War Thunder (WartHunder?)

War Thunder is an MMO in the same way World of Tanks is an MMO; multiplayer matches with persistent hangar buildup, XP and cash for upgrades and new rides/flights? It's ostensibly set in WW2, but the planes (just like WoT) seem to reach out far beyond; I've seen a Mig and a Sabre at least.

Highlights (for me):
- working cockpits! (3 views, 3rd person, cockpit, cockpitless HUD)
- 's purty!
- TrackIR and 360 controller support (no extra config required, it just works (tm))
- tons of planes to get, with upgrades (although the rate I'm getting shot down I doubt I'll be able to afford anything anytime this decade :P)
- something on the ground more than just decor (bombing and strafing targets, artillery, AA, and even convoys ripe for blowing up).
- eventual promise for Fleet and Ground player control - the tabs are in the game so they seem quite determined, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm also curious about the Historical Battles, which I assume are tier-locked. All the deathmatches I've played start in the air and are fast and furious, so the tutorials for carrier take off and landing, convoy and carrier dive bombing and well, ANY take-off and landing seem out of place. Maybe there will be a campaign mode or something, not sure.

Cons: long wait times for matches while this is in beta. Even longer for Historical Battles, so I haven't even tried that. :( Go sign up so there are more targets! :D
Oh yes, and their updater murders my router. I've never had this much trouble with a download. The torrent client maxes out the connection for about a minute, then dies utterly for 15 seconds. Repeat.



The following are official, but the game *does* look that good.





So, anyone else playing? Thoughts? I've only barely scratched the surface and I'm a shit pilot, so it's pretty hard to judge. :P Flight feel is definitely not Rise of Flight but neither is it total arcade - probably somewhere near Il-2 Cliffs of Dover, complete with WEP (turbo boost on all planes). They still judder nicely, stall, and bite into the air in a wobbley fashion (as appropriate), and altitude management is king.

I might have to give this a go.

Looks pretty similar to world of warplanes. Better cockpits, though!

I put in a couple more hours over the weekend. It certainly IS similar to WoWP, especially in the double currency model, the talent trees, and the UI.

But there's a few key differences, at least from WoT (which I have way more time in than WoWP, so maybe it's different too, but it wasn't last time I played WoWP).

- In order to unlock planes further down on a country's tech tree, you have to fight for that country more - so there's really 3 sets of XP. One to simply have the funds to purchase, one premium, and one to unlock a country's tree. On the plus side, there are no prerequisites so once you hit a country rank, all airplanes on that rank are unlocked (unlike WoT where you follow the tech tree to unlock a successor). In fact, you could unlock all planes without ever buying any, which is pretty nice.

- Very active battlefields. There are columns of armored convoys, tanks and even car-mounted AA below, all heading to their own predetermined destinations. They count towards the victory conditions, and will take potshots at you as well. In addition, I *think* you have to land on airfields to capture them, making yourself vulnerable of course.

- Instead of one-life-per-match, you get to choose 3 planes. Since rounds are quite deadly, this actually lets you enjoy the match a little longer :P but also lets you multi-role in one match, as you deem appropriate. I'm currently loaded with 2 fighters and a bomber, which is pretty neat.

I'll probably spend more time in it, but I think it's much more skill-based than patience and strategic awareness based than WoT. Good gear helps too, and at the rate I'm "unlocking" anything ... I might not last that long. :/

I hopped into an He 51 yesterday and waited six minutes for a mission. It's very pretty, and I think I'm going to stick around for a while. Maybe get to the Bf 109 E3.

I think I heard someone (in chat, so who knows if true) say that it's the same engine as Wings of Prey. I'd believe it, it really is quite nice.

I'm gunning (HAHA) for a Spitfire myself.

I'm not ordinarily a German flier, but I've been getting acquainted with the 109E lately thanks to BoB2, and so I figure I may as well keep some commonality. Once they add British historical battles I'll probably work on that line too.

Funny thing is, I'll probably be giving the higher tiers a miss, except maybe for a few of those multistation bombers. As a kid in Poland, I pretty much grew up on Spitfires, BF 109s and Yaks so the game's monetization might fail with me utterly, as I'll just be playing those guys (which I believe are tier 1 or 2).

Come to think of it, the most fun in World of Tanks is at the low tiers too ...

goddamn this thing is grindilicious. Took me the better partof a week to get something that does not have two sets of wings. i also completely suck at it. i can shoot in the general direction of things, but hitting stuff is far beyond me. other people do not seem to have that problem, so i find myself getting wtfpwned completely by anything and everything.

The level of skill required in flight sims to be competitive can be daunting, nothing else I've played really even comes close.

I remember thinking I was good as a lad, until I watched over a friend's shoulder as he calmly gunned down a plane that was but a few pixels on the screen. My first reaction was "why is this fool wasting ammo?", then flames and black smoke.

Similarly you don't need to waste much energy maneuvering to get completely out foxed by a good dogfighter. Haha! I've got you now young S... fuck, how did he do that?!

After watching some videos of this (from BohemianEagle, aka The Mighty Jingles, on Youtube), I decided to try this out. The only things I knew about aerial combat previously, which was not particularly much, were from watching video let's plays of IL-2 Sturmovik from another Youtuber. I decided to start with the Japanese planes since I wanted to try the Zero. In 8 hours so far, I have, in order:

-Climbed into my newbie biplanes, and gotten my ass handed to me since I was getting into protracted turning fights at a low altitude, allowing for plenty of time for more people to swoop in and easily shoot me down.

-Gotten a tier-2 aircraft, the Ki 43-II Hayabusa, causing the newbie matchmaking gloves to come off and resulting in me getting swiftly crushed by people flying higher-tier aircraft every game.

-Gone back to practicing my flying skills in the reserve biplanes and the Japanese tier-1 fighter (the A5M4).

-Realized what was going wrong, and instead begun trying to make use of boom-and-zoom tactics; climbing to a high altitude, diving on an enemy that's lower and slower, raking them with machinegun fire and then using my speed advantage to climb back to a higher altitude before the enemy is able to respond. This resulted in an extremely drastic increase in survivability, but I was still making a rather small impact in battles since the firepower of the A5M4, which I was primarily piloting, was not sufficient (at least with my gunnery skills at the time) to reliably kill aircraft if not guaranteed more time-on-target.

-Discovered that I can, in fact, kill planes in the A5M4 by turn-fighting, against the right target. The A5M4's turning speed is in fact excellent, it just isn't so apparent in the newbie battles where you're mostly fighting biplanes, most of which have turning characteristics as good or even better, which prevents you from gaining much advantage from that fact unless fighting some specific opponents.

-Feeling much better about my skills, added the Hayabusa back into my aircraft lineup, and went back to fighting battles with higher-tier aircraft involved. Lo and behold, enemy planes start dropping. The Hayabusa does better than the A5M4 with boom-and-zoom thanks to being equipped with higher-caliber machineguns and a higher maximum airspeed, and the A5M4 is a vicious little craft in a turning fight - I've taken on 4-on-1 odds in the A5M4, dropping 2 higher-tier fightercraft before losing my engine and being shot down. Ending up in that kind of situation - finding myself at