AMX 50 B

The AMX 50 B is the top tier French heavy tank. It has a 4 shell autoloader with great penetration and burst damage, and is a very quick and mobile heavy tank. Trading for mobility, AMX 50 B has very weak all-round armour.

1. Armour
2. Gun
3. Mobility
4. Equipment, provisions, & consumables
5. Gameplay advice
6. Overall
7. Is it worth grinding?
8. Camo cost:
9. Tech tree overview

Armour

(The AMX 50 B in the images is using Improved Assembly)

Drag slider Right -> to view 257mm AP
Drag slider <- Left to view 330mm HEAT

Flat ground:
Upper plate 200-250mm
Hull shoulders 95mm
Lower plate 100mm

Turret upper half 140-180mm
Turret lower half 110-120mm

Armour vs all tier 9-10 tanks:
The AMX 50 B’s armour will generally perform in the same way against all enemies.

The tank has essentially no frontal armour. Most shots will very easily penetrate the tank, and the armour isn’t at all reliable.

Occasional stray shells may hit a small red area and bounce, but these are uncommon.

Armour vs HE:
HE type shells will easily penetrate this tank, its hull shoulders are only 50mm base thickness, easily penetrable when angled (higher penetration HE shells can even penetrate the hull shoulders from the front of the tank).

The turret sides are also 50mm, and the hull sides are a terrible 30mm, which even a fully stock Centurion (smallest gun in tier 9) can penetrate easily.

Gun

The AMX 50 B mounts a 120mm autoloader

-Alpha damage is 380 on AP, 320 on premium APCR, and 500 on HE
-It has 4 shells in the magazine, with a 2.73s intra-clip reload, so in 8.19s it can burst out 1,520 damage.
-Reload time is 23s, giving it 2927 DPM
-Penetration is 257mm on AP, 340mm on APCR, and 65mm on HE
–Estimated aim time is 2.9/3.1s
–Base aim time is 1.8s, but it can get down to 1.34s.
-Dispersion is 0.317/0.269
–Gun handling is 0.2/0.2/0.08, or 0.18/0.18/0.07 with Vertical Stabilizer.
-Gun depression is -10 degrees
-After-shot-bloom is only 3.500, compared to the usual 4.000, this is very good. It can be improved down to 2.835, which is extremely important as the 50B is an autoloader and has to fire its shots in quick succession.

This is overall a very good gun. Though its reload time is long, the tank has the 2nd highest burst damage in game, and doesn’t lack DPM. The intra-clip reload isn’t fast, but its good enough, and lets the gun aim a bit before its next shot.

It also has great penetration, with 340mm APCR which basically cuts through anything, especially coupled with that great aim time and dispersion.
Gun depression is amazing, but gun handling is just average for a tier 10 heavy.

Mobility

-Top speed is 50km/h, reverse is -18km/h.
-Traverse speed is 38.1 deg/s on hard terrain, and 35.3 deg/s on medium terrain.
-In game acceleration rate is shown as 22.2 hp/t, it has an extremely strong 1,380 horsepower engine for its 62 ton weight.
-Actual acceleration rate is 17.1 hp/t on hard terrain, and 15.9 hp/t on medium terrain.
–Ground resistances are 1.3/1.4/2.3

Overall this is amazing mobility for a heavy tank. The tank is very quick with great top speeds, and a high acceleration rate to utilize it. The traverse speeds are average.

Despite poor terrain resistances, the base acceleration is so high that the terrain resistances aren’t so noticeable. The tank of course doesn’t feel like a medium with 22.2 hp/t, however it is a very fast heavy and doesn’t struggle to reach its top speed.

Equipment, provisions, & consumables

The AMX 50 B tech tree from tier 7-10 has access to reactive armour consumable.

-The reactive armour consumable is essentially mandatory for a heavy tank, as it significantly helps to reduce the damage that enemy shells do to your tank.
On the AMX 50 B in particular its important, as it takes you 8.19s to fully unload the magazine. Reactive armour can fully cover that unload time, allowing you to expose your tank, unload your entire 1520 magazine, and take 27% less damage from the enemies who shoot you.

Improved Ventilation/Calibrated Shells:
AMX 50 B doesn’t need either of these, it would still be just as capable of a tank without either equipment piece, so this choice is really down to what you as a player prefer on the tank.

