Introduction

I’ve never been good at computer games. The first PC I owned was in 2008. I was so new to computers, that I never thought I had to dive deeper someday, into the abstractions of the electronic masterpieces of its kind. I don’t even remember the specifications of the build, maybe I will try to dig it up someday and rip it open to see the circuitry. Anyway, I had played some GTA Vice City and Project I.G.I, and like I said in one of my previous blogposts, I didn’t have/use a stable internet connection for the PC until 2010/11. So, the sources for the games I played were some of my school friends, who kindly let me borrow their CDs flashed with pirated games. I think I had played some Counter Strike Source as well, thanks to my old friend Ashutosh for introducing me to computer games back then.

When I moved to college and had my personal laptop, I played some C.S Go here and there, never with friends or on a LAN. I did however, got my first chance to play with some colleagues during an internship.

During my final year in college, I started watching some Twitch, and that’s when I got introduced to people playing War Thunder. Since my father built his life from studying and teaching history, naturally some of it got passed down to me. I was amazed by old things people built which still stood the test of time and tide. Luckily our college was in Tamil Nadu, the people of which have preserved their cultural heritage very carefully. With some friends, I got to visit some of them during this time and was so filled with ecstacy when I touched the monument built a millenia ago.

I had also studied a bit of philosophy in my third and fourth year, to understand how human understanding of ’thinking’ evolved from the Greek philosophers in third century B.C till today. Wars are a fantastic bunch of events which amalgamate political philosophy, and history. But due to lack of time and resources, I had only watched a few documentaries about World War II on Netflix and YouTube, and those were my only sources of information regarding those events.

When I came across War Thunder, it blew my mind. Someone on the internet showed me that there are tank simulations with a minimal-arcade view of the battle(sorry World of Tanks).

How the game works, and how I’ve played so far

The game has a beautiful organisation of vehicles, one chooses a country to ‘grind’. You get the most basic tanks of that country which are divided into tiers according to their superiority.

This is called a tech tree. Similar tanks stay in one vertical line, and tanks belonging to a particular generation stay in the same tier, albiet with some exceptions. So most anti-air guns stay in a vertical line in the tech tree, and tanks from the same generation like early Tigers and Panthers belong to the same tier.

Once you choose a country, you take part in a battle with these available tanks, you get some Research Points(RP) and some Silver Lions(SL). RPs are spent in the following ways.

• Research modifications and parts of the vehicle you’ve played (i.e Fire Extinguishers, additional armour, smoke grenades, etc.)
• The remaining research points are spent on researching 1 other vehicle from tech tree within the same tier, or the next(if you’ve researched a minimum number of vehicles from the same tier)
• So for an example, if you look at the following image. If I play PT-76B in a battle, I’ll spend my gained RPs between researching parts for the same tank, and since I’ve chosen to research ASU-85, the remaining RPs would go to that tank.

The SLs are in-game coins, it can be spent in the following ways.

• To repair damages to the tanks one took to battle.
• To buy ammunitions(if they aren’t free)
• To restore crew members
• To buy new tanks, and train crews for the new tanks.

Elaborating a bit on the fourth point, there is a minimum count of RPs to be spent on a new vehicle before it can be bought. Once it’s ready for buying, some SLs are used to buy the tank, and some SLs are used to train one(or more) of your existing crews to use the tank.

Clear on the rules, are we then?

With a shallow understanding of World War II, it was pretty clear to me that the Germans had the most superior machinery, the soviets had the most men, the British had the most guts, and the Americans just arrived too late and fresh when Germans were getting battered from both sides. Thus most players coming to the game, including me, choose Germany as the first tech-tree to grind.

Not only tanks, but if it suits you, you can choose to engage in Air or Naval battles.

There are three primary modes of gameplay:

• Arcade Battles - AB - enemy vehicles would be marked with a red rectangle with the distances, so it’s easier to shoot. Friendly vehicles would be marked with a blue popup, and their locations will be displayed on the map.
• Realistic Battles - RB - the enemy vehicle marks would be absent, but friendlies are still displayed in map and popup.
• Simulator Battles - SB - this is the trickiest, no marks on the HUD will be present for friends and foes, except for the kill feed. So one has to look around, identify friendlies along with directions of fire, and guess the location and identification of enemy tanks.

