The subject of the Winter Marathon "Legend of the Hunter" brings a versatile hull-down fighter with the mobility to take its optimal fighting position and the penetration to remain relevant at whatever tier it loads into. In this piece we introduce the Premium Tier VIII French Medium Tank AltProto AMX 30.
Overview
The event name "Legend of the Hunter" ties in very nicely with the characteristics of AltProto AMX 30, which has been designated the role of Sniper. For the purposes of this review, its characteristics will be compared to other Premium Tier VIII Medium Tanks with the same designation, excluding the Russian STG/Guard.
It must be said from the outset that AltProto AMX 30 is only effective when played to its strengths and does not substitute well into other roles. It lacks the DPM (Damage per Minute), universal armour layout and HP pool to brawl effectively or sustainably trade hitpoints in a shootout. Players will require focus and discipline to ensure that they do not become the proverbial square peg in a round hole, and careful selection of equipment to cover its relative weaknesses. But if AltProto AMX 30 can maintain an effective standoff distance with the enemy, rolling back and forth from either a forward or flanking hull-down position to take shots at its leisure, you can collect a nice swag of damage while preserving your HP for the final push.
The Armoured Hunter...
AltProto AMX 30's real strength lies predominantly in its well-armoured turret, facilitating 11° gun depression, and the mobility to get the vehicle into the positions that enable it to capitalise on these characteristics as early as possible. While turret armour is only 150mm on paper, the huge 240mm thick spaced armour gun mantlet provides excellent coverage to the turret face with a typical 290mm effective thickness. This will resist kinetic rounds from most same-tiered and a few over-tiered opponents. The armour is even more forgiving against HEAT shells due to 5%/100mm travel losses of the Explosively Formed Penetrator, where a roll of 305mm is required to pass through the mantlet.
Your chances of bouncing E100 HEAT are low, but never zero
The front slope might only be 60mm plate, but its 70° slope is highly effective at generating auto-bounces, particularly once the gun is downsloping beyond 5°. Assuming you even need to show your hull above a ridgeline, this makes hull-down fighting a very forgiving experience in AltProto AMX 30, although the driver's hatch remains an ever-present weakspot.
The armour profile is otherwise unreliable on other facings, with the turret easily penetrated outside of the gun mantlet and the sides generally able to be overmatched by guns exceeding 120mm calibre regardless of how well you've angled the side of the tank.
Vehicle concealment values are also below-average for tier, so reliance on foliage should be treated with caution until you're comfortable with what the combined effects of your crew skills, equipment and inherent properties of the vehicle will facilitate on the field of battle. Bushes atop ridges are a much safer place to test the theory, whereas fighting on the flat leaves you nowhere to hide if your estimate is off. Caught with its pants showing, AltProto AMX doesn't forgive mistakes due to it's health pool of just 1250HP. This seriously impacts the ability of AltProto AMX 30 to trade hits, in fact across all Tier VIII Medium Tanks, it ties 2nd worst for HP pool with Bat.-Châtillon Bourrasque and only tops out the 1200HP of Object 274a.
...with a 100mm Ballista
But what is a Sniper without its gun? The 100mm main armament of AltProto AMX 30 packs a 300HP punch with a best-in-show base penetration of 232mm. For softer targets with less than 50mm of armour, the HE shell will also land a highly-satisfying 400HP alpha damage. These shells minimise flight time with a zippy 1000m/s muzzle velocity, but the Premium APCR overtakes them at 1250m/s. With 263mm penetration on the Premium APCR, this is only surpassed among the Premium Tier VIII Sniper Mediums by the 275mm HEAT penetration available on STA-2 (which incidentally won't get through your mantlet without a serious high-roll).
The softer stats of the gun are where AltProto AMX has its role cemented as a Sniper rather than a Versatile Medium Tank. Base dispersion of 0.35m/100m starts to seriously impact its long-range credentials while an aim time of 2.40sec is sits among the upper-limit of its peers. Dynamic dispersion values (i.e. dispersion from movement, hull/turret traverse) are average, however with the exception of Lansen C the vehicles with similar or worse dynamic dispersion have a tendency to compensate through tighter dispersion or shorter aim time.
Sniper Mediums are typically characterised by either really-high DPM or really-low DPM, and AltProto AMX 30 sits among the latter with 1,877HP/min and tied worst with the Soviet STG/Guard. In this respect, it could be argued that STG has a slight advantage in a brawl since it can land 390HP with each hit of its 122mm calibre gun.
Between the low-DPM, questionable dynamic gun handling and situational armour layout, AltProto AMX 30 is ill-suited to brawling. It exists to either patiently control ridgelines or impose a relatively slow but attritive HP loss to the enemy team from flank or second line using its reliable penetration. Fighting outside of these parameters places the tank at immediate disadvantage and is likely to result in a disappointing personal result unless you're confident of a quick kill.