Improved ventilation will improve your tank’s view range, reload time, aim time, accuracy, traverse speed, and terrain resistances. All these stats will improve slightly.

Calibrated shells will improve the penetration of all shells, taking AP from 257 up to 278mm, APCR from 340 to 357mm, and HE from 65 to 70mm.

(Author note: I like to choose vents on this tank, as the AMX 50B is such a gun/mobility focused tank. Vents boost your accuracy, aim time, and traverse speed by a noticeable amount. It allows the gun to be one of the more accurate HT guns and makes dumping the magazine so comfortable. The view range also becomes boosted to the highest possible for a HT, 288.9 meters. As the penetration of this tank is already great, it doesn’t struggle at all to run vents.)

Improved Assembly:
The AMX 50 B is not an “armoured heavy tank”, and its gameplay does not involve it using its armour, hence improving it by using enhanced armour is essentially useless.

Its far better to use improved assembly, which will really benefit the tank in damage trading with its magazine. Improved assembly would increase this tank’s decent 2300 base HP, up to 2392 HP, this combines very well with the tank’s reactive armour consumable.

Vertical Stabilizer:
The AMX 50 B doesn’t have impressive gun handling, its actually quite poor for a tier 10 heavy with only 380 alpha. It already has good accuracy, and hence it doesn’t necessarily need refined gun to improve this.

Use the vertical stabilizer, its arguably the most important piece of equipment on a quick-fire autoloader. This equipment helps to reduce the dispersion bloom after you shoot, and as the 50 B has to fire 4 shots with only 2.73s between each, it often won’t be fully aimed in, and really benefits from the reduced dispersion-after-shot.

The stabilizer also just makes general gun handling better when you don’t fully aim in or are playing actively and moving around the battlefield.

Argument for refined gun:
Refined gun can and does work on the AMX 50B, if running the setup of vents, GLD, and refined gun, your gun does fully aim in within the 2.73s intra-clip reload. Such a setup gives you 0.260 dispersion ( or 0.269 without vents).

Running refined gun means you are more likely to miss shots at longer range when moving, but if you’re fully aimed in and not moving you will be much more consistent.

Gameplay advice

The AMX 50 B has a very unique playstyle in tier 10, as there are no other heavium autoloaders.

This tank is truly just a more powerful version of previous tanks in its tech tree, the AMX 50 100 and 120. It has the same basic playstyle as these tanks, so having grinded up the tree, the AMX 50 B’s gameplay should already be quite familiar.

General gameplay:
The 50 B works both on the heavy side and the medium side of the map. It plays rather the same on both flanks.

Use the mobility to take early positions or catch enemies out. The 4 shell magazine is very useful for getting an early HP advantage, as long as you trade well. With trading, if you decide to all-in with your magazine, use reactive armour. Don’t “save” it for later times in battle, the more often 

Use the HP to trade damage, you can’t rely on armour. The HP is more advantageous on the MT flank, where most enemies have less.
you can use this effectively, the bigger of an advantage it is for you and your team.
Keep using the mobility throughout the battle, flank enemies, change positions, isolate enemies, etc.

Use the clip to focus down enemies, its more effective with allies, as 1520 clip damage will bring down most enemy mediums to a 1-shot, and really cripple enemy heavies. Your enemies can just finish off these low health tanks.

Use your tank to coordinate a push. In tier 10 there are few better tanks than the AMX 50 B for making a push through enemy lines. It has the HP, it has the speed, it has huge magazine potential, and its even got reactive armour to soak up damage while it clips.
Communicate with allies and push together through enemy flanks, the AMX 50 B is the perfect tank for this.

Don’t chase damage:
Chasing damage will make you lose HP. Its easy to get carried away when unloading the magazine on an enemy.

Don’t chase enemies when they run away, just to unload your magazine fully. Often you won’t know what enemy tanks are unspotted and may be able to shoot you, and chasing the damage may cause you to lose a lot of HP to these hidden enemies.

Its best to conserver your tank’s HP. When it comes to late game scenarios, having a magazine that can burst 1520 damage, along with enough HP to be able to take a few hits, will allow you to take down enemies fairly easily.

