War Thunder

Personally I don't have an issue with their being a little pushy about the ways they actually pay their own wages, y'know?

But then, I am in a financial situation where I can pay for things, so that might make a difference. And they have avoided "pay to win"; it's just "pay to advance faster" and "pay for optional machines you don't need to get to the best ones in game". There's very few premium planes that aren't just variants of planes you can research; they tend to either be just minor variants or planes not fighting for their maker's nation (e.g. lend-lease, captured). The only exceptions are things like the Australian planes or the French fighter, but they are no better than the freely available planes for their tier.

Had one of my favorite AB games so far last night. Domination mode with 3 airfields to cap. Playing American planes myself.

People tend to get too distracted by the dogfight furballing to try to actually win, so I set out to correct that. Got in my XP-55 Ascender. It's a good base capture plane. Tricycle undercarriage so less risk of pitching forward when touching down at high speed. Pusher prop so I can't break the prop off easily. Very controllable, very stable. Fast. All it needs to be perfect in the role is to be a lot tougher; like a lot of prototypes, it won't stand up long under heavy fire.

I pick the middle airfield, further away and off to the left from the one we spawn pointed at. I figure someone'll cap that one. Max power, dive to the deck, and when I start the final turn to landing I drop gear, landing flaps, and kill the throttle. Too fast to actually really land, but you don't actually need to stop, for this. Drift in, touching down a bit later than I wanted, just before halfway. Just as the runway runs out I cap, so I push the throttle to the stops and pull up just as someone's tracers start sparking around me. Gear in, flaps up, get some speed. Loop up to an Immelmann, then point down and, aha! There's an enemy trying to cap back. And I have him. The XP-55 is a wondrous gun platform, and the shot is easy. Nice fun ball of flame.

Someone else has captured the C point, so we're two to 1. There's a Bf-109 in the vicinity and he can out-turn me, so I claw for height, and then fall to someone's F 8 F from above. Typical. Ah well, I did what I came for in this plane.

So I get in the B-25 and bomb the crap out of the ground forces for a bit, and shoot down some Russian plane into the bargain. Then the F 8 F gets me again. Motherfucker.

Well, if bomber hunting is the sport of the day, I'm up for that. Time for the P-51 equipped with rocket tubes. I see two B-17s at low level, basically trolling for fighters they can shoot the shit out of as they try to score a bomber kill. They're not ready for me. They're coming toward the spawn point, low, so I can't get usefully in front of them. Instead, I pass them, flip upside down and pull back on the stick. By the time I straighten up I'm about 1.2 km behind the tail one. Hit WEP to catch up, making sure I jink around to foil the bot gunners. 800m; time to open up on the guns, because why not? But still approaching. Scoring hits, but unsurprisingly nothing crippling. I fire one rocket but it misses; too great a range. Have to get closer. Someone behind me is shooting, I see the tracers. Like me, he gets visual hits but no joy. The plane's now filling my screen, wings almost to each side of the display, and I loose the second rocket. Direct hit. The B-17 disintegrates in a fireball, wings breaking off and tumbling.

Now for the next one. It's a few km ahead, but I catch up. First rocket, kill, even easier than the first. I dogfight a bit with a Spitfire but someone else gets him, then there's a Corsair ahead strafing ground targets, and I go for it. This pilot's smart; he knows to move around and make himself a hard target. One rocket goes past him and explodes harmlessly. So do most of my Browning .50 cal shots, though it registers a few hits. Second rocket, he jinks left and it goes under his wing. But then he straightens to shoot another ground target and I have him.

We've had two bases most of this time, and are winning, but then we lose one, and then another. They have three. I try to get to base A and get a Kingcobra instead, with that damn instakill cannon taking off my wing with the first shot.

Only other tricycle nosewheel plane I have is the premium P-38, so I pick that. Someone is trying to recap the middle airfield; he fields left are the nearest and furthest airfields, so I go for the nearest — our meter's dropping rapidly and we need to stop bleeding. I get shot up a bit capping, but I succeed. The center cap has failed, but at least we're now tied with the enemy. But we're hurting. All they need to do is defend and they'll win. The center airfield is a buzzing hive of fighters, so instead I swing round as I gain a touch of altitude, cursing the slower controls due to combat damage. The plane wants to roll to the right all the time and I keep having to correct it.

