And the Winner is...

At this point I've probably bored you enough with my forays into telling you which tiers and nations are better on one weee 'ittle map visited only by tier 3 and under tanks. But I have one last big reveal, the full listing. Trying to estimate just how good all 54 tier 3 or less tanks are on Province represents a lot of typing, after all, those names are long, but for you, I did it.

Now, to get you ready, I used as my baseline the T1 Cunningham, so positive values indicate it's better to have that tank than a Cunningham, while negative values indicate you're better off with the Cunningham.

Honestly, I rather surprised by just how many of these produce significant results. If you read the previous posts, you'll notice that most of these values fall in line with the findings from their regressions: Artillery is bad, TDs good, Premium Tanks good. The two best tanks to have on your team are German Premiums. Tier 1&2 British tanks are poor shadows of their counterparts.
The best:

PzKpfw II Ausf J: This one really surprises me, since looking through the data I can only find one instance of it appearing in a battle. But the data suggests (with a surprising level of significance) that having one on your side gives you a nearly 30% increase in win chance. Obviously either the tank or those who drive it are extremely good...

PzKpfw S35: Another tier 3 German premium, this one give you an extra ~25% chance of winning compared to having a Cunningham.

M22 Locust: American Premium this time, boasting a respectable +23% win chance.

FCM36 PaK40: The French Tier 3 TD seems almost perfect for this map, long view range and powerful gun. It's slowness is not a problem as there isn't much movement to do. This translates to a +22% win chance.

PzKpfw 38H735.f: The infamous Micro-Maus gets the distinction of being the only Tier 2 to make the top 5. Each one on your side give +21% chance of winning.


Obviously it's easy to find a pattern to this data. Premiums are good, Artillery Bad, the lower the tier the worse the tank. It's pretty simple to understand why this is, most people don't play the Tier 1-3 for more than a couple weeks, and even then, rarely with elited tanks and good crews. Premium tank players on the other hand tend to have more experience and are willing to pay, both gold and credits, for better crews and ammo. Further, premiums have no XP grind, so you're never going to find a premium tank fighting at less that full effect.

In an attempt to verify this theory, let us take a look at two premium tanks in particular, the T1E6, this year's gift tank and the M3 Light, the Lend-Lease M3 Stuart that players could get by finishing the tutorial. One peculiarity of the M3 Light is that when you get it, it comes with a free 100% crew, giving players with little experience a fully qualified crew much sooner than they would hav otherwise.

The T1E6, on the other hand, was gifted to everyone with a 50% crew. If you were like me, you immediately dismissed them to place your trained Chaffee crew members in it. But some people forget that it is a premium tank and can use tankers trained on other vehicles.

Comparing the M3 and the T1E6, it's fairly obvious that the M3 underperforms for it's tier, the fact that  50% crew tier 2 and a 100% crew tier 3 perform similarly is ample evidence of that. Comparing to other tier 3 premiums, the skill differential can be estimated at about 0.8, or 16% win chance. This shows that experience is not an irrelevant factor, but having a good crew is also important.


One thing you may have noticed is that the map bias we noted in the last two post is a bit higher in the full tank run. Also, we have some rather extreme biases toward high skill players in the form of premium tanks. How about we try to cut out that bias by removing the premium tanks.

Ok, I messed up a little. The T1E6 stayed in and I don't access to my regression currently to fix it. But, other than a few top tier tanks, almost every tank was close to 5% significance level. And all the low tier ones were highly significant. Plus the map bias has tweaked a bit down toward where we've had it previously.

One thing that should pop out immediately is that almost all of these tanks have negative coefficents, the M3 Stuart being the sole exception (With about 45 predictors, it's rather amazing that we only had one that truely deviated. Further, the significance level indicates just how random that value truely is, so I am going to ignore it and wait for more data). This tells me that it's not so much a question of who is better, but of who is less bad. Obvious offenders appear again, Artillery tends to be close to -0.9, some TDs are very good, others not quite so good.

The surprise winner among these tanks? The French D2 Medium, though it too is a low significance result. Beyond that, the Chi Ha and Luchs make good showings. The most surprising tank would be the classic LoLTracktor (Leichttraktor) which performs 0.11 points better than it's fellow tier ones, though this may be attributed to nostolgia driving by high skill players.

One could make a whole chart of which tanks are good, bad and balanced. But I will leave that for another time.




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