The problem with new minor nation trees

Machinery of War Discussion
1

On June 13, 2023, Gaijin published an article called Economy Revision - Our Plans in Detail as part of their response in the wake of the review bombing of the game due to prior proposed economy changes, and in that article was they said this:

Currently, War Thunder features 10 playable nations, and we have no intentions of stopping there!

Spot the problem?

That is a bad sign. That confirms that least one more nation will get added to the game as its own tree and heavily implies that multiple will be. Given that this was said on June 13, 2023, we can almost certainly expect one of those new nations in 2024. That is not good. More minor nations as their own trees are fundamentally bad for the game’s health.

Most people will never play many of the minor nations ingame. For the longest time, Italy was the least played nation ingame, and the only reason it isn’t now is because Israel was added and Israel is even less played. So that begs the question: what is the point?

Obviously it generates hype in the short term, but in the long term, what you get is a giant drain of resources to make a nation that nearly no one will play. Beyond that, the nation itself is also not fun to play. Sure, it can have some fun vehicles in it, but we are now at the point where there is no nation left that does not have a significant amount of copy-paste in it (and don’t bring up Yugoslavia because slightly modifying a vehicle doesn’t make it unique and have you seen its prospective air tree?).

The great thing about the first nine nations ingame was that they all had something unique to offer. Granted, China was a bit of a disaster upon launch, but it is now in a place where I am very comfortable calling it a worthy addition. But Sweden was the last nation left with enough stuff to make it worth having its own tree. Sweden has a really diverse, interesting, and almost entirely indigenously-designed ground tree. It had a lot of holes for a long time, but the Finnish subtree, the only significantly copy-paste part of the tree, filled nearly all of those holes, and having some copy-paste in a tree to fill holes is fine because for Sweden it was filling holes in a 90% unique tree. The exact same applies to Sweden’s air tree. Outside of the Finnish tree, the only copy-paste vehicles in Sweden’s entire air tree are the J6B, J8A, J11, T 2, B3C, J20, J26, and J26 David. All of those are rank 1 vehicles aside from the J20 which is rank 2, the J26 which is rank 3, and the J26 David which is rank 3 and an event premium. That’s a very small amount of copy-paste and the tree has true gems like the J22s, J21s, Pyörremyrsky, T18B (57), A21RB, SK60B, Saab J35XS, AJ37, and JAS39A. It’s a fantastic tree.

However, there’s an issue. Sweden is where the consistently unique options stop. Sure, Yugoslavia has quite a few unique planes and tanks, but being more unique than Israel isn’t the bar. Even Sweden already has issues. It’s helicopter tree has nowhere left to go aside from a supposedly tested Eurocopter Tiger of which no images exist, and its bluewater fleet tree has nothing above 6.0. Sweden was the last minor nation worth adding.

Then there’s the issue of Israel. Israel is a disaster of a tree that should never have been added. That is not a political statement, but rather, it is a statement about the quality of the tree and its effect on the game’s health. Nearly no one plays Israel and it’s fully understandable why. It’s an all-but-entirely copy-paste tree that doesn’t have any uniqueness until the Gal Batash and the Merkavas. It also has very little room left for expansion. In air it can go much further, but in ground it only has the Sabras, a few more Merkavas, the Pereh, Namer, Eitan, and HVSD/ADAMS. As for helicopters, the limit is already reached. All that could be added is the AH-64Ai, which is yet another Apache, an SA 342L, the AH-60 which will just be an MH-60L DAP with Spikes, the Mi-24V “Mission 24”, and the gross, disgusting monster that is the Ka-50-2. As for its naval tree, its coastal fleet is actually pretty good, but its bluewater fleet doesn’t exist outside of 3 rank 1 destroyers. Israel is emblematic of all of the problems that new minor nations can have.

But subtrees like South Africa and Hungary fix all of these copy-paste issues, and while Finland’s subtree is entirely copy-paste, it’s to a nearly entirely unique tree that needed to fill holes in lineups, so it’s still valuable. Subtrees allow you to add all the unique vehicles while leaving out the copy-paste ones (unless there’s a good reason to add the copy-paste like there is with Finland).

New minor nation trees are bad. But since we already know that at least one more is coming, let’s make 2024 the last year we ever see with a new full minor nation tree. Keep all of the unique things to subtrees.

19 Likes
3

Unfortunately, we only have 3 trees that can take a sub-tree. As Gaijin has said 7 lines make (5 researchable vehicle lines) in a tech-tree.

So unless we want more of the “Canada problem”(A nation that is split between 3(5 with stuff they built) trees) more trees are needed.

