What is the general health of the War Thunder squadron system in 2026? How many players are in a squadron? How many of those people are in squadrons that are getting the maximum award, or less than the maximum award?
A data pull of all available squadron data from 4 days ago (Jan. 8) gives us some data to work with here. The date, right at the end of the Christmas event, should be a good one for measuring maximum squadron participation.
Some quick facts first:
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As of Jan 8, there were 103,952 squadrons in the squadron database.
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Of those, 67,365 (65%) had player activity in the previous 30 days.
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Those squadrons had a total of 1,619,230 player accounts in their membership.
The 36,568 squadrons that were inactive (not including 19 squadrons with 42 members that were freshly created on Jan. 8 and had not finished their first 24 hour activity cycle yet) had another 141,415 player accounts.
Squadrons with 0 to 1 members: Squadron names are at least sometimes never deleted, even if completely abandoned… one draws this conclusion from the fact a total of 94 inactive squadrons had 0 player members. Another 8,892 squadrons comprised only 1 inactive player account (meaning that player had no game activity in the previous 30 days).
Discord use: Approximately a quarter (9,576) of those active squadrons make reference in their online descriptions to a Discord site (although some of those are site shared by more than one squadron and some will not have put their discord invite in their description).
Squadron special tags: A total of 296 squadrons (all active), or 0.4% of all active squadrons, have special flanking characters indicating at one point recently they were in the top 100 squadrons of a squadron battles season, and chose to use the optional characters in their squadron name. Of the other options open to everyone for their flanking characters, the preference of choices is:
- Equals (= =): 18886
- Asterisk (* *): 15433
- Hyphen (- -): 14717
- Square Brackets ([ ]): 11928
- Exponents (^ ^): 5123
- Period (. .): 982
When were most War Thunder squadrons created?
The mean age for an active squadron is June, 2022, so the majority of active squadrons are less than four years old.
The graph below shows two waves of squadron creation reflecting the “two lives” of War Thunder squadrons (the oldest squadron that is still active, -1911-, was created on 12 June, 2013, one day after the squadron system was set up); an initial wave slowing in 2018, and a new wave of players that started to arrive and set up new squadrons in increasing amounts in 2019 and after, when squadron vehicles were added to the game. This second wave started to slow again in 2025. A majority of squadrons created in the first 2013-18 wave are now inactive, further pushing the average active squadron creation date to the right on the calendar.
In the first six months of War Thunder squadrons in 2013, new squadrons were being created at the rate of 28 a day, slowing to 7 by 2018. This then ramped up to today. In 2025, an average of 45 new squadrons being registered daily.
How many players in squadrons?
The distribution of players between the maximum 128 and 0 in active squadrons is strongly bimodal (see following graph) with over 50% of squadrons with 1-6 players and a large number (5,414, or 8% of active squadrons) with all 128 slots filled.
The largest squadrons with no activity were [SLABO], created in 2023, with 120 inactive accounts, followed by -shoti-, which was mass banned a while back for naval botting, and still has 99 mostly-banned player accounts.
How many squadron players are getting maximum activity rewards?
Squadron activity decides how fast squadron members accrue squadron vehicles. It is currently capped for reward purposes at 20,000 every three days, equivalent to a 30-day activity figure of 200,000. While individual situations vary, it’s reasonable to assume active players in a squadron with an activity greater than 200,000 are regularly getting something close to the maximum possible award.
The graph shows the number of active squadrons with more than 100,000 activity (orange less than 200,000, blue greater than). I’m leaving out squadrons that make less than 100,000 because they are so many it would overly distort the graph. In total, 447,560 player accounts, or 25% of all accounts with a squadron affiliation, were in one of these max-reward squadrons.
In total 3,581 squadrons (3.4% of all squadrons) were making something like maximum rewards for their members in December-January. Five of those were actually created back in the first day of squadron creation in 2013: [CSAF], [JGR], [AV], [THP] and [WTHU]. The newest squadron to get up to 200,000 activity as of Jan. 8 was Latin American squadron GUNNERS (=GuNrS=), created Dec. 2, 2025 and counting 126 member accounts.
The squadron with the smallest membership that was still hitting 200,000 activity was AVANGARD (╁AVR╂), with 35 member accounts. The squadron with the highest activity on Jan 8 was Polish squadron Liga Niezwyklych Dzentelmenow (=KRUK=), created April, 2025, with 483,608 activity (max possible with all 128 members getting their individual maximum of 3960 points over 11 reporting periods is 506,880… noting again above 200,000 the actual reward is capped).
The graph below shows most of the highly performing squadrons are close to being fully subscribed. 90% of squadrons with 200,000 activity or higher have less than 10 vacancies.
Summary and conclusions: Looking at squadron totals, creation rates, and actives vs non-actives, could be a good indicator for checking the overall health of War Thunder as a game going forward. While the second surge of players into War Thunder squadrons starting in 2019 significantly increased the base, that activity could now be slowing down again. It is interesting to note that squadron names are apparently never recycled, even when all members leave. (This can’t be the whole story, however: several years ago now I created a “training” squadron to check how it worked before creating the one I’m now in and it’s not on the list of “zero member” squadrons, so at least some names are recycled.)
The heavy use of Discord gives a sense for how much War Thunder relies on it as a third-party communications method. It shows new squadrons being created either need to have or share a Discord site (at least in countries where Discord is heavily used) and try to keep their vacancies under 10 or so to have a reasonable prospect of maximizing player rewards.
Squadron battles, while garnering some attention and having a permanent place in-game, only appears to hold the interest of a relatively small portion of the population.
Raising the squadron activity cap from 200K to say, 250K, could improve rewards for about 450,000 player accounts, but also reduce rewards and lengthen squadron vehicle reward times for well over a million other accounts in active squadrons. However, another low-cost way Gaijin could make the squadron grind more interesting would be recognize the top-100 (or top-50, or whatever) squadrons by annual activity with an award on their Gaijin squadron webpage, similar to what they do for the winners of squadron battle seasons today, to enshrine those bragging rights and give high-performing squadrons a little more to motivate their members to play more.
Previous articles in the Data Analysis series: 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1