An enemy's taking off from the airfield and turns toward me, tracers filling the sky, but I get him. Damn, too fast, too high now. I overshoot, bank and turn around, dropping gear and flaps as I swing level, pushing myself down to the tarmac. Oh crap, too steep an angle; my propellors shred. No more chances. But I'm rolling. I'm capturing. And I'm running out of runway. I'm not going to make it. I roll out into the fields, bounce over a ridge, momentarily airborne, and come to a spinning stop.

And somehow it counted anyway. We capture. And as it counts down to my being able to switch planes, it announces our victory.

How the hell did I pull that off?

Just unlocked the P-47, and it's quickly turning into my favourite part of the game.

When an adversary tries to pull a boom-n-zoom attack on you, the best course of action is usually to turn into the attack or try to bleed their speed in high-G turns. Not so with the P-47. You start off gaining altitude and watching as the furball develops over the middle of the map, keeping an eye for enemy strays. Sooner or later, you spot one and pounce on them. When your P-47 dives on someone with the throttle wide open, they literally have no time to react before getting pulverised from point blank range by the eight-gun armament. And by the time their buddies figure out what's happening, you're off zoom-climbing into the high heavens, with practically no one capable of giving pursuit.

I cannot overstate how wonderful the armament configuration is. With planes that use 20mm and above for their primary offensive weapon, you have to make every burst count (they usually don't) and forgo high-deflection approaches. With the Thunderbolt's 3600-round capacity, you can simply blanket the sky with metal in a long trigger pull and watch as the very fabric of reality itself unravels about your target, every time without fail. And that's before you get your hand on special offensive belts.

I haven't brought it into RB yet - after that time my P-38 exceeded VNE and broke apart, I've grown a lot more cautious about playing the aggressive vanguard there. But using it in AB has net me an average of 6 kills per match, almost all by fuselage destruction instead of pilot knockout or elevator failure. It's just the best, most entertainingly overpowered thing ever. :D

So what ammunition loadout does everyone here use?

I usually go for the universal but I'm not sure if I should change it up.

edited 30th Jul '14 6:31:09 PM by LeGarcon

Double post but whatever, it's slow.

Golden Battles thing going on as part of wrapping up the big summer event. win 3 battles and earn 100 golden eagles.

Also the usual 2x daily bonus is boosted to 4x.

Omni/universal for me.

I've started playing Soviets in tank battles, trying to get to that sweet T-34. I find it odd that there doesn't seem to be much use for light tanks, besides playing like shitty medium tanks in the early tier games.

The quality gap between the T-26 (Soviet reserve tank) and any other Soviet light tank is mindboggling.

Edit: So got my T-34! There is nothing quite like taking your circa 1941 T-34 medium tank and flanking and singlehandedly killing two KV-1s that are making a push on your capture zone.

edited 18th Aug '14 12:07:25 PM by Mars444

hey, does anyone know how good the F 4 U Corsairs are? or should I just go for the P-xx line of planes?

Anyone else notice that planes seem a bit flimsier?

I've been kills like crazy because one burst is enough to trash a plane and I wanna know if it's just me.

They definitely did make planes a little flimsier, possibly to address the issue of bombers that won't go down to 2 million hits.

I've been mostly playing Ground Forces a lot lately. I have both nations to Tier IV (just), and I'm noticing more and more how outmatched the Germans are at high B Rs in this game. For one thing, we're seeing postwar tanks against 1944 tanks, the ones they were designed to defeat. Also, I think the German shells aren't working right. They are doing much worse than the Russian ones in similar spec guns, and on Arcade you can shoot both sides' tanks, so you can test this a lot more easily. The T-34-85 should not be eating Panthers for breakfast and yet be hard to kill by them.

That makes sense. It's especially wings that feel weak to me.

And that's a bit odd on the tank front too. Never mind that in the real world the expected result was the T-34-85 killing literally everything, that's just poor game balance.

Despite what the History Channel will tell you, post-1940 the Germans were not very good at making tanks. The Panther in particular has a number of crippling design flaws. If you want "realistic" German tanks, perhaps they should catch fire by themselves, break down every ten yards, and take 30 seconds to shoot because the gunner is trying to find the target without a unity sight

EDIT: And don't forget armor that shatters after a few hits because they'd run out of molybdenum!

edited 16th Sep '14 6:15:02 AM by Achaemenid

Partial notes for the big 1.43 patch.

