War Thunder

Brodur wrote:Let's see how long Nazibuck lasts against Brtidur.

lol, espcially with you wingmen about, i hear his brand new MK1 spitfire is really chewing those nazi planes up

Ahh... I'll spit all over your Spitfires with my Messerschmit BF 109

We'll shoot you down before you get the 109 

And you can't kill me anyway, still 3.2 GB of download remaining 

nazis FTW just wait till i get the frack wolf muahahahaha!

Unfortunately the latest 1.31 update of War Thunder has massively reduced the fun of this game, especially in Arcade mode. Half the planes are now useless (ie bombers and heavy fighters), game objectives are unclear with a much heavier emphasis on PvE rather than PvP, and battles are often over in 3 minutes, plus the rewards system continues to encourages selfish play rather than teamwork.

It saddens me to say this, but I can't recommend this game to anyone in its current state.  I'll certainly post here again if the situation changes.

will disagree a little there - heavy fighter/bomber planes (ie, fighters that can carry a bomb but are mostly fighters in practice) have a rear gunner on them. get a crew with decked out gunner stats and who needs a wingmate? these planes have gotten buffed if anything. seeing games where 3/4 of the team uses these in domination games makes me sad. arcade does still have its moments but it is almost required to have a 4 man squad on comms to get very far.

My reasoning for bombers isn't the effectiveness or otherwise of their gunners, but the fact that 1.31 massively nerfed their bomb splash radius.  The game doesn't have much for bombers anyway, the most lucrative targets being AI tank columns which scatter when you approach and can only realistically be bombed at extreme low level runs or by dive bombers.  The way bombs are now, you have to score a direct hit to kill a tank no matter what size bomb you drop.

Add to that the nerf in their damage models (sure, all DMs were nerfed in 1.31 but bombers unrealistically so) and they are flying coffins compared to what they were.  Machinegun-equipped light fighters can take them out.  For instance a single 7.62mm machinegun taking the tail off an undamaged Catalina - youtube vid below - and in 1.29 that was a very tough plane to kill.  I haven't seen nearly as many bombers in-game as what you're describing, but then again I immediately quit all Domination maps except for Krymsk (the single airfield one).  There's only 4 bombers I'll fly now: A-20G (USA tier 5), Havoc (Britain Tier 2 premium), SB/2M and AR-2 (Russian tiers 3-5).  They're all unusually fast and maneuverable.  Anything slow is simply cannon fodder.



The main role of heavy fighters used to be intercepting bombers, but they're no longer needed for that.  Unless you get lucky with the rear gunner, a heavy is the new soft target for lights, so they are much rarer now than they were.  There used to be a real rock/paper/scissors thing going on - light fighters could take out heavies, heavies could take out bombers, bombers could repel lights and hit ground targets to win missions.  Its not there anymore.

What really gets to me though are the broken game-modes in Arcade.  Ground Strike used to be about killing all the enemy's ground targets (or bombing his airstrip).  Now the game will start to automagically make targets disappear without anyone killing them, and can produce a completely random outcome for the battle.  Domination used to be about an air to air struggle for control of airfields, and it was epic.  Now its "race to capture your airfield, shoot a few ground targets and a few airplanes then the game will end and announce an arbitrary winner".

Worst of all is the restriction of low entry-level tiers to two horrible maps where games end in 3 minutes or less, and no air-to-air combat is required at all.  This is a potentially great game filled with amazing artwork, but from a gameplay point of view its developers sending it backwards at a fast rate of knots. Had I known that this is what they had in store for 1.31 I'd never have started this thread.

As I write this, War Thunder is partially downloaded onto my comp, so I can't really say anything about gameplay. It looks like a really pretty game, imho.

As somebody who hasm't even started WT yet, I'd like some recommendations.
What country would be the best for me to play in, what aircraft I use... That's the kind of stuff I'd like tips on...

BTW: My username will be Nightwing5...

Agent of Change and Nazibuck will tell you the jerries. me and Nite will tell you tommies.

depends what you like flying. whatever nation you pick, you will unlock the others in a matter of hours (probably faster since it took me that long to adjust to the lag compensation model in this game, and i thought MB euro server was bad).

that said, russian planes are considered OP if you want that flavor. i cant say that they're too much more OP than any other plane that has shot me down, however i would advise against this simply because im tired of seeing half the arcade players queued as soviet (dam MIG's lol, and dont start on the chaika). i went with german, didnt like it too much at first, stuck with it to tier 5 and things have improved. currently flying around with 112 B-0 (amazing dogfighter), 112 A-0 (not as maneuverable or sporting as much firepower as B-0 but center-mounted 20mm cannon is great for shooting out engines, cockpits and especially rudders), tier 5 stuka (i forget its designation), BF110 (so so, good for its tier as a dual role plane) and MC202 (my favorite at the moment, despite being a monoplane, feels like youre handling a rocket powered biplane).

longshot, you may want to add the tier 5 stuka to your list of decent bombers. last night was able to take out 8 ground targets with 2x250kg and 1x500kg bombs, survived the mayhem long enough for two more bombing runs of ground targets for a total of 18 (2 per bomb avg). its slow, for a dive bomber it feels slow. obeying it's speed limit though gives good results (ideal approach angle if you stay at 460-480 kph with 0 throttle on the dive), and it's dual 20mm FF cannons with armor piercing high explosive rounds can hurt if you happen to catch something in your sights.

should note thought that last night is the first few 'real' games ive had where i came into the game knowing how to maneuver and aim (ie, on 360-450 ping), averaging 2-3 kills a game now

also fyi if you didn't already know. game takes replays of any match you're in, you an save the replay at the end of the game. have an awesome replay saved (will record it to youtube at some point) - round last night where im evading 2 fighters on my tail for a good 3-4 minutes, flying through trees, hugging the mountain, flying through the bridge supports sideways (ended up making a huge lap of one side of the bridge and flew back through the supports) in mc202. no kills and i eventually crash when my elevators were destroyed, but then i go back in my B-0 and score 4 kills in a row

fun game, if you can put up with: planes much higher tier than yours chasing you everywhere because of just that (im exaggerating but some truth to it), teammates who ram into you while chasing the same target in a blind rage, and bombs having 1/3 the spash radius of what the visuals will have you believe (and medium and heavy tanks, only bombs take those out reliably).

