A Personal Note
I consider myself an active communicator in GRB. Years of playing real-time strategy games like Wargame: Red Dragon or WARNO gave me a working understanding of coordination, flanking coverage, and threat prioritisation that I genuinely try to apply in matches. On occasion it works: a handful of players acknowledge the callout, adjust their position, and the push holds. Those moments are what Ground Battles could or is supposed to feel like.
They are also the exception. And the tools available to make them happen are, frankly, inadequate for a game that positions itself as team-based.
The Problem
Radio commands
The T menu was useful once. It isn’t anymore. Years of players reflexively spamming “Attack the A point” and “Attack the D point” regardless of context have desensitised the entire playerbase to the point where most teammates filter these commands out entirely. I switched from “attack” to “defend” callouts years ago specifically because I noticed the former had stopped producing any reaction at all. The signal-to-noise ratio is so poor that even a genuinely urgent and accurate callout drowns in the noise of everyone else’s spam.
Text chat
War Thunder’s playerbase is international, and in any given GRB match the odds of your teammates reading, understanding, and acting on a typed message are low on multiple fronts. Language barriers aside, players engaged in active combat rarely have the attention to read text in real time. I have been killed multiple times in the act of trying to type a warning to help a teammate; exposed, stationary, and unable to defend myself while attempting to communicate something that went unread regardless.
Map pings
Pings exist, but share the same broadcast problem as radio commands. Beyond that, the audio feedback is so repetitive and so poorly varied that many players (myself included) have simply lowered the volume to avoid being driven out of focus by the sound. World in Conflict, for reference, shipped with thousands of distinct voice lines across three factions with genuinely excellent voice acting. Being “spammed” by those never felt like spam. War Thunder’s equivalent does not inspire the same confidence.
- World in Conflict: Tactical Aid Voice Lines and Quotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX6vCz2zoqo
The result is that even when a player has accurate situational awareness (a flanking enemy, a vulnerable cluster of teammates, an inbound air threat) the tools to communicate it effectively to the right person at the right time do not exist. Players end up zoned out, scoped in, and killed by something three people on their team already knew was coming.
The Core Issue
Ground Battles is marketed as a team-based game mode. This suggestion is simply asking for the communication tools that would make genuine teamplay possible in practice — not just in name.
Proposed Solution
A proximity-targeted communication system: look directly at an allied vehicle, hold a designated key, and a contextual radial menu opens allowing you to send a specific message to that player and only that player.
Unlike broadcast radio commands, a targeted message arriving from a nearby ally is harder to dismiss as background noise. It is specific, it is direct, and it arrives without competing with the rest of the team’s callouts simultaneously. The game already displays compass bearings, making compass-based directional callouts a natural fit — “incoming from the North” is unambiguous regardless of which direction the recipient is facing.
Suggested Message Types
The following are proposed as a starting set — the community is encouraged to suggest additions below:
- Incoming enemy from [compass direction]
- Enemy flanking from [compass direction]
- Incoming air threat — aircraft
- Incoming air threat — helicopter
- Bomb / Missile incoming
- Please help me repair here
- Friendly fire situation / blue on blue (useful in Simulation Battles)
On the Ideal Solution
The honest ideal would be in-game VOIP. Direct voice communication between nearby allies would render most of this discussion unnecessary. However, the moderation challenges this creates are real. Toxic behaviour over voice is harder to catch and punish than text. It is worth noting that at least one major title has recently implemented AI-based voice moderation to address exactly this problem, demonstrating it is a solvable challenge rather than an insurmountable one. Whether War Thunder ever goes that route is a separate question. In the meantime, a targeted text-based system is a practical and implementable step in the right direction.
Precedent
Proximity-targeted player communication of this kind has been implemented effectively in other titles in the genre with demonstrably positive results on in-match coordination. The mechanic is not new or experimental. It is simply absent here.
Community Input Welcome
This post covers a proposed starting set of message types, but the system’s value scales directly with the variety of callouts available. If you have additional suggestions for messages that would be genuinely useful in GRB, please share them below.
- Yes
- No
- Yes, but with a different implementation
