Following the Roadmap: refining landscape

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
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This is one more step along the War Thunder roadmap and a lot of important steps across many locations of the game. Today, we are going to tell you about the improvements to locations within the game based on your feedback. Fixes of overshots, imbalanced positions, vulnerable respawn zones and other improvements which we promised in our big roadmap that we released in June.

Positions

Let’s start with some good news for those who drive near the “A” point of the map. Vietnam has changed - but how? The swamp has dried up and the road to point “A” has become noticeably faster, with the location itself looking more contrasted to make your eyes feel more comfortable. We have also improved the minimap on this map.

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Eastern Europe now has a lot of new natural shelters and landscape changes, which means moving between capture points will be much more secure. These changes have mainly affected the suburbs — the city is still recognizable to those familiar with it.

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El Alamein has been improved: effective positions on the tops of mountains as well as several zones have been corrected that were unavailable in the SB version of the map. And Jungle has been thinned down a bit so that battling on the map doesn’t turn into a tedious round of looking for a moving bush. We have also blocked some known passages outside the playable map zone.

Protecting respawn points

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One death isn’t a problem in most of the game modes within the game. Although, this can’t be said about death instantly upon respawn. Of course, if the enemy team honestly pushed through your defense and reached your respawn point - this situation is a bit different. We are correcting obvious positions which can get on the nerves of the enemy, even at the very beginning of the battle.

On Normandy, we have blocked the ability to shoot from respawn to respawn from the edges of the play area. This has been one of the maps where the problem was particularly obvious.

A similar problem affected Stalingrad, but on this map it was less obvious. On this map we have also blocked such shots.

On Alaska, you used to have to drive up a wooded mountain to reach a similar position. Not anymore - the drive up has been blocked.

Maginot has also been criticized by you. We made reliable protection for respawn zones on this location as well! Thank you for the feedback!

Landscape design

We are regularly making small tweaks to locations — the most attentive of you may have noticed that your favourite positions after the next update may have changed, such as a moved bush or a tree may have “grown” in a new place. Here are a few more of them, where we’ll show them with screenshots.

There was a house close to the spawn point on Iberian Fortress that, according to our analysis, made for an exceptionally effective position for one team within the match. We’ve removed the house, so that there is now one less point on the map from which a shell can fly towards you unexpectedly.

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Much more complex changes have taken place on the map Seversk-13 — we have towed away police cars that posed a problem: even after being destroyed, they left behind an invisible collision model which shells hit. And on Jungle, which we told you about in the beginning of this blog, has had some small changes: we also worked on the shade of vegetation and some other visuals.

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The most noticeable changes have taken place on Sun City. The architecture of the whole city has changed very noticeably — objects, buildings and the environment as a whole have become more diverse and modern. We have improved some textures and didn’t touch the sun — it continues to shine.

We continue to refine

While we’ve worked diligently to refine and improve the maps based on your feedback, we recognize that in the process, some new bugs or issues may inadvertently arise. We genuinely value and appreciate your continued feedback in identifying these challenges, as it aids in our ongoing commitment to enhance your experience in War Thunder. Feel free to let us know about any balance issues and bugs you may find on War Thunder maps - we will continue similar work to improve map balance in the future.

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Landscape changes are great and kudos for that, but.

  1. Some of your fixes seem to rely on shrinking then maps even further. Please don’t. We need bigger maps for top tier, not smaller.
  2. Some of the map changes are quite good, but they won’t mean anything if you don’t look at stuff like layout of the maps itself. Particularly - Spawn points and Capture points layouts.
  3. Also, increasing amount of spawn locations would do a lot to help the issue of spawn killing.
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By the way “Reduction of research and purchase cost of rank VI and VII aircraft.”
@Stona_WT
Is this a typo, & ground vehicles & helicopters might be included?
Or is this only for aircraft?

Cause I think the entire community hopes it’s for aircraft, helicopters [technically aircraft], and ground vehicles.

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Was only recently made aware that Summer means the scientific definition, so till 23rd september (I assume this has always been the case for War Thunder). So HOPEFULLY those last promises for the Summer Updates won’t be too far off in the future. Because otherwise, what’s the point to keep calling it a road map if implementations planned later in the year is already being implemented now? It is isappointing if the plan now is to implement autumn changes in the middle of the summer while promised summer changes come at the tail end…

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#3 . . this, exactly this! The spawning system has been in need of an overhaul for many years, “spawn protection” in ground battles being the only major change at all really. One of the main issues and causes of rabid spawn camping is a overall lack of varied spawn points. No map in any mode should have only ONE spawn point. And a very simple fix would be to a) add additional spawns to every map, b) remove the markers for spawn points, for the enemy team, from the mini map! Only show friendly spawns. c) make a variety of spawn points(and caps as well) so as to add variety to single maps.
A lot of the problems, particularly for ground battles, a good deal of naval battles(torpedo spam into spawns there) and to a lesser degree air combat, is the static and “Well Known” layouts, especially the spawn points. Simple changes like these suggested would a) make the games fresher, less static & predictable b) diminish, but not eliminate, spawn “aggression” in most modes & c) lead players to play a more “realistic” game style, with actual recon, seek & destroy type scenarios and make choke points, known routes & coveted sniping spots(in tanks team mates actually fight over sniping spots, instead of cooperating) less obvious, well known and predictable. Honestly, a move in this direction would freshen up tank battles a LOT, help with naval and even tho it would not totally eliminate air spawn camping, I mean campers could still do what they do, but with less ease as is the current spawning systems set up.
Lastly, I would suggest adding Progressive spawn points, much closer to the battle area be added as the game advances, based off team actions and time spent. Except for Air RB, where “one & done” is the norm, all other modes have additional spawns which a player gets after they have died. They are penalized as it is by repair bills for destroyed vehicles, but on many maps the time taken to get back in the action and help your team is far too long and in current set up the players are left with little choice and held back to a point that they may not consider respawning at all. Progressively moving an additional spawn point or two, depending on the map size, could a whole other dimension to the games.

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“Following the roadmap” what about RP changes?

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They have thousands of vehicles to look at & edit.
Patience.

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Will naval maps ever be reviewed in a similar manner?

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In “other progression” for the autumn updatss it say that 3/3 have been done, but the daily login via the mobile app still isn’t implemented, is it?

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1; Not an excuse, it’s reality.
2; Nothing was skipped over.

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dont bother, he already started 2 threads to complain about it, but doesnt understand that nothing got skipped on the roadmap and it just needs time

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It doesn’t need time, it’s a simple fix.

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“Simple”
You mean complicated.

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RIP 😂💀 if that’s complicated for them

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It’s complicated period.
Analyzing thousands of vehicles, and deciding which should be foldered takes time.

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add the system for automatic 50% reduction for everything as well, or they need to manualy change that with changes every time on top of that

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It’s not marked.
3/3 means it’s 3rd time out of three that “other progression” is listed on the road map.

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Once again, nothing has been skipped for now. Really, I understand, that for some Players seasons can be confusing (for example, you live in place where there are only two etc.) but for Gaijin (and majority of world (I guess) Summer ends on 23rd September. And we stick to this whatever you will say.

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Xbox got skipped on the update, it seems.

@Stona_WT Something happen that caused a delay?

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Excellent suggestions. Would definitely improve the game experience for ground battles if these were implemented.

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