lynx for other perspective buyers or just people curious about the vehicle. (For the people interesting it took me 73 crates to get exactly 100 parts, with way too many rentals). Survivability The survivability of the Lynx is an interesting topic to talk about. This is because the vehicle has NERA and an unmanned turret. With the NERA your armor holds up for about all autocannons, except for an armor hole in the drivewheel once you turn your vehicle to about 75 degrees. However once your NERA is gone your vehicle is basically unarmored. In practice the NERA holds up pretty decently, but it is still recommended to try to get spotted as little as possible or only show your turret. See these screenshots for the armor against AC with NERA: And now the armor against AC without NERA: Against HEAT the armor holds up until the Lynx is getting shot at by shells with approximately 1300mm penetration. This means that it holds up for almost all atgms, only the Hellfire and AFT-10 has enough pen to reliably pen you. This however only holds when your NERA is intact. Just like with AC shots, once your NERA is gone basically all HEAT shells pen you. See the following screenshots for penetration with NERA intact: And the following without NERA: Against AP shells from mbts the armor does simply not work. After an enemy get around 680mm AP pen it will just go straight through. NERA has basically no impact on this, except for the ufp. See the following screenshots: One thing to take into account though is that your engine if mounted frontally so you will have a broken engine quite often. This also leads to quite a lot of engine fires. Your ammo rack is straight behind your gun, which does not have any armor whatsoever (since the whole turret does not have any armor to speak off). This means that your ammo rack will pop occasionally. This is also one of the reasons why you should aim to keep your vehicle hidden. Combined with the pretty decent armor for an AFV, it has 2500 hitpoints. This is the same as the M-48 GAU-8, which is very decent. The vehicle unfortunately has no APS, although the armor and unmanned turret sort of make up for it. Since the vehicle is so tall, you can hide behind all kind of rocks and only exposing your turret which other vehicles cannot do. This is also very nice. Of course the vehicle also has smokes. It has 6 smokes in total inside a magazine with 2 smokes with 2.5s reload between them. The reload of the magazine is 25s. This feels very similar to most of the other t10 vehicles and is very workable. The only thing lacking is the limited capacity of only 6 smokes. I would like to see this possibly increased in the future since you can quite easily run out in this relatively light armored vehicle. Gun Your main gun is a 30mm Autocannon. This AC has the following rounds: So we have an AP round with 80 alpha damage and 300mm penetration (which is low for t10 but very workable, especially compared to the special HE). This rounds seems to do less damage once you cannot pen a surface anymore (for example due to the angle), approximately 20 to 40 damage. We also have a very special HE round. This round is special in the fact that it has a 2m splash radius. This means that you can simply shoot over tanks and it will do lots of damage. Sometimes you also will have 2 hits if you fire at some mbts, one for the turret roof and one for the engine deck. This round has 90 alpha damage, with 72 partial-pen damage and 9 non-pen damage. On most turret-roofs you however only get the non-pen damage. The gun only has the ability to fire of it's burst at once like the t249 vigilatne. This means that you cannot just fire one shot, which makes killing infantry quite awkward. One such burst consists of 12 rounds and therefore you can do 960 damage on average with AP and 1080 damage max with HE. It takes about 1s to shoot such a burst (with gun breech) and then you have a cooldown of 2.5s. Shooting at most MBT roofs only gives about 120 damage, although on some more lightly armored vehicles you can regularly get 400-500 damage bursts. The vehicle also has a second weapon: KEM ATGMS. The stats of these KEMs are as follows: So this KEM does about 500 damage per missiles and has a reload of 15s base. You have 2 missiles in the launcher simultaneously with 2s between these shots. There is no partial reload. With the 500 alpha per shot this is very similar to a HEAT ATGM, since this KEM ignores APS. So, while it's slightly worse the tradeoff is not as bad as it seems at first sight. The only disadvantage is that they are quite hard to shoot at moving targets. According to the game, this vehicle has about 17.5k dpm (using a rammer). This is about 1.5k less than things like the Hunter or the Fatback, so this makes the vehicle slightly more difficult to play. However, we have special mission not affected by APS, which takes it slightly down. This is of course very competitive, but not best in tier like the T-15. You have 1500 AC rounds, which is plenty with 80 alpha damage. You will almost never run out of ammo. You have 12 degrees of depression, which is very workable and makes working ridgelines a treat. The elevation is 70 degrees, which means you can practically shoot straight up. Also at this point you might be wondering why my title is "This is supposed to be an AA?". This is because the spread in the burst makes it really hard to hit all shots reliably on choppers. Especially since they have 1100 health it is impossible to shoot them down in one burst. This makes it extremely awkward to shoot down choppers and therefore play AA. Mobility We compare the mobility with some other fairly similar vehicles in t9/10. These vehicles are chosen because they are different AFVs or are TDs with an AC gun: As can be seen this mobility is slightly better than the AS21 Redback, but slightly worse than the Hunter AFV. This is a very passable mobility and nothing to complain about. Only the top speed of 70 km/h is occasionally awkward. But this is a trade-off worth taking since you get some armor in return. Spotting/Camo We again compare the same tanks, now on the camo and spotting categories: As can be seen the spotting is very similar to the Hunter AFV. You get 5m more base view range with 505m which is basically best in class (and best in-game for t10). Furthermore you get 30% extra spotting through foliage to improve your spotting even more. You have 25% camo which is the same as the Hunter AFV which is very respectable, but less than vehicles like the Sphinx or the Vigilatne. While moving this is 20% camo, although these in-game stats do not show this. This is very workable, but while shooting your camo quickly drops down to around 6% or 1% while moving. This means that if you want to rely on camo to keep you hidden you need to use extra modules or a camo commander. Still I would not hold this against the vehicle since this is about par of the course for these kind of vehicles. Of course we also need to talk about the elephant in the room here, the special ability of the Lynx; the High Energy Laser. This is a laser, which you can lock on to an enemy vehicle in around 2.5s which will decrease their vision by 60% for 10s, after which it has a reload of 15s. Apparently you also see this laser in-game while activating, but I have not actually seen this myself, so this might be bugged. However, in my opinion this is a bit of a gimmick, sort of useful in a 1v1, but it takes too long to activate to be useful in general. Especially since you cannot shoot while activating it. Furthermore since you can only limit the view range of 1 vehicle, this feature is not useful while fighting large group of enemies. Final thoughts To start of my final thoughts I just want to note that buying such a lootbox premium is just simply not worth it. (You can calculate yourself what it cost, but whales gonna whale, expect to pay around €175.) However, with that in mind I will still give this a normal score like it would be more easily obtainable. To start of with, I want to state that the vehicle is simply quite buggy still. For example you cannot fire your missiles while your AC is on cooldown. There also is a reload of the main AC once you run out and replenish your ammo (although this did not occur 100% of the time.) As stated before I don't feel like the laser actually shows, but this might be me just ignoring it. However, I don't feel like this substracts too much from the overall experience of playing this vehicle. All in all I would rate this vehicle with approximately a 8/10. The vehicle has decent armor, which will occasionally help you survive situations you should not be able to survive. You however should not rely on this armor, as it chips away quite quickly and the engine is placed quite awkwardly. The unmanned turret however means that you can just show this turret and will be relatively safe. However since there is no real mobility trade-off this is still really nice to have. The gun is not the best in t10 with the bursts, which limits your damage output, but really fun to use with the ability to kill MBTs through the roof. The AP AC is also very competitive, and you can delete enemies quite quickly, although you don't have the ability to delete stuff by just holding down your mouse button. Furthermore, the fact that you have 12 degrees of depression and the fact that the vehicle is really tall makes ridgelines very nice. Furthermore, this gives you the ability to hide the hull behind weird rocks, which gives you the ability to play all kind of positions other vehicles just simply cannot. The score is not higher since this is a prime vision control vehicle in which you should make sure to not get shot at if you can help it. This combined with this gun makes it hard to play. Which brings down the score. The vision control abilities are very good however and basically together with the Sphinx best in-tier/ in-game. The mobility is good enough, with only a slight disadvantage in the top speed. Recommendations Commander For the commander you can basically go two ways. You can firstly use a vision control commander like Erin or Juan Carlos. This is definitely recommended for PvP. For PvE, you however can also chose to use a damage output commander. I would do this through increasing the damage per shot, so using Cortez or Kwon Han through the "fake Cortez" build. As stated by Sladjan, using Sabrina might also be a good choice in PvE since this commander increases your module damage and therefore allows you to track enemies easily. It is however up to you to also pick other commanders Equipment Honestly up to you, but the same with all AFVs. I would personally use: - Ballistic Computer - Better aim-speed to improve the accuracy in the burst so your shot do not go all over the place. - Optics - Improve the vision control abilities of your vehicle. - Pain - Improve the vision control abilities of your vehicle. And the last slot is up to you, you will probably want to improve your DPM using a Gun Breech or improve your view range while stationary. Crew skills Driver - Off-road driving - up to you Gunner - Accuracy - Aim time Consumables The use of consumable is honestly up to you, your engine gets knocked out quite easily and you will be occasionally set on fire, so I would definitely take a fire extinguisher and repair kit. You can choose your last consumable yourself, you are not really losing crew members, so oil could be a good choice although not required. Energy drink is not that useful since you do not have a human loader. Bonus statistics Well, the statistics of my play session with this vehicle are gone because of AW fucker, but it was quite doable to get around 40-50k in Special Operations and you occasionally get 70k hard-carries (which you lose). In PvP it was a mixed bag for me with some insane 10k games, but also a lot of games where I did not manage to do more than 500 damage. However enjoy this one great PvP result:

Well, after a long grind of like 5 months and some extensions of BPs which meant I didn't have to whale I finally got the final BP reward, the ZTZ-20. After playing it a few times I found it pretty insane, especially in the armor department, so here a quick and dirty review. Survivability Well, let's start with the survivability. Let's just say it's pretty insane. Especially against AP. Even the best AP with 950mm penetration (Panzer 87 AP) cannot penetrate this tank frontally when on even ground. You will see a weakspot to the sides when you angle to around 60 degrees. The rear quarter of the tank can be penetrated quite easily, so try to not show too much of your sides. Reference the following screenshots: So how is the survivability against heat then? Well, still good but slightly less good. On even ground relatively weak HEAT, like the K2's HEAT with 920mm penetration can penetrate your lfp. However this time around you can show a lot more side armor. Although the rear part is still weak. You can show about 45 degrees of angle before your sides start getting weak. And if you have truly high pen HEAT like the AFT's 1400mm ATGMs, the front gets very weak. Reference the following screenshots: So how do I actually take such a vehicle down when I meet it? Well, as you could've guessed you should switch to HEAT and try to pen the LFP. This also regularly takes 1 or 2 crew members with it. Shooting up into the LFP also seems to work quite well. Furthermore PISH works wonders against this tank and often takes down a bunch of crewmembers and modules with it. (As can also be seen on the screenshot that follows this text block.) Also especially in PvE you can have issues with your gun being shot off, especially by snipers for some reason. But really all in all the armor is really good and you can get insane blocked scores like the following, which was just done in a regular Desert Fox game: Not only the armor is good, the turret is also unmanned and you have a decent hard-kill APS with 30s cooldown and 8 charges. Not the best in the world, but it will surely do it's job. It doesn't have APS soft-kill. It has 3400 hitpoints, which is on par with something like the Type 99a2 or K2. It also has smoke with 16 charges for some reason. It's inside a 2-smoke mag with a 3 second reload between both smokes and a 25s reload for the mag. This is very good for an MBT, although I have 0 reason why it deserves it. Gun This vehicle is quite special in the fact that it has the option to choose from 2 guns. The 125mm that can also be found in the Type 99a2 and the 140mm that can also be found in the Type 99a2-140. The stats of the 125mm are as follows: So it has a 720 alpha AP shell with 825mm of pen. This pen is quite low for the tier, but very workable. You also have a HEAT round with 930 alpha and 1000mm of pen. This is the same insane HEAT round as can be found on the Type 99a2 and it's very good. With a rammer this will give 7170 DPM using AP and 9261 DPM using HEAT. I will come back to the ATGMs in a second. The stats of the 140mm are as follows: As can be seen, you have slightly more pen on the AP rounds, with 945 alpha to spare. Your HEAT rounds however have slightly less pen with 950mm, but a higher alpha with 1181. This is however still very workable. The DPM is slightly less than using the 125mm gun with, using a rammer 6775 AP DPM and 8467 HEAT DPM. Now the ATGMs, these are WP ATGMs, which means they give WP damage like on arties. They have a 25s reload time for 4 ATGMs, with a 1.5 intra-clip reload and partial reload. This ATGMS just in general feel like they are pretty bad and get about 200 damage a missile from WP damage. The launcher has horrible elevation and depression angles, which can mean that ATGMs might go into the ground right in front of you. All in all, this feels like a pretty meh gimmick and totally not worth the tradeoff of not having HE rounds. Now, I haven't yet talked about depression and elevation angles, like the 99a2 series this is 7 degrees of depression, which can be quite awkward at times. And 14 degrees of elevation, which is fine. However, while playing spec ops you run into issues with difficulties killing infantry that is located far above you. Mobility To compare the mobility with a few other t10 MBTs we have the following statistics: (note that all these statistics are using filters since you apparently cannot compare the stock build on premium vehicles) This means that the ZTZ basically has 99a2-140 mobility. Second only to the Object 640 in practice. While playing it, it felt a bit slower than the Type 99a2-140, going only around 80 km/h on flat ground, but the statistics don't lie. All in all this is very good mobility and nothing to get disappointed about. Spotting/Camo We again compare the same tanks, now on the camo and spotting categories. Note, that there have been coated optics applied for all these vehicles: As can be seen, this means that the ZTZ basically has the second highest VR in the t10 MBT category, with 400m with optics. Only the K2 and Type 10 have better view range, beating it by 10m. The ZTZ has 27% camo for some reason, although you won't notice this much in practice, since this will drop to almost 0 while moving and firing the gun anyways. Although if you wish to, this means you will be able to make a meme Erin camo build. Final thoughts All in all this vehicle is a 11/10 would recommend. The armor, especially in PvE is just that insane. The gun is very good as well, since they are shared with the Chinese MBTs, which have had one of the best guns for a while now. Sure it doesn't have the extra AC of the other new BP MBTs, but the armor more than makes up for it. It feels pretty similar to a 490, although having an HEAT weakness instead of a AP weakness like the 490, but no other tradeoffs in the mobility, VR and the gun like the 490 has. The mobility is also really strong and you have good VR, good smokes and a decent APS system. Honestly the AW developers have done a good job and made the final BP reward OP again. Of course some people want me to not how god-awful boring this vehicle is to play. And to be fair, they are right... The armor is almost impenetrable, so if you do not blindly push forward and allow the enemy to get your sides, you will basically always survive. You just need to shoot at your enemy every 6s and everything will be all right and if you do not run out of DPM you will finish the mission alone. Much fun much wow. Recommendations Gun In general I would recommend the 125mm gun over the 140mm simply because it has better DPM and less alpha which means you lose less DPM finishing off low-health targets. However this gun has one weakness, it has just 41 rounds, which using 20 AP and 21 HEAT rounds gives a potential damage of only 38,310. Which gives issues in spec ops, especially war. In this mission I would therefore recommend either an ammo commander like Alisa or using the 140mm gun, which also has 41 shells and therefore a potential damage of 43,701 using the same ammo loadout, which is slightly better. Commander Any MBT commander will work, just use the same commander as on the Type 99a2 since the vehicle is very similar. Although you will need an ammo commander like Alisa sometimes. Recommendations go to Ophi, Douglas, Cortez, Sabrina or whatever you feel like. Rachel using the module damage build also is able to ammo rack enemies in PvE in about 1 HEAT shot generally using the 125mm (or 140mm). So, all in all, It really doesn't matter all that much. Equipment Honestly up to you, but the same with all MBTs. I would personally use: - Gun Rammer - more DPM is always better - Optics - More VR is always better - Filters - Better acceleration is always better And the last slot is up to you, you will probably want to improve your repair speed or your hull traverse speed. Crew skills Driver - Off-road driving - faster repairs - more traverse speed Gunner - Faster turning of turret - Up to you Consumables Whatever you normally use on an MBT. You don't really need a fire extinguisher, but you can be set on fire occasionally. However not enough to bring an extinguisher. A med kit and repair kit is recommended however since you occasionally lose modules and/or crew members. You don't have a loader, so an energy drink isn't that useful. Furthermore your vehicle is fast enough that you don't really need oil. Bonus statistics Some bonus statistics of my play sessions. You surely won't get a blue star every time competing against ACs since you have low-ish DPM, but you will surely end up on the top half of the scoreboard and have fun:

So as some of you might already know I decided to make a heroics guide together with a few friends about 1.5 years ago... In the meantime I lost motivation and different shit but it's now finally done... The guide is meant for people who want to see new tactics or just want to do their first run. So enjoy: A special thanks to: @Haswell @Dammit_Vadim @TeyKey1 @Stratzi @Sebastian_Grimm @Nekrosmas @Soren and all people who I forgot... And remember, if you want to find a run, visit the AL discord server

Uhm, how far have we dropped that we call 1k heat memes every 7s or something like that balanced? Maybe in PvE, but I did like 9k in my first PvP game, because I felt it was a good PvP tank. And yes, it is a good PvP tank. 1k alpha bombs every 10s with godlike mobility is just so damn good... The only thing that is bad about it is that it makes me want to use far smoke for asthetics and it's just not competitive. Oh and the 70 km/h top speed isn't that high, but combined with overdrive or whatever it is called it accelerates quite quickly and is quite nimble. Honestly, the best reward tonk to date, 10/10 would recommend, borderline OP

Where do you (SS or the devs) see the game going in the coming years?

They were in the shop last BP (EoW) and I am pretty sure I saw the cattb this BP as well... But y'know, memory might be shit etc

Great, someone misspelled my name already... Still thx Beeda xD... Anyhow, let's make my own nominations: Pesa & Stratzi, I feel like these users are both reasonably active, which is ofc always nice for mods. Furthermore I feel like these people will be able to make the though decisions necessary. Also, I don't really know that much active guys from NA timezones (on Discord at least), Spyshadow maybe, idk. So there's that.

80 games in vehicles which are in any of the groups.

I present you some nice statistics: In short, imo it looks like quite a crapbox, then again I haven't played it... It wouldn't surprise me if it is worse than the regular kornet actually. Apparently it also doesn't have partial reload (after a test in the testing grounds) but who knows. Then again it totally kills the aft, so a mandatory meme:

True, a strv103 would be nice, even while seeing how much pain the taifun is to handle... Hell, overbuff it like crazy and make it a t7 for all I care, if they don't want to add any lowtier stuff... This just feels cheap. 3 cv90s and 1 t10 mbt... On another note, see how all these models are unfinished (still in some 3d-modelling software) and compare this to previous bps announcement articles. Last minute changes or something seem quite likely imo.

I mean, yeah it has no dpm, but it has very good armor... Anyhow, I tried to make a combination of all 3 modes which ofc kind of failed. But I would say that even in pve the 490 is at least decent/good for anything that isn't pure dmg whoring. You can tank and spot quite well in it. Also if other people want to try, I'll leave this link here: https://tiermaker.com/create/armored-warfare-9-10-1009954 Yes, I know about the double t4 I made a mistake and thought one was the regular leclerc just ignore it...

I mean, yeah it has no dpm, but it has very good armor... Anyhow, I tried to make a combination of all 3 modes which ofc kind of failed. But I would say that even in pve the 490 is at least decent/good for anything that isn't pure dmg whoring. You can tank and spot quite well in it.

Decided to do something... Anyhow something something personal opinion etc, feel free to discuss etc. I took t9 and 10 both because some t9s are basically as good as a t10 and it is not that much vehicles in general. Also PvE specops pool.

Implying that the aft-10 is anywhere close to meta... That thing was ruined with .33... That said I am scared if this thing makes it into the game with retarded camo. Like wtf, do they want people to leave their game? Chipped to dead from vehicles which are hidden sounds like very fun and engaging gameplay. Ofc this is assuming it actually gets retarded camo. Furthermore, 370m is defo not blind and more than the average mbt, but what is worse, it will get sniper... Not sure where the sniper will hide since the troop compartment is removed, but realism or something. All in all, I am afraid this thing will be stupid and will powercreep the shadow and aft (and maybe even the current kornet), so I do hope this vehicle will be more balanced than I think it is...

Well, since there is no place where all commander builds are compiled together, I decided to make a thread for this... Do note you might be using a different build, which you prefer and feel free to add your own build! Ophelia "shield bitch" kitescu Well let's start with the most hated commander in the game, shield bitch. First a regular build: (Yes, you have one skill point to do whatever the fuck you want) Then the meme retarded build with less hitpoints: Erin "miss ireland" O'connel: The good build: (Thanks hassie) The I am stupid, I should use taco instead build: Alisa: ammo build: Ramming build: Juan Carlos "taco" Miramon: To get quicker to the useful skills: The other build: Some stupid build cursed guy gave me: Douglas O'Reilly Dpm build: View range build: Slightly different: Some combined build: (Thanks seb mon Amour) Sabrina Washington: (got these two from Stratzi, thx) (thx Charlie) Viktor Kirsanov: Got this one from Seb (thx mon amour), should be for module damage, so "sabrina" like module damage build: (thx again). idk, max spread and max module dmg or something stupid like that: (thanks yxlouvia) Freja: (idk whatever this is, Tey gave me) Min spread build: combined module damage build: Aim time build: (thx seb) Vincent "frenchie" Girard: Ioannis "fire guy" Sanna Fire memes: (thx Yxlouvia) Balanced build: Spotting: (Thx again) Rachel "I want to taste my enemy" Kramer: (Thx mon amour) Rashid "atgm boy" whatever the fuck that surname is: (thx) Viktor "I like my troops" Kirsanov: I like my troops build: Aleksandr "I am lucky" Cortez (Yes, I will shame you if you use this) Andrey Zaitsev