Adding quite a few new planes and tanks. Research trees will now look like this.

Thing I like the most are the new sounds and the like

Finally my machine guns sound like proper weapons and not adorable.

Really, neither side on the Eastern Front had tanks that were that great. Russian tanks cut a lot of corners to allow production at the speed they required, while German tanks were pushed into production when they had major design issues unresolved, and were increasingly poorly made as materials, factories and labor became worse. The Panther could only drive about 100 miles maximum before needing transmission replacement. It's quite likely more German tanks were lost due to breakdown than enemy action in the last 2 years of the war. Though that had always been a problem with tanks; they weren't all that reliable.

I did read somewhere recently that it's estimated Germany could have lasted another year of the war if they didn't waste so much effort designing wonder-weapons and embraced cheap and simple. Probably a good thing for everyone they didn't, though.

However, German tank ammunition appeared to work reasonably well during the whole war, and I think it's underperforming at Tier IV and above Ground Forces.

Also, the game makes it way too easy to knock out German guns. I don't see any reason why a German gun would break from a hit and yet a Russian one wouldn't.

So, Nazi tanks bad, Nazi tank ammo good?

Nonsense, all will cower before the perfection and might that is the T-34-85.

It's power and glory know no bounds.

I feel cheated whenever my Panther D dies while the glacis plate is facing the enemy.

Especially since I can never seem to defeat enemy Panther Ds from the front.

Soviet testing indicates that this is not the case, or at least that German ammunition was not significantly better (sometimes even at all) than its Soviet equivalent.

Ugh, I've hit a sort of wall with the English.

I'm finally breaking into Tier 4 with their planes but everything takes 61,000 or more research points and that just takes ages. Worst part is I'm about to hit that wall with the Russians and I'm fast approaching it with everyone else.

Except the Japanese. Their stuff just sucks.

But on a more positive note, I finally realized that I should probably open the combat flaps when in combat so things go much better for me now.

Achaemenid: Interesting. Thanks. Is part of the problem that the Germans are being given late-WW 2 ammo of questionable quality, but the Soviets are getting post-war ammo of better quality? I know I've seen people complaining that the Russian tanks get post-war ammo before.

I've now unlocked the Jagdpanther, which is proving to be a lot of fun. But raging at Gaijin for making it a heavy that only gets one spawn, when it's based on a medium tank chassis, and its Russian equivalent, the SU-100, gets two spawns. I don't see any reason for the Jagdpanther to be classed as a heavy. The Ferdinand and Jagdtiger, definitely.

The big ass 1.43 update is out

Lots of shiny new toys to play with, including a good number of AA tanks, the multi turreted T-35 and the Flying Wing among many others.

New hangers for everyone, crew presets, lots of goodies.

That the Germans called the Panther a medium tank doesn't make it one, any more than the wimpy Italian P40 was a heavy. The SU-100 weighs 32 tonnes, and is based on the chassis of the T-34, which weighed about 27ish tonnes. The Jagdpanther weighed 45 and a half tonnes, and was based on the Panther, which weighed about 45 tonnes. That puts it closer to tanks like the M26 Pershing, JS-family, and Churchill in weight bracket.

The Panther was conceived as a 30-ton medium (that it ended up so overweight should tell you something about its design pedigree), but the vehicle that took to the field was for all intents and purposes a heavy.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the mighty Shermans and Pershing when they introduce a US tank line.

edited 16th Oct '14 11:47:52 AM by Achaemenid

Hey anyone else feeling a framerate drop after the patch? I used to get 60+ easily but now I'm struggling to maintain 30.

I have switched computers but this new one is actually more powerful than the old one, is it just me or is something up?

Definitely was a framerate issue for some people after the patch, but it seems to have gone away.

They're making noises about a 1.45 patch in the next couple of months with at least a starter for the US ground forces tree. Can't wait. Just two nations in Ground Forces isn't the best.

1.43 is mostly better in GF. I love the kill-cam. I like the two new maps. I like how they introduced brief aircraft use into Arcade ground forces without it seriously hurting the tank combat.

The ZSU-57-2 is a bit OP in Tier V, though.