I’ve put together a table that tracks how the number of vehicles and their associated costs have changed in War Thunder over the last 5.5 years, from Starfighters (May 2020) up to Line of Contact (December 2025).
The data is taken directly from game files for each major update and includes all vehicles available at the time. For each patch, I summed up the total costs across the entire vehicle roster, excluding hidden vehicles.
This is not about individual vehicles or single tech trees, but about the overall economic scale of the game and how it has evolved as more content was added.
I’m sorry to ask, but what on earth happened with the naval numbers between la royale and sons of attilla?
Specifically the addition of 122 blue water vessels and the loss of 105 coastals?
Edit: the research cost numbers seem very odd too for the blue water vessels between new power and la royale, being less than 1 million rp for dozens of ships.
The game files are generally a mess, and I determine vehicle types based on them. I would need to analyze what has changed, but I’m fairly certain that many vessels have had their types modified in the files.
Because I determine whether a vessel is Bluewater or Coastal directly from its type in the files, you end up seeing these odd results.
There’s also another complication: Coastal and Bluewater used to be a single tech tree before the New Power update.
I could have ignored the Coastal and Bluewater separation altogether, but I still think it’s better to present some data rather than nothing.
I would need to take a closer look at vessel types in the files before the Sons of Attila update, but this would require analyzing hundreds of vehicles.
EDIT: As expected, there’s an issue with the way I detect Coastal and Bluewater vessels. It should work fine after the Sons of Attila update, when the devs finally corrected the types of many destroyers and cruisers in the files. I’ll try to find a better way to distinguish Coastal from Bluewater vessels that also works on older files.
I have the files from every major update since I started playing the game. If you want them, just PM me your Discord username and I’ll send them to you.
I don’t know what method you’re using, but it’s easy to explicitly find whether a ship is bluewater or coastal from the files, there are several ways.
You can look for it in shop.blkx and see if it’s part of the ships or the boats tree, though this is computationally “expensive” if you’re looking for just a few vehicles, but not if you’re traversing all of it anyway.
Alternatively you can look it up in unittags.blkx and see if it has "boat": true tag.
Not OP, but there is always my repo, which goes back to 1.95.
If you want to separate them even before New Power, you could build a database from post-separation data using a method I mentioned, and then use that database to determine their types when going through the pre-separation data.
Thank you for the info. I’ll take a look at it when I have more time.
I wrote a small JSON parser app focused on the wpcost file. The whole idea was to keep it simple. That was before I realized just how messy the game files can be.
My biggest issue was with some temporary event vehicles that weren’t correctly tagged in the files (missing even showOnlyWhenBought or showOnlyWhenResearch flags). Some vehicles have _event at the end of their names, others _tutorial, but some can’t be easily distinguished by their properties or names. Detecting the real vehicles available to players already made this app much more complicated than I expected.
In the case of detecting Coastal vessels, I can see that I oversimplified it. I used unitMoveType, which works fine for later updates, but the devs classified some destroyers and cruisers as fast_ship in older updates, and that’s exactly what causes this particular issue in my data.
I’ll check whether it makes sense to use unitClass instead, and if not, I’ll probably include other files to parse, as you suggested.
Because those flags in wpcost (the economy file) are only there for redundancy, as far as the game is concerned the file that counts is shop (the tech-tree file). If the vehicle is not in shop (e.g. a number of event and tutorial vehicles), it’s by nature always hidden and can’t be researched.