Don’t try to focus only 1 enemy:
This is the same as chasing damage, focussing on one single enemy, while there are multiple targets you could shoot, may cause you to lose HP unnecessarily.

If there’s an enemy tank that you’re unloading damage on, but they start to retreat, or become a harder target to hit, its best to just aim for the other enemies that are exposed and easier to hit.
Again, you want to try and save your HP for the late game scenarios, where having a clip and a decent amount of HP makes your tank very powerful and capable of winning a close battle.

(Of course, if that enemy is still very easy to hit, and you don’t have to re-position your tank to hit them, then do focus them down, as its better to focus fire to get rid of enemy guns.)

Don’t rush shots unecessarily.
Though the gun is accurate, it still needs to properly aim in every shot to be effective.

If you have time to aim, then aim in fully. Don’t just unload damage as soon as the intra-clip reload has happened, as your intra-clip is actually quicker than your estimated aim time. This means that you may sometimes miss a shot, especially if its at a small target.

If you don’t have time to aim (such as in a situation where you’re about to take a shot, or be destroyed), then just unload your magazine on reload to get the most damage and then retreat.

Try to not take hits while unloading the magazine, but it won’t always be possible. If you’ve already taken a hit from the enemy, just fully unload the magazine so that they take the maximum damage in return. Nothing in game (other than the FV4005) can out-trade a fully loaded magazine from an AMX 50 B.

Don’t be afraid to reload:
The reload time of the AMX 50 B is long, but you shouldn’t be afraid to reload the magazine due to it.

If you still have 2-3 shells in the magazine, wait 4-7s before reloading (estimated time, all situations are different).
If you know an enemy is close (but gone unspotted) and you can hit them without take damage in return, or just destroy their tank, then don’t reload yet. Try to unload your remaining shells into this enemy without taking damage.

If you know that this enemy won’t be destroyed by your remaining few shells, or that you will take damage from them, then its best to reload.
Ideally, if you’re going to take damage from an enemy, you want to be fully loaded, so that you can put a full 1520 damage back into their tank.

Note that all situations are different, this is just a rough guide for how some situations may play out. Sometimes an enemy will appear just after you start reloading, sometimes there’s nothing you can do to anticipate this.
The best way to judge such situations is to try keep track of where enemies were/are on the map, and then start your reload when you are quite sure you will have the time and the cover to be fully loaded before you have to fight an enemy.

Angle your armour:
Not the front, but the sides. The hull sides are only 30mm thick, and the turret sides are 50mm thick. Any tank can penetrate HE if you just let them have your side armour. If you notice a tank shooting HE at you, angle your front to them.

Its always better to take damage from standard rounds than from HE, as HE has the potential to damage more modules, and kills your tank quicker.

Make pushes:
AMX 50 B is the perfect tank to push, it has some frontal armour, it has a good amount of HP, and its got a big magazine.

With allies to support you, you can very quickly take down a whole flank. Try to focus one enemy at a time, don’t spread the damage out. Take hits if your allies are low HP. Ram enemies, AMX 50 B is fast, is quite heavy, and has an armoured hull to make very strong rams.
Of course, use the mobility to your advantage. Often the speed of your tank will surprise enemies, and if you need to, it can also let you just run right past them and into cover.

If you can’t communicate with chat (or maybe your allies won’t reply due to language barriers), use your actions to  get them to push.
Seeing a reloaded AMX 50 B full on rushing an enemy tank at 50km/h will often encourage your allies to do the same.

Use your reload to relocate:
If you have just begun reloading your magazine, you can use this time to relocate.

Your gun won’t be loaded for another 22-23s, so you have plenty of time to find a new position where you can take on enemies from. Sometimes this will be the perfect opportunity to change flanks or to coordinate a push with your allies.

(Sometimes you won’t have to relocate, and just staying in your current position is the best possible play.)

Raise the turret:
As shown above, and in the image below, the upper half of the AMX 50 B’s turret is quite well angled.

Pointing it upwards takes it from about 240mm up to 400mm or higher.

On flat ground, you can use the full gun elevation for this, but if you’re in a gun depression position, full gun elevation isn’t needed for bounces, and it exposes an area under the gun.

If you’re not sure of the angle,  continuously move the gun up and down. It creates changing angles, which make it an inconsistent penetration for the enemy, and the armour will change between red and grey highlighting.
This should discourage enemies from shooting the area.

Trading damage:
As stated above, if you penetrate all shots, almost nothing can out-trade the AMX 50B.

Trading works as an exchange. You exchange some of your hitpoints, in order to be able to put a shot (or 4 shots in this case) into an enemy tank.

You want a favourable trade, so knowing an enemy’s reload is useful for this.

Note your tank’s unload times:
1 shell – 0s
2 shells – 2.73s
3 shells – 5.46s
4 shells – 8.19s

Trading damage with cyclic gun tanks is most optimal, they have the longest reloads for the lowest damage.
For example, you can shoot 3 shells into a T95E6 before their gun reloads. You take 400 damage, but the T95E6 takes 1140 damage. It takes you 5.46s to do this, but the T95E6 needs 7.7s to reload their 2nd shell.

Trading with most autoloaders is not optimal, as most have quicker unload times, or higher alpha.
For example, FV4005 takes only 7.5s to unload, T57 Heavy takes only 5s to unload, TVP takes only 5.7s to unload, etc.

(This is very technical, to trade perfectly you will need to know essentially every tier 10 enemy’s reload and alpha, also alternate guns like on the M-VI-Yoh.
The consistent rule here will be that, most tanks with a cyclic gun can be traded with, as long as you can put multiple shells into them. Autoloaders are much harder to out-trade due to your slower intra-clip reload.)

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The AMX 50 B has a unique playstyle for tier 10, being essentially a very large, healthy medium tank with a big bun and burst damage. It works both on the heavy and medium side of the map, and is the perfect tank for making pushes and focussing down an enemy tank.

Play it as a heavium, and be aware of your HP and how you trade damage with enemies.

Overall

Overall the AMX 50 B is a great vehicle. It features some very novel and fun gameplay in tier 10, and it has enjoyable features which make it a good tank.

The mobility is superb for a heavy tank, this is by far the quickest and most agile tech tree heavy in the game. The gun is wonderful, with very impressive penetration and burst damage, along with good aim time and accuracy. While the armour isn’t great, it can frontally resist some standard ammo, and HE and HESH shells. The side armour is very weak, and gun handling isn’t too impressive.

Is it worth grinding?

The AMX 50 B is worth grinding. Its a good and unique tank, with features that both heavy tank players and medium tank players can use in gameplay and enjoy about the tank.

Its a fun tank which can perform very well and be quite influential in the battle, but its not a beginner-friendly tank. Its not an easy vehicle to play, due to very lacking armour, and a long magazine reload. For newer players, the high level of mobility may just be a factor in getting killed faster.

This tank shouldn’t be an early line that you grind. To do well in it, you have to be fairly experienced at the game with knowledge of when to reload, how to avoid enemies, trade damage, and use a heavy tank without armour.

The AMX 50 B is a niche tournament-meta tank.
As mentioned in the review, this tank has some very desirable features with make it very good for pushing and isolating enemies, and just dealing huge damage quickly.

This will work especially well with a well-coordinated team of 7 players. Using just one AMX 50 B can easily influence the outcome of an engagement (namely when you rush them). 
While two AMX 50 Bs would be capable of dealing a total 3040 HP, this would take up an extra slot on the team.
Sometimes this tactic of using two AMX 50s to rush enemies will work well, but it often needs a proper strategy and map plan based around the AMX 50 B to go with it.

This is not a fully tournament meta tank, as it won’t see use in every tournament battle, but it does have a dedicated purpose and reason that a tournament team would use it. That reason is to make rushes and pushes, quickly and swiftly with allied tanks, to crush a flank.

Camo cost:

Tech tree overview

To get to the AMX 50 B, you have to grind up the French heavy tree. Most tanks in this tree feature very similar characteristics, the low tiers are slow with not the best armour, the mid tiers are quite well armoured with standard guns and good mobility, and the high tiers are all lightly armoured with autoloaders and great mobility.

Most of the tanks in this line have ok stock grinds, the most painful will be the ARL 44, with many modules to research and quite weak stock modules, most other tanks are quite usable when stock.

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-Tiers 1-3 are all fairly slow tanks, with decent armour (but not too reliable), and poor speed. All of these tanks have good guns and are quite a quick grind.

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-Tier 4 is the Char B1, which basically encompasses the same gameplay as all the previous tanks, but it actually has some proper armour. Its also quite mobile for a heavy tank, though its gun is low caliber.
The stock version is very slow, but the gun is fine, its advisable to grind the engines before getting the top gun.

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-Tier 5 is the BDR G1 B, a slower heavy, but with very strong armour for tier 5, and a high alpha 90mm gun. It has great penetration and gun depression and is an all round great tank.

The stock grind is decent. The tank is a bit slower and the stock turret has no armour, but it has a great stock gun.

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-Tier 6 is the ARL 44, an arguably overpowered tank, and definitely among the best tanks of tier 6. This tank is fast, with great top speed and acceleration (though slow traverse), very high DPM and penetration, with amazing hull armour and a decent turret.

The stock grind of the ARL is painful, its much slower, and the turret has no armour. You also have to grind through 1 extra gun (90mm F3), before reaching the top gun (DCA45).

Its not recommended to go to the next tank without unlocking the 2 top guns, the 90mm DCA45, and the 105mm 13TR, as both guns are competitive on the next tank.

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-Tier 7 is AMX M4 45, a good heavy tank with great mobility and decent hull armour. Its turret is strong, and it has 2 competitive guns, a 105mm with good accuracy, DPM, and 310 alpha; or a 90mm with good penetration, slightly better DPM, but worse accuracy.

The stock tank is actually decent. Though its turret armour will be weak, the tank is still quite mobile, as its “middle engine” could be unlocked from the ARL 44, same thing for the 105mm gun, which is the better gun to use for the stock grind.
The top 90mm gun is also unlockable from the ARL 44, but its not needed. The 105mm gun is the more competitive option on this tank due to its higher alpha and better accuracy.

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-Tier 8 is the AMX 50 100, it keeps the great mobility that the tanks up to this point have had, but loses all hull armour, and only has -6 gun depression. The turret is very strong, but has weakpoints and is also very small. The gun of this tank is insanely good, its a 3 shell autoloading 100mm gun, with great penetration, accuracy, DPM, and reload time. This is a great tank that encompasses the gameplay of the AMX 50B but down at tier 8.

The stock grind of this tank isn’t too bad. You’ll have to suffer with the 90mm F3 for a few battles, but this gun is still decent and you can grind past it pretty quickly. The middle gun isn’t great, but its still usable, its an autoloader but has low alpha and DPM.
The AMX 50 100 doesn’t have an upgradable turret, and you can unlock the top engine from the AMX M4 45, so there’s no engine grind either, just the guns and tracks.
(If you have already grinded up the Bat Chatillon 25t line, the top 100mm autoloader is also unlocked from the Bat Chatillon 25t AP.)

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-Tier 9 is the AMX 50 120, another great autoloader tank. This tank again takes a downgrade in armour, having both a weak hull, and a weak turret, with the same -6 gun depression. The AMX 50 120 is faster than all previous tanks, having the proper acceleration of the AMX 50 B but at tier 9. It also has a very powerful top 120mm gun, with very high penetration, good DPM, and a great damage burst. Like the previous tank though, it only has -6 gun depression. The biggest downside of the tank is abysmal traverse speed.

The stock AMX 50 120 is decent. Its still fairly mobile as the stock engine has decent power, there’s no turret upgrade, and the “top” 100mm gun is already unlocked (given that you researched it from the AMX 50 100).
This “top” 100mm gun isn’t very good though, and the 120mm armament is far superior in terms of what this tank can achieve when using it, so do grind the 120mm gun, even though its an optional module on this tank.

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Tier 10 is the AMX 50B, just like the AMX 50 120, it has essentially no armour at all, with a very weak front. Compared to the AMX 50 120, its side armour much worse (30mm compared to the 90mm on the AMX 50 120) and every tank can penetrate it with HE.

The gun again takes a step up, now gaining an extra shell in the magazine, and featuring amazing penetration and burst damage, with far better accuracy than the previous tank.

Mobility profile is also upgraded, with similar acceleration as the 50 120, but a much improved hull traverse speed.

The biggest and most significant change on this tank is its -10 gun depression, making it far more flexible than both of the previous autoloader tanks in this tree.

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