Sounds like a fun game anger, I'd love to see that vid - or you can upload the replay file if you like, that works too Btw by "bomber" I meant level bombers with multiple engines, dive bombers weren't hit unrealistically hard with the DM nerf brush, although yes the splash radius is really bad.

Nightwing, please be aware that at present the low tiers have to struggle through two absolutely horrible maps that are only focused on killing ground targets (no dogfighting) with missions that end in under a minute. Things get better once you've progressed past that nonsense.

ill upload the replay file, easier, and you get a choice of viewing angle

will edit post with link tonight (at work atm).

it seems the germans have some pretty cool bombers and maneuverable fighters at higher tiers, as for the brits i think they have a lot of firepower specially the  spitfires most brit planes are made to one-shot kill anything if you have good aim, as for the maneuverability i can't tell you because i only played germans but the spitfire and hurriken aren't exactly easy to shake from your six
the US seems to have pretty powerfull planes while being fast and durable
the japs have some of the most maneuverable fighters and some crazy op tail gunners:p
and the russians, some planes are op not all of them but you can imagine that everybody who picked russia are going to use the op ones

personally, if guns (and lots of them) are your thing, go with brits. their planes have silly amounts of firepower. if youre going for the typhoon, its predecessors have 12 guns mounted. 12. german planes in the same tiers are lucky to have more than 4.

Also its important to get the convergence distance right, especially with the brits as all those machineguns are lined up out on the wings.  You want to pay close attention to the range targets are at when you typically land the most shots, and this'll be different for each player, and then set convergence to that distance so all the bullets arrive in a tight concentrated group.

Imagine receiving a fully-converged burst from a Hurricane Mk2 - that's 12 machineguns on a low tier plane.

For planes with nose-mounted weapons its not as important for obvious reasons.  Cannon, especially at calibers > 20mm, do terrific damage to anything that gets in their way.  Some nation's cannons have significantly slower velocity than machineguns, which makes targetting a bit of a challenge when you're firing both at the same time.  The British Hispanos are only 20mm, but have the highest velocity of all the nations making them accurate out to a larger distance.

Jack: I've flown mostly Brits and Japs as I find they're the most enjoyable - their planes are much more nimble than the other nation's by a considerable stretch, yet still able to be used as energy fighters.  On the other hand, many Brit fighters don't have great cannons (or any cannons) and the Jap planes are of course made of paper, the equivalent of flying a Sidewinder.  US are the worst, as their plane's flight models are just terribly implemented - bias from a Russian game developer maybe?

My forum-whine campaign (and its not just me, there's tons of other fellow whiners) has paid some dividends in that apparently 2 additional maps (Africa Canyon and Alpine Meadows) were restored to the low tier map circulation.

So far, I've tried out USA and USSR planes.

USA strikes me as slightly more balanced(?) than the others.

USSR was absolutely horrid for me though: I tried some bombing runs, but I had pretty much no pitch control.
I ended up having to roll to one side, and use yaw to pull up... I'm gonna try it again after I get this posted, but if the problem persists, I'm not going to use USSR...

dont know about best in the game, but all german planes have at least one 'seemingly' good ammo loadout for each gun, better than omni but used like omni.

lot of love there for incendiary and AP, often in the one combo. and 20mm 'stealth' belt on the tier 5 stuka is a monster, 20mm APHE/API rounds are no laughing matter and one belt contains special german-only 20mm incendiary frag rounds (frag rounds are apparently good in some circumstances, german version of them is better, more punch to it). hell, my friggin A-0 (tier 3) with 20mm APT + incendiary & fragmentation, when it hits, very frequently either blows something off or sets the plane on fire. the only major downside i can see with german planes, the handling is all over the place - some planes in the same tier handle like a streamlined brick with wings, others like a seagull caught in an ocean breeze and (thankfully) a good few that are just right.

Just had some great games with Agent & Ferc.

It seems that the timer on Domination games has been scaled back enough to allow for some decent gameplay, though its still an abomination, there's no reason why games should be forced to end early! Similar with Ground Strike - there's "gremlins" eating ground targets, but not as often as before when it was so bad you didn't need bombers at all.

I can now happily recommend the game once again, its heading back in the direction of "fun"

that replay i mentioned earlier...

http://genesis.trinon.info/war_thunder/
file is 2013.06.18 02.35.59.wrpl

(id put a direct link but the url tag is broken at the moment, won't render from bb code - perhaps disabled?)

any other replay's worth keeping ill throw into that folder, don't hold me to it unless something amazing happens in one lol...

(ps, google has ranked the home page. was curious if it would, have not checked for years)

One thing about replays, they'll be good only for as long as it takes for the developers to release an update that changes gameplay in some way.  As soon as that happens it'll no longer let you view the old replays ... and as I speak, Gaijin are pushing an update.

Time for another vid...