So even if you want more sub-tree you need a tree for them to go into. As we have 3 left that can take some.

1 Like
4

I do agree to an extent, nations like Yugoslavia, Korea (Both North and South in one tree) and maybe Poland deserve their own tech tree, if Gaijin plans on adding more sub trees, they’ll need to find a way to extend past the 5 lines (I personally think it’s them not wanting to redesign the UI) needs to be done, it’s starting to look very dated.

2 Likes
5

If a new TT were to be made, I’d like gaijin to make the Korean Peninsula (or just South Korea and add North Korea to China or the USSR), Pan-Southeast Asia, and India and Pakistan, though Pakistan also seems better suited to joining China as a spinoff, while India might be added to the UK
T80UD (Pakistan) T84 (Thailand) VT5 (Thailand, Bangladesh) K2 (South Korea) are all interesting loadouts

6

When it comes to Korea, I’ll just say this: 9 M48s. That says it all (yes I know Israel has 15).

3 Likes
7

There is an option which can avoid that, and that’s combined trees. Sure, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine don’t have enough indigenous vehicles each to create tech trees. But between them, they do, far closer to Sweden than to Israel or low/mid tier China.

It’s important to point out that there is still a great deal of untapped potential from nations not currently in game, and I would really hate to see these vehicles locked away behind limited time events as we’ve seen recently. WT needs a constant stream of vehicles to add to live, it makes no sense for Gaijin to hard limit themselves to only the nations in game. As long as we persuade them to avoid more low effort trees like Israel, it could work.

5 Likes
8

Sure, you could put Yugoslavia, Poland Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine together in one tree if you wanted, but the point of a tree is for the main tech tree portion of it to be a collection of vehicles from nations that are more related to each other than having close-ish relations and being in geographically the same general region.

These vehicles should not be locked beuind events, I agree with that, but as I suggested in this post, subtrees. Finland, South Africa, and Hungary are great ways of doing this. Through subtreesm, they can add only the unique stuff from each country without having to do a bunch of extra copy-paste and those unique vehicles work to bolster existing lineups and fill a lot of holes in the tree.

2 Likes
9

It’s very simple. Gaijin is running out of possible vehicles able to be added to the game. The most effective way to offset this is to add a new nation which comes with the benefit of CTRL C + CTRL V already implemented vehicles. Least effort / max profit. They do not care what it does to the game. Some people like fighting F-16 in their F-16.

IMO game was better when we only had 5 nations and historical matchmaking.

1 Like
10

sure buddy 99% lmao

6 Likes
11

Gaijin has to add new content for the game to grow, and you can only add so many subtrees to a nation before it gets extremely bloated and even more painful to grind through.
New minor nations won’t be as good as the big 3 that’s for sure, but there’s a huge amount of new content in them for Gaijin to make profit out of, and saying people won’t play them is just a guess.

7 Likes
12

So where would these nations go then? Ukraine in particular is a rather big issue, as the previously obvious answer is now solidly off the table for fairly apparent reasons.

The others aren’t much better. Do we give them all to Russia? Russia doesn’t need them, they have vehicles that’ll perform very similarly to the modifications made, which makes them less distinct, and there’s the obvious political issues of having more modern Western equipment that those nations use. Give Russia a Leo 2PL, see how well that goes down with the community.

No other nation has any distinct connection with most of these potential additions, and those that do are invariably either the US and the Soviets, two trees that absolutely do not need more variety. There’s also the previously posted issue of:

Now, I don’t buy this as a hard limit forever. I refuse to believe that a UI issue is so hard coded that it could not possibly be fixed. But it does seem as though Gaijin aren’t willing to add more than 5 lines to any one nation, regardless of the reason.

4 Likes
13

I tried to be fact-based in my other post but here is my opinion post.
The options are to either blot the tree with unneeded vehicles(and you know Gaijin will make the grind as hard as possible) or add new trees(with about the same level of grind other trees have now) I rather the new trees.

Also, War Thunder is perfectly set up for underrated nations in military games to get that. And with them also repenting everything a nation used with the more than a handful of C&P updates we have had now.

2024 should not be the last year for new nations unless they want to see the game die. with the small contact with the devs, that got the info from early learned I’ll take their word.

Like, the are more than three “Minor” (note I hate the word as it’s used to erase nations that were key to victory) nations that I would play than any other in the game right now. Like, after I’m done with my current grind I might just stop after all collect all the vehicles from the nation I want. unless they get a tree.