...and swift resolve
Touching on the final component of the Holy Trinity of Tank Warfare that is Mobility, AltProto AMX 30 ties fastest among the Premium Tier VIII Sniper Medium tanks with the German Kpz 07 RH. The French Premium arguably does it better once a few hills are involved with slightly improved Power-to-Weight ratio. The primary purpose of this mobility is to propel the tank to *that* ridge or *that* bush and ensure that the large dispersion potential and relatively long aim time are fully dialled in before the enemy makes its appearance. It also helps the tank make a handy escape to the second-line when things look they're getting to hot to handle.
Outside of driving in a straight line, the vehicle is likely to feel sluggish to many with a below-average turret traverse and the worst rate of turn on the hull amongst its Premium Tier VIII Medium Sniper peers. This somewhat contributes to AltProto AMX's inability to brawl successfully as the excellent forward mobility is not followed up by the ability to continue the turn and evade the enemy gun traversing to catch it.
Crew & Equipment
To date, players considering AMX 30 B as a top-of-the tree vehicle would be making their way to a mediocre Tier X with an even more mediocre selection of compatible Premium Crew Trainers and Credit Earners. AltProto AMX 30 presents a superior alternative to AMX CDC and M4A1 Revalorise, while maintaining a playstyle not too dissimilar to AMX 30 B. Although tier-for-tier where AMX 30 B suffers with penetration, it compensates for AltProto AMX 30's lack of dynamic gun handling and DPM. This leaves both tanks providing a rewarding experience so long as they're allowed to play to their strengths.
The testing crew wasn't purpose-built for this vehicle, and comprised a mix of an existing Lorraine 40 t crew supplemented by a Loader from a Premium Tier VI Bretagne Panther but otherwise performed adequately. Despite achieving a 8.44sec reload down from the base of 9.59sec, the absence of the Intuition skill on the Loader remained a source of lamentation. A Gun Rammer was chosen to mitigate the poor base DPM, while Improved Aiming sought to enable AltProto AMX 30 to be taken seriously as a Sniper by reducing base dispersion to 0.32m/100m in conjunction with the Brothers in Arms perk. These two items were felt to be essential for this vehicle to perform in its intended role. Improved Ventilation was fitted originally, but after repeated instances of being spotted in spite of a 380m base view range they were dropped in favour of Coated Optics. The Optics were later refitted with Vertical Stabilisers, but then the vehicle started to suffer again for the lack of Optics. As with many French vehicles, the Commander is the Radio Operator so is required to learn 4-Skills in order to be fully proficient in the eyeballs department. The current build provides an acceptable 440m viewrange.
Crew Development should ideally focus on viewrange and dynamic gun handling from the outset, and shifting into improvements to fire-resistance, ground-resistance and concealment thereafter. Intuition also facilitates a quick change of heart when the 232mm base penetration is not up to task.
Equipment choices will largely depend on what's important to you. As a second-line vehicle, optics were originally deprioritised assuming a second-line sniper playstyle with forward team-mates identifying targets. This was not found to be compatible with using the natural mobility of the vehicle to take a forward hull-down position thus often leaving friendly scouts eating dust. Optics became necessary in that scenario for early spotting and early accurate effect on target. Should other crew skills be pursued other than dynamic gun handling improvements, then the Vertical Stabiliser makes for a sensible choice. Improved Ventilation also provides subtle across-the-board improvements including a reduction in base dispersion to 0.31m/100m for the serious second-line Snipers. Enhanced Gun Laying drive also gets an honorable mention, given the 2.4sec base aim time but I'm not really sure it would help any more than the items noted.
Countering AltProto AMX 30
AltProto AMX 30 is a situational vehicle that thrives on hull-down play, but is fairly weak outside of this comfort zone. If you can get below its gun line, there are different ways to respond to the players actions. A less patient player might over-peek to attempt damage and suffer for it with return fire from your team. That often signals the time to brawl, forcing the French Premium into a one-sided fight once its underwhelming HP pool suffers further for missing a chunk. Should your opponent exercise more patience, this should give your team-mates more time to assemble and tip an ensuing brawl in your favour.
An AltProto AMX 30 operating from second-line support can be more difficult to deal with, since you are likely to be carrying out a triage of threats in between. While it penetrates well and is resistant to damage in the turret and upper-frontal-plate, it still maintains low DPM with a long aim time. You could use this opportunity to more carefully aim and penetrate shots outside of the gun mantlet, or act quickly to damage other threats between its shots.
Gameplay Review
See Also
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