Identification of enemy tanks is very important, since without it, you’d be shooting at all the wrong spots. The level of simulation is very well done, it considers armor thickness, human response to shocks, shape and composition of rounds, experience of crew, etc.

There is a concept of Battle Ratings(B.R) for every playable vehicle in the game, so when you play a particular mode, you match with players with the same BR.

So in all permutation and combination one can choose to play [Ground/Air/Naval] [AB/RB/SB].

Most of us including me started with Ground AB, then gradually progress into Ground RB. Simulator Battles are probably for pros, I’ve only played it once or twice in my entire War Thunder career. The author feels guilty and proceeds to play some Ground SB for a while and reduce serotonin levels.

One of the major reasons why Gaijin (the company behind this game), is hated by most of us players is the game is very heavily monetized, and if you’re a play-for-fun person like most of us, you’d find it hard to navigate through the tech tree. For context, I’ve been playing this game since the beginning of 2021, but so far I’ve only grinded 3/5 of the German ground tree, and 1/2 of the Russian ground tree.

There are of course mechanisms where you can pay and get unlimited SLs as much as you have money in your wallet, and grind most of the tech trees without any major roadblocks(like play a bit bad, and actually lose SLs because the tank repair costs mount up if you lose too many tanks.)

Players are also allowed to purchase bush camo, which makes it harder to identify a tank, and if you don’t know its weak spot, there are very high chances that you’re the one getting battered in that 1 v 1.

There are also other flaws in the game, where at some points in time, a particular tech tree is overpowered at a particular BR, how Gaijin sometimes goes overboard with the idea of expanding the game, such that it makes the gameplay bad. An example of this would be, addition of drones in an upcoming release.

How I think one should play the game

If someone is starting with this game, I’ve a few suggestions.

1. Regarding country to choose from, don’t pick Germany. It’s too overpowered at lower BRs, so much so that you blindly shoot tanks without familiarizing yourself with their weaknesses. Even if you choose Germany, make note of how ‘your tanks’ are getting killed, so you at least know what your weak points are. Pick Russia, or the U.S., you’ll learn better about the in-game tank battles and gotchas.
2. Regarding economy of the game, never lose S.Ls. Gaijin is constantly finding ways to screw players with no money. When you enter a battle with 5 tanks, spawn a vehicle which gives you the highest S.L gain / lost ratio, and see how you’re performing in this battle. On casualty, respawn a vehicle only if you’re confident that you’re going to make +ve S.Ls at the end of the battle. Scouting helps a lot in this matter, make sure you accquire and use scouting vehicles as much as possible.
3. Turn autopurchase of modifications off after buying the necessary ones like fire protection and crew replenishments, buy them when you have a lot of SLs.
4. Don’t ‘research’ always. At some point, you’ll be running low on S.Ls and an unlimited supply of R.Ps from all the boosters you get from Gaijin. Use these to research ‘unnecessary’ vehicles which you’re sure you’re never going to buy. There would be some vehicles that you can skip in a tech-tree. This keeps your anxiety to a minimum, so research only what is necessary.

How the game changed how I think about wars

Playing War Thunder for the first time was one of the few best decisions of my life, it led me into a rabbithole of technical, psychological, political and tactical aspects of events in World War II. I’ve come across videos from historians and the game-players playing the game together discussing the things the game got right, and things it didn’t. I’ve come across a YouTuber who links all his sources in the description, which led me to two of the best books of my life, they were war accounts during height of the second world war.

I still have countless more books in my reading lists, and some other topics to read more about, like Medieval warfare, WW-I weapons, etc. and I can thank this game for most of the curiousity.

Simple activities like searching for archives on the internet when I play a vehicle, to see what it looked like during battles and in museums gives me a lot of excitement. The mighty machines of destructions, designed to keep 5 tankers safe, and a few hundred thousands of us who cherish the archivists’ efforts to preserve their legacy in documents.

And yes, as the title suggests, I crossed the 1000 hours of gameplay mark on this game. My first really, here’s the proof. :)