War Thunder by Gaijin

Games
21

There is a Bismarck that does videos on War Thunder, (and World of Warships), and I frequently get gushing fanboys on both games, but I don’t tell them that that’s not me.

I do have War Thunder videos up, but they’re mostly for when I do dumb stuff like this, (and again), or glorious personal moments like this one, (I still don’t know why they thought the smoke was a good idea, but I’d like to thank them for making themselves easy to track).

I’ve been playing a long time, so I can throw together a collection of Tigers and Panthers if I want to, but War Thunder is definitely a game where I enjoy the game at the very low levels, both in tanks, (as Germans and US), and airplanes, (as US and British).

I have a “1.3” tank group that features the Sd.kfz, the Pz.IVC, the Pz.38(t), the Flakpanzer I and then a reserve-rated Pz.III B. They’re all really terrible in their own way, but the fights are also really mobile, compared to what goes on up at 5.7 battle rating and above, so it’s a great contrast.

Like you, I also really like to use ground-based AAA. As in really, really. If you sort all of my vehicles by how many aircraft kills it has the M16 MGMC is 9th overall. I have 137 planes shot down just with that halftrack, (one more plane kill with the MGMC than with the Hawker Typhoon!).

If you’re on at the same time as I am, feel free to send a squad invite and we’ll push over some laughable enemy tanks together.

22

Theres a few bismarcks i saw on war thunder. im ‘mtkafka’ for pc. im still tier 1 and 2 though! BTW does squad play change anything?

Also the PZ IV C with that penetrating shell is great at br 1.0 i noticed!

What I hate though is I’ll have a BR 1.3-2.0 and i’ll be up against t-34’s! at 3.0+! Matchmaking sometimes makes no sense. But I do get the sometimes ‘rating does not matter’ kill!

23

Your BR determines who you’ll run up against and while you can engage in some shenanigans on the plane side, on Ground Forces is straight up decided by the highest BR unit in your lineup, even if you don’t use them in the battle.

So when you make a lulz 1.3 German lineup don’t forget to remove that 5.7 rating Tiger from the end or things will go badly.

The lowest T34 is a 3.3, so you shouldn’t see any of them until you get to 2.3. I run a 2.3 American lineup as one of my presets with the M5A1 and the M16MGMC and I very rarely run into T34s.

I think this is because 3.3 is a really awkward space for the Russian tech tree. You can run the 1941 and 1942 T34s alongside the KV1 all at 3.7 BR, but if you try to put together a 3.3 lineup then it’s going to have the T34 1940, the SU122 and then you’re going to have to have throw in an SU76 or one of the garbage T28s.

That’s fine when you get paired with 2.3s, but if that lineup got uptiered into a 4.3 match I’d probably want to start crying. At that level the Germans are fielding guns that’ll go through 100mm of plate at 1KM.

So hopefully that was just an unlucky one-off and the matchmaker is nicer to you going forward.

24

Meanwhile, this might be my new favourite thing. I mean sure, we could specially design an anti-aircraft vehicle to protect our mobile units, but on the other hand… we have bread truck already…

CEA9D2171264C21EBD574920226B8F9DCE1587911920×1080

25

So I got back into the loop on this to a degree recently and one of the daily awards was a collection of research boosts, so I used them to properly attack the low level Japanese tank tree.

My advice: don’t do this.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever encountered a more miserable collection of vehicles since, well, the low level Japanese plane tree.

A lot of the low tier tanks are bad, obviously, but almost all of them have a redeeming feature of one kind or another. The Japanese don’t have any - the low tier section of the tree is slow, poorly armoured and has terrible guns.

The one positive I did find, (hidden in a negative), was that the muzzle velocity of the low tier tanks was so low that you could hide behind small hills and slopes and sort of lob your rounds onto the target while they were unable to respond, as their shells actually flew in a straight line.

Of course, when the terrible APHE round falls onto its target it then does practically no damage, but you can’t have everything.

Getting frustrated with the tanks led me back to this beauty…

hnyElsx.jpg1920×1080

The Hurricane II/B. I actually keep an all Hurricane* lineup for WT, featuring the four Hurricanes that are around the 2.0/2.3 BR spot and then the Spitfire IIa that provides the asterisk the to “All Hurricane*” title.

The II/B has twelve .303 guns rather than the more conventional eight and as a result it’s a little more sluggish than most of its cousins (the Hurricane that has two 40mm cannon aside), but the four extra barrels finally give it the last bit of punch that was missing from the rifle calibre guns.

I’ve had a lot of nice rounds with it recently, including one fight where I was climbing back from a diving attack only to get surprised by a P36 appearing behind me, causing a really enjoyable one-on-one that flipped from me flying defensively to him flying defensively, to me just having enough power to catch him at the end of a prop-hang and set him on fire.

Then I had this thing, where I chased a Stuka down toward friendly ships (and their not so friendly AAA), and then every time I peeled off of one fight there’d be another enemy right behind me, or flashing across my nose chasing a friendly. I ended up downing ten enemies in about seven minutes.

26

That sure looks beautiful. Is that on PC or PS4 or PS4 Pro?

27

That’s on the PC.

It’s a surprisingly nice looking game both in the air and on the ground and I take way too many screenshots of the game.

28

Hey nothing wrong with that! I do the same thing in any game that has a scene that shows some artistic beauty.

29

Turning off the HUD and angling the camera for screenshots could be why I’m so bad at the tanks side of the game.

73CCB258A0D796D1AFD608E92E97BB383C1CB8A81920×1080

B12FBE6A829F5F574E76BB746603BB6CBA836D901920×1080

B76AB6D5C87CEFEA338D79C2F9A4C0406246EC611920×1080

30

Sorry if this has been covered upthread, @Mr_Bismarck, but are you flying those planes with a game controller? And that’s working out for you?

-Tom

31

I am not. I’m flying them with a mouse and keyboard and, at the arcade level where I usually hang out that’s actually the preferred/best method. The flight model is forgiving enough there that the extra fine accuracy of the mouse makes it much better than my HOTAS.

I love War Thunder because it’s the PC flight “sim” I can play from my couch.

32

33

Heh. If you play in sim mode then the HOTAS needs to come out, but in arcade mode mouse+kb would eat that alive.

I have to stress though that I’m playing mouse and keyboard - there’s a mouse aim mode in the game which is sort of the default for arcade and it’s good, but if you turn off some of the instructor things and remap some control surfaces to keys then you can turn and loop much faster than someone just shoving the mouse around.

You can usually tell by counter-manoeuvre number two whether the person you’re fighting is mouse aim or m/kb.

34

Definitely this… my wife and I used to play fairly regularly in arcade as a squad. Initially I was using a gamepad, and she would consistently end up around 4th, and I’d be down near the bottom of the team. When I swapped over to M+K I started placing ahead of her. Did have to remap the control surfaces though, like @Mr_Bismarck said. Elevator definitely helps especially.

35

I just had a great fight in the Hurricane II/B again. It was an air domination round where you have to loiter in a fixed area and as soon as there are no enemies in it a countdown starts to you winning.

Someone had downtiered to bring in a P47D and I climbed as fast as I could to try to make sure he wouldn’t get an altitude advantage. I saw him coming from 5km away, but kept my plane side on to his as if I didn’t know he was there.

When he got to 2km I went into a fairly steep dive, then rolled and turned into him. Suddenly the closing speeds had us at a half a km in a head-on pass and I snap-rolled to get out of his gunsights, then pulled under through a Split S, immediately getting onto his tail, because the Hurricane is more manoeuvrable.

From there he tried to shake me off and clearly knew what he was doing, but I managed to hang on behind him and eventually forced him down below 7,000 feet where I hoped my team would finish him off.

Climbing back up I got into a fight with a P36 and we spent some time looping for position when I noticed the P47 had climbed back and was hammering in on my tail again. So a the bottom of a loop in my fight with the P36 I broke off and turned it into a Split S and made a head on pass on the P47. I took a snapshot then rolled out as I didn’t want to gamble my .303s against his .50s, then got back on his tail again and forced him away once more before I swung back into the dogfight against the P36.

Then I noticed a Yak1 inbound and I really didn’t want to take too many of his 20mm cannon rounds, so I stuck on the P36’s tail, then started a really lazy rolling scissor to keep myself out of the Yak’s gunsights and to make him overshoot… he took a potshot at me and then, unable to avoid overshooting, he zoomed by right into my gunsights and I shot him down.

I then snapped back to the P36… I’d spent the last two or three minutes essentially in a dogfight with the P36 while also ignoring him to try to avoid being shot down by two other planes, but now my luck ran out. I saw the P47 coming back and was about to roll off the P36 and Split S under the 47 again when a long range shot from his .50 cals took my wing off.

As someone who has a seriously unhealthy love for the flat or rolling scissors, being able to see the Yak coming in the middle of a fight, rolling out of the way of his attack and then shooting him down was glorious. Better yet, after respawning in my Spitfire Ia I managed to shoot down the P47 pilot who’d got my Hurricane, so I squinted and called that even.

36

I tried WT some years ago, never really got into it. Progression was just too F’in slow for me. Did that ever change?

37

I guess that depends on what you’re aiming for? The tree has been filled out with a lot more vehicles, so the gap to something new is shorter. However, if you have something specific in mind, for example getting from a new account to a Konigstiger, then it’s still going to take a long time and if that’s your dream tank you should probably buy a month of premium and only play German tanks.

Personally my favourite range in these games is the lower-mid level from 2.3 to 4.0 BR and so unlocks just sort of happen for me. The reason I have both Tiger I’s is not because I went through the grind to get them, but because I always loved the various PzIV (and, having tried them, the Pz.III), so the bigger tanks unlocked for me while I was having fun playing something else.

I’m a free player (although I’ve bought packs in the past to get into the tank beta and to get my hands on the RAF Typhoon), and if I were focused purely on reaching some high level plane or tank, then yeah the grind is probably still off-putting. At least it’s free to find out.

38

Mr Bismarck gave you the long answer. Here’s the short one: yes it’s slow. They made changes during the beta so that if you want jets you’ll be grinding forever.

Paying can speed this up, as can playing realistic battles instead of only arcade.

I think I actually enjoy the lower level battles better than the jets. Maybe I say that because I don’t have jets yet and when I do encounter then I’m hopelessly outclassed :-) But tinkering around in the tech level 1 stuff seems like more fun. The cannons at higher levels are so lethal that everyone dies so quick.