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I posted this as a comment in another thread that said the machine needed a nerf but I felt I wrote it in depth and wanted to get everyone else's opinions on how it's performing so far.
So as a player who put the time into grinding out the machine (and with roughly 200 battles played in it both alone, in a platoon and in a platoon of 4 or 5 machines) I have to say that the tank is probably as balanced as it can be. I'll break this down in as much as I can going to each aspect of the tank and please share your experiences and opinion on my statements:
First is the gun. A four shot 100mm at 320 average with a 0.35 accuracy is pretty good to put in damage quickly with the 1.5s inter-shot reload. The alpha and reload are below the T57 Heavy for the four shot clip with the best I could get the reload to be was 25.05s where the T57 was ~22s (Don't own the T57, relied on a friend to tell me this) So looking at the gun alone it's not the best but with the turret armor and maneuverability it makes it competitive. But lets go further down before we group it all together.
The Turret, a Chieftain turret is really nice along with 10deg of depression makes being on ridgelines almost impossible to pen. This is also with the Sharpshooter and the actual Chieftain. Simply put ridgelines make the machine quite a threat but that's not often especially when you look at the subpar viewrange and lacking camo, being out spotted happens quite often to me so I rely on close/medium engagements and have a team as backup.
The Hull, an AMX 50B hull isn't that great. You cannot sidescrape at all because the armor is so thin everything will overmatch above a 90mm gun (almost every tier 10 and 9 has a larger caliber). So with that basically any angle and you lose hp, kinda bad imo except the front where the armor is the best in addition to the 10deg of depression to make that angle even sharper. Reinforcing the statement: ridgelines are the best place for this tank. The tracks don't have the best resistances which i'll combine with the engine next...
The engine: 1200hp is nice along with the 20ish hp/t ratio is pretty nice but getting up to and above 55 is a struggle on most maps. Going uphill you'll slow to about 30ish and downhill you'll fly at 68-71. This is nice to get to position quickly but you're not circling tanks with the paper hull, maybe if someone's alone sure but usually you'll lose hp regardless. Ramming is also an available option thanks to the weight, nice combo with the speed to do a good amount of damage.
Overall I find the tank pretty good playing solo but it needs the support of the team to do well. The reload makes it vulnerable and being alone it could be a death sentence. I've been in games thinking I had support just to empty my clip and find myself alone and dying so it takes a smart player to have good situational awareness and positioning. You really can't just outmaneuver anything with the size and lack of armor. I basically would judge whether or not I could clip something to death, push and dump all four rounds and then point the armor straight at the most immediate threat hoping they don't pen. Being in a platoon makes things easier as the team support is actually there and then being in a squad of four or five machines is a different story entirely...
Being in a squad of two machines you can get off eight shots in 4.5s which totals an average of 2560 damage. You can disintegrate most tanks if you work together and if you add to three or four machines together and you have a rolling death machine just clipping tanks left and right, timing the reloads and baiting shots and just speeding towards tanks really is something quite scary but it's completely comparable to a platoon of Batchat 25t. I mean five 25t, five shots of 390 is 1950 each so it's 9750 alpha. Five machines is 6400 alpha so it's well within the range of being acceptable. It's an arty magnet because it's easy to pen. The average player will have a hard time in the tank.
