My unoriginal take on War Thunder

Game Discussion General Discussion
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Short remark is it in NOT friendly to new/casual players

I see people play the game, and I always fall in love with it, and think- hey, the game looks fun, let’s play it again. Play for about a month maybe less, get irritated at things, and uninstall. Waiting about a year or two and come back to it. Rinse and repeat.

Think my main problem is there’s not much to really learn from; at least easily. I get there’s fourms here, discord groups, and many of willing and helpful people here to get me on the right track but when I don’t even have a clue what I don’t know I’m not sure how to ask short of ‘How do I play the game?’

My medium tank blows up instantly to AA guns, Tank Destroyer gets a ‘non-penetration’ firing at a light tank, and my light tank can’t even move out of the firing line of Tank Destroyers. Still don’t understand what a ‘Strike Aircraft’ is besides some weird fat dive bomber?

(For the sake of simplicity I’ll focus on tanks)

APCBC (Armor-piercing capped ballistic capped shell) looks like it punches into armor and explodes… good. Armor piercing is good when 80% of the tanks are, well, armored. But then I scroll down to HEAT (High explosive anti-tank) and that’s where I get confused. Anti tank… so it punches through armor? And is HE so high explosive. To me, sounds exactly like APCBC with much less letters. I can read the stats, I can see they do… different levels of penetration, okay sure. APCBC is… better? Stats wise it is but okay, maybe the HEAT is good for some certain situation.
Oh wait- what’s this… APCR (Armor-piercing composite rigid shell)… No explosion, more penetration, okay… so this is like, super armor piercing. I get the idea; HEAT - Light Tanks, APCBC - Medium, APCR - Heavy, HE - Unarmored

Then I try to use that in practice and find out APCR does punch through armor but also doesn’t do much internal damage- have to be real accurate, understand the tank layout, and hope it 8 other things that could go wrong all don’t go wrong. APCBC doesn’t penetrate certain medium tanks, or Tank destroyers even… okay I guess. Have a HEAT shell loaded but run up to a heavy tank and panic shot-… killing it for some reason? Not complaining

More onto the class of tanks I also don’t understand it. SPAA makes sense, Anti Air… though as stated before most of the ones I run into as a tank somehow shred me anyways. But the ones I got are literally shooting 12.7 mm that can penetrate 31mm at best or 15mm that penetrates 33mm so what ever. Light tank, is light… which means less armor… which means easier to blow up. Sure faster but I don’t seem to be good flanking around or… moving out of the way of shots either way. Heavy tank, heavy armor, harder to penetrate but moves slower (I have no further information as I haven’t unlocked a heavy tank yet). Medium tank. In my experience, moves slower than light tanks and las less armor than heavy tanks yet for some reason doesn’t feel like either one balances out in either way making me easier to hit and easier to penetrate

Then we get ‘Tank Destroyer’ which in my experience is the best thing I’ve ‘used’ so far on the simple fact that most of my shots are just BIG which becomes overkill for everything. Only problem- all my destroyers have little to no armor, super limited aiming without moving the tank (Which is great when one single shot can more or less immobilize you), and the reload is really really slow

I watch people play, I watch teammates play, I’ve seen nearly every type, faction, and BR vehicle kick butt easily. But me? Everything I try to do feels ‘wrong’. I could be bad, that is a very good option. I’m not even saying I want to go on kill streaks or win matches left and right but 90% of the time I spawn, drive in, get shot from the side and blow up, respawn and take it slowly, spot an enemy and the moment my turret starts to aim at them I blow up by them, respawn again, follow some allies as a convoy, either get picked off first or if I’m lucky I kill someone who killed a friend- followed by blowing up, and that’s my game. I like battlefield the game, because I can play it and my team could be getting creamed and we’re losing horribly but I could still have fun giving supporting fire, spotting enemies, reviving, etc- but I’d be playing the game having fun doing… something. Doing the air battles I do enjoy being a bomber and taking out ground forces and bases- That is literally the very thing that got me into War Thunder and yet I rarely get a chance to cross the sky before two people gun me down.

I could go on but I think everyone knows this and ‘it’s just part of the game’ or something but I only bring this up (or more to the developers) because I would pay money into this game. I would tell my friends ‘Hey let’s play this and do a thing and blah blah blah’. But I won’t, I would recommend people not to play this game unless they are simply bored like I get. I see people play the game and use recon drones in tank battles, or fly CAS to tanks, or fire at the beaches as a Destroyer and I genuinely fall in love with it ever- single- time. But I can’t seem to do it, and I don’t know where to start or what I’m doing wrong or anything.

I like the game, it is a good game, really do think that despite this pointless rant and honestly I’m only here screaming at the walls like this because I hope they could add something to it. Not even change anything, but give a silly little co op mode where you can play against AI and still feel like you’re having fun. Something where you can actually test a shot to see just how much 68 degree angles can affect your shots, or figuring out your flight moves to dodge fighters. *Or actually have something where you can mixed battles more than just World War (Or again, making it easier to find out where you could do that but my rather quick and brief google searches did point only to WW mode, which I’ve yet to partake in for obvious reasons)

-If this should be posted elsewhere than here do let me know
–If there are easy to read/understand help pages for newbies I’d also appreciate that
—I’m not checking back here that often though and by chance you have comments related to “You’re wrong” “You need to learn the game” “Get Good” I’m just… not going to care? I’ve seen from other pages like this that the game sucks and I quote “It’s never about having fun”

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The game has in-game tools that allow you to learn armor of every vehicle in the game to study where to shoot…

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Well, seems like you just don’t have enough experience with when to do what and what shell does what to what bits of what armor, and trust me that’s a very deep hole to get into.

Soon you will find out weird stuff like how the same type of shot might still have different characteristics and uses like how the StuH42G’s best HE is actually the HEAT and its all these little niche and weird details that makes a player good.

My advice is to find a lineup you like the most and stick with it until you’re good with it. Get familiar with your enemies and get familiar with your own vehicles. After this it’s just a matter of transferring your skills when you switch to another lineup.

Most importantly, get used to getting killed and learn from when you do. I’m sure you’ll be able to learn how to get kills while not getting killed after a few thousand deaths, if not, die a few thousand times more.

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Back when I played TF2, I experienced the same thing. Most of my playtime was in TF2, but I’d occasionally boot up WT and it never went well. That was back when I had a few hundred hours- I have 4.3k now.

Warthunder isn’t a game that you can just casually play for a 2 week phase then forget abt it for the next few months like minecraft. You either needa commit fully or just drop it.

Most of what you learn in Warthunder simply can’t be taught through words. You can learn a lot through videos and guides, but you really needa experience the wrong way yourself before you can truly learn the right way, and it takes a really long time.

Tank ammo is something you can be taught.

Basically, tank ammo is divided into two categories, kenetic (AP) and chemical (HE). Kenetic uses kenetic energy to penetrate armor, and chemical uses explosives.

APCBC is pretty straight forward. It penetrates armor with kenetic energy, then explodes after penetrating.

HEAT however is very special. It has explosives like a normal HE shell, however the front of the shell has a block off copper, so when it explodes, it forces the copper through a funnel at high speeds to penetrate armor.

APCBC explodes after penetrating, HEAT explodes before penetrating.

APCR, although it looks like a good tradeoff of damage v.s penetration, is complete worthless crap. The damage is ridiculously bad, but not only that, it’s actually worse at penetrating sloped armor than APCBC.

SkDoger has a really good tank ammo guide.

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This game is definitely a lot like LoL/Smite in the sense that it has a steep learning curve and game/map knowledge is a big advantage. You can test literally any ordinance at any angle up to 1000m by going to the armor section on a previewed vehicle and clicking protection analysis. If you want to test your tank “on the field” against misc. stuff you can find custom maps here WT Live // Best missions for the past week
You can practice dogfighting in customs games and fill them with bots as well but they’re not very bright. There are the assault game modes too where the game sends waves of tanks/planes at you that you gotta kill.
The game mode that you’re thinking of where you can shoot coastal targets in ships is in the events tab called Enduring Confrontation but it has a min BR requirement and is kinda rough if you don’t have something with enough punch to deal with a battleship.

As for tips, here are some on ground and there are more posts like this The Academy section.
https://forum.warthunder.com/t/tips-from-a-veteran-player-for-ground/15557
But a very big on that I think a lot of people fail to mention is that you gotta keep in mind you’re driving a tank. You’re big, your gun is in the center of your turret so you can’t “lean”, it takes time to turn your tank/turret to meet someone, there is no challenging a corner by sprinting and sliding through it unless you’re going REALLY fast, and you don’t have a stabilizer so reacting to someone is considerably harder when you’re on the move. With all of this in mind, you have to play methodically. Listen for the engines of people approaching, wait for them to come to you instead of pushing them. Even with stabilizers, if you go around a corner and someone is waiting for you, they get a free shot while you work on exposing half of your tank to get your gun out. Positioning is also super important, but that requires map knowledge that you’ll only get with experience.
As for medium tanks, I can get why you’re confused because it’s a VERY wide category. They can have very big differences in strengths and weaknesses since every nation’s doctrine has their own priorities when developing them. I’d suggest looking at the overview of whatever tank you’re curious about on the wiki to get an idea of its strengths and weaknesses.

Now air is a different can of worms. Stat cards are the biggest gaslighters of a new air player because more often than not they lie about the turn time/climb rate or you’ll be sitting there staring at 2 planes that seem identical and you have no clue what the difference is. If you want to find actually useful info about planes, Statshark and the FM calculator in it are your best friends.
As for air tips, DEFYN on Youtube has always been great for that one.