2 Likes
14

What about BeNeLux? They have lots of unique vehicles - for ground, air, helicopter and naval.
And most vehicles aren’t even added to the proposed TT.
If needed, they could get indonesia, congo and suriname as a sub-TT.

In my opinion there are a few indepent trees left to add.
BeNeLux, ASEAN, Swiss and Combined middle east TT (arab-iranian-afghan-iraqian).

3 Likes
15

Hello OP!

I’m very much with you - and TEC has plenty of good videos on this - we shouldn’t see any more independent tech trees in the game. For the reasons you listed, but there are even more.

However… I wouldn’t be so sure about your interpretation of Gaijin’s article. Playable nations does not necessarily mean independent tech trees. If Italy is any indication, their focus is very much on sub-trees now, and I’m expecting to see that be the theme of many future updates.

I think it’s time we moved beyond “national” tech trees, but given the way War Thunder tends to do these things, it will be a slow, gradual process. Not a grand, sweeping change.

I mean, “Italy” is already almost a misnomer for that tree at this point.

1 Like
16

I would also add “Pseudo-Commonwealth”

Canada with an ANZAC sub-tree.

Canada definitely has enough for a tree but I hear the Aussies and Kiwis don’t so it be the best thing for them. (I want them to see love too)

17

Every bit of data suggests very few people play minor nations, so that’s not just a guess… also just playing the game you’ll see a lack of minor nation vehicles, so it’s hardly just a guess.

Of course a big part of this is Gaijin poorly managing minor nations and still relying on their garbage formulas to determine BRs, which everyone understands doesn’t work well when applied to small playerbases… an issue that was evident over a decade ago, and whilst I’d the first to state the obvious incompetence from Gaijin, this is just malice to ignore it for this long.

So when you’re faced with picking a nation, do you pick the major nations with lots of choices and balanced BRs, or do you pick a minor nation with lots of BR gaps, again due to Gaijin’s poor decision making, overtiered vehicles also due to Gaijin’s poor decision making and making your life a lot more difficult than it has to be?

The game is bloated to all hell, who in the hell is going to be playing 10 nations in air and ground, 20 tree, even with a premium vehicle that requires $1400 worth and you’d still be ODL every game.
We have over 200 million RP in the game now but Gaijin refuses to even give us nation skill bonuses despite our RP gain being the same as in 2014.

1 Like
18

There is 6 in fact with 2 unnecessary.

M48A1 - Copy n Paste
M48A2C - (lCopy n Paste
M48A3K - Upgraded engine and 90mm able to shoot K241 APDSFS
M48A5K1 - Able to shoot the K270 and K273
M48A5K2 - similar to the K1 but lower profile cupola (no shot trap)
M48A5KW - premium version of the M48A5KW.

19

Honestly, you could just recreate the Little Entente and add Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia to France… Romania could go there as well, were it not already slated for Italy. :D

Given their close relations historically, and the French need for more vehicles, Poland and France is also something I wouldn’t object to. It’s certainly less explosive than the alternatives.

Every time I see a “game die” quote, my brain dies.

War Thunder has more players than it ever has had. The minor tech trees in question are problematic precisely because almost nobody plays them. So this claim is baseless.

Let’s leave the melodrama aside and look at the issue for what it is. No need for emotional appeals.

The Big Three are still the centre around which Gaijin makes almost all of their decisions about the game, and they retain an overwhelmingly vast majority of players.

There’s no point adding a new tree that people won’t play. Flesh out those that already exist.

I’m pretty confident Gaijin’s strategy in this regard is to go with sub-trees where feasible, and scattered event vehicles/battle pass vehicles/premiums for nations that have a small number of vehicles, which I agree sucks: the first Lithuanian vehicle to come to the game is an event vehicle for example.

But if you look at it from Gaijin’s perspective, you can see why they do it like that.

2 Likes
20

Question? How many trees can take a sub-tree? Oh 3 that’s right. Our other option is to be 1DL. without receiving a tree.

Don’t take my word take the devs.

Once I have the last vehicle from the nation the intree me that it I’m done. guess what that is one out of 20 that could get a tree. and not be screwed over by the sub-trees adding nothing but its C&P(What the last two sub-trees where work at least 50% of it.)

I know at least 50 people I could get to play by adding a tree.

In my experience, people who ask for the status quo for the screwed-over nations that could have a tree are from places that 99% of the time are in video games like this. AKA Yanks.

21

Gaijin said 10 playable nations when ten nations and two sub-trees already existed.
This means it was in reference to the independent trees, otherwise they would’ve said 12 playable nations at the time of the article’s release.

4 Likes