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knutliott

Kurganets-25

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TL;DR - I've wanted a Premium T-15 for basically forever, and this comes pretty close.

Offense

The Kurganets has 3 separate weapon systems, 4 if you count the coaxial machine gun.  Each is good, but each also has limitations.

57mm Autocannon (AP only): good penetration (320mm), decent damage (140), good rate of fire  (200 rpm, 20-round clip, 480 total rounds), deceptively poor accuracy.  What, you ask?  Yeah the accuracy rating of 0.08 is only while it is fully aimed, which is realistically only your first shot in a burst.  It's "largest circle" accuracy is almostly meme-tasticly bad, fully encircling a Bradley at any kind of decent range (which is where you're going to want to fight, but more on that later).  You can single fire, of course, but that means you're waiting for it to re-aim after every shot which lowers your ROF to 1 shot every 1.5 seconds or so.  This is still a great weapon against any kind of soft target, though, since its pen is high enough that you don't really need to aim all that accurately.  Clip reload is 8 seconds so you can get away with only using the AC if you really want to, but there's basically no reason to do so.  See next weapon.

Bulat ATGM-TB: poor pen (30mm), good damage (320 thermobaric), insane rate of fire (120 rpm for an ATGM, 8-round clip, 320 total rounds), deceptively good accuracy.  Again, huh?  It's weird, but even though these are ATGMs they do not seem to be affected by soft kill APS.  They will get shot down by hard kill, but honestly that's a good thing since these come in clips of 8.  It's reasonably easy to hit the green areas on a T-15 with these, for instance, while a regular ATGM veers off on its way to mars if fired anywhere remotely near an Armata.  And yes, there are green spots on a T-15 - these are TB ATGMs so they have a different armor map than regular HEAT-based ATGMs.  The smoke launchers on either side of the mid hull of a T-15 are green from most angles, and you can hit them.  The front deck is also mostly green if you have a height advantage.  Translation: you can obliterate T-15s with these.  They'll also do chip damage to most armor, which is only ~50 but with 8 missiles per clip that's still decent.  The clip reload is 12 seconds which isn't bad at all.  The down side is that it takes 4 seconds to empty the clip and then you have to hold aim until all of the missiles reach your target, so you're pretty exposed while using these.

Kornet-E ATGM: good pen (1150mm), good damage (1000 HEAT), normal rate of fire (pretty standard 4 seconds between missiles, 24 seconds to fully reload, 4 missiles in the rack).  Not much to say here, as these are pretty standard high-tier ATGMs.  Meaning that they're really good against just about any target, but can be difficult to control when there's soft kill APS around.  I find that I don't actually use them all that much because in PvE the first 2 weapon systems are all that you need, but there are times when neither of them will pen the only target(s) you have available and these will.  So they're handy to have around.

Defense

Armor?  What's that?  Don't be fooled by the numbers - 90/165 Hull, 210/370 Turret for AP/HEAT.  That doesn't stop anything but coax and maybe certain fragile/weak bot autocannons.  The reality is that you have no armor and have to play as if you have no armor.  2100 base health isn't going to keep you alive for long when literally anything other than a machine gun that hits you does damage.

That said, the 20% base camo is actually useful because you're going to be fighting from range as much as you can.  Every little bit of camo helps at range as it tilts the VR battle in your favor.  Your base VR is 370, but I immediately equipped it with Augmented Optics and Telescopic Lenses and 405/475 is workable with 20% camo.  Your best bet is to rely on teammates for spotting, though, and to use Ophelia (if you have her) so that when you get suddenly spotted by a random Lieutenant you don't insta-vaporize.

Maneuverability is good - it feels like a smaller, quicker, more maneuverable T-15.  By that I mean that it still feels a bit weird because it has a rear turret like the T-15, but it isn't as long or as wide so it doesn't feel like a wallowing whale the way a T-15 does.  Note that it's technically slower than the T-15 (70 kph vs 80 kph), but it accelerates much faster so has more useful speed than the T-15.

The Kurganets also has 360-degree smoke, which is significantly more useful than either hull or turret aimed smoke especially for a fragile vehicle that needs to be able to pop smoke immediately when spotted without having to figure out which direction to aim the smoke.

Summary

In PvE you're just going to cycle back and forth constantly between the AC and the TBs, and you can do that pretty close to constantly for an entire match.  I have yet to run out of ammo for any of the weapons in a PvE match, though I'm sure it's possible.  The limiting factor is your defense which means you can't just constantly toggle weapons and keep firing, but on some maps (read: Perseus) you can come pretty close from the right sniping perch.

Due to its mix of weapons and huge ammo loads, it's pretty easy to out-damage a T-15.  The T-15's advantage is armor so realistically it's still the high tier OP King, but if you're a support fire player like me and you know how to position yourself to provide maximum fire support for your teammates, 40k and even 50k damage matches become routine (on maps where that's reasonable... some maps simply don't have enough targets to get there no matter how good your vehicle is).  Good games for me in the T-15 might reach 35k or 40k.  I'm averaging 26k damage so far in the Kurganets (which includes losses, etc) but only 21k in the T-15.  Granted that's only 35 matches in the Kurganets vs 245 in the T-15, but it feels representative to me.

I don't play PvP in AW but if I had to guess then I'd say the Kurganets probably isn't that good in PvP.  It can do a lot of damage pretty quickly, but has no real armor and isn't actually all that good at the VR game.  So I suspect it's "fine" as far as AW is concerned and hopefully it won't get nerfed.

So for me, at least, this is the best BP reward vehicle in ... possibly ever.  It's the only one that I'm likely to keep in my daily play rotation.

Edited by knutliott
added smoke info (see edit history)
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I played with it a bit last night.

To me, for all the hype that it got it is not as great everyone thought it would be.

It has some good damage output but its lack of defensive ability means you have to depend on positioning, and with positioning you have to pay attention to the map you are on.


 

"If you were not birthed with claws or fangs, store bought will do just fine."

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On 12/31/2020 at 1:57 PM, knutliott said:

 

So for me, at least, this is the best BP reward vehicle in ... possibly ever.  It's the only one that I'm likely to keep in my daily play rotation.

Finally unlocked the Kurganets-25 last night; it was a good New Year's present.

It may have its limitations, but to me it is the most fun vehicle I've played with straight out of the box.  Definitely a better feeling than the usual, "OK, need to break it in and it will improve to meh after the crew is level 4 and I throw in 3+ million in retrofits."  The Bulat is interesting; I used them to overwhelm the APS before launching a Kornet. Having 8 in the launcher also makes the damage divisible among targets. The pen on the AC is what I wished the Bofors on the Type 89 IFV would be.

I suppose that opinions are relative to other choices you might have in your fleet. As a newer player whose other TD's are the T7 Centauro 105 and the T7 NM142, the Kurganets is a thrill.

As much as we rant on the dev team, I am thankful that they designed and built this, and constructed the shop to make it accessible to the mortal [below?] average player.

DVC,

QR

 

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On 1/1/2021 at 12:08 PM, Katsumoto said:

To me, for all the hype that it got it is not as great everyone thought it would be.

It has some good damage output but its lack of defensive ability means you have to depend on positioning, and with positioning you have to pay attention to the map you are on.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell.  The hype was completely overblown which was obvious to those of us who regularly use similar "glass cannon" style vehicles.  It's not a vehicle for tight, constrained maps.  But it's great on maps where you can use range and camo to support your front-line fighters without drawing attention.

What really keeps it in check is its inability to consistently and confidently bounce incoming AC fire.  It's going to take damage even from a Tier 8 (read: non-Superior) Bradley.  If you're good enough and have teammates you can work with (whether platooned or just randos) you can make it work on a maps like Banshee, Dire Wolf (at the start), and Ghost Hunter (at the end), but it's not optimal.

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Lock the target for the Bulat and AC and fireaway...The Bulat Autotrack...you only have to worry about aiming the BIG ATGM...

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On 12/31/2020 at 1:57 PM, knutliott said:

  Granted that's only 35 matches in the Kurganets vs 245 in the T-15, but it feels representative to me.

I

Just discovered that there are upgrades to the Kurganets in the workshop that start at 80 matches... so I need to grind it some more to max it out.

Even in its current state it's getting a few blue stars on the right maps... and I am far from an expert player, so it's the vehicle, not me. :classic_smile:

DVC, QR

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1 hour ago, Quantum_Ranger said:

Just discovered that there are upgrades to the Kurganets in the workshop that start at 80 matches...

That's 80 completed daily BP repeatable contracts/BP missions/BP challenges, not 80 matches, and you don't have to complete the requirements in the Kurganets to unlock them.  It'll just happen over time as you play.

If the numbers seem like a lot, realize that there are 10 x challenges in the BP, and that each challenge has 10 levels.  So that's 100 completed right there if you get them all done.  Plus whatever mission chains and daily repeatables you get through while doing the challenges.  It should be fairly easy to get 150 completed by the end of the BP, and IIRC that's the largest number required on any of the vehicles in the Workshop.

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7 hours ago, knutliott said:

That's 80 completed daily BP repeatable contracts/BP missions/BP challenges, not 80 matches, and you don't have to complete the requirements in the Kurganets to unlock them.  It'll just happen over time as you play.

If the numbers seem like a lot, realize that there are 10 x challenges in the BP, and that each challenge has 10 levels.  So that's 100 completed right there if you get them all done.  Plus whatever mission chains and daily repeatables you get through while doing the challenges.  It should be fairly easy to get 150 completed by the end of the BP, and IIRC that's the largest number required on any of the vehicles in the Workshop.

Also, if you don't get to 150 completed missions and challenges, missions and challenges from future BPs will also count towards unlocking the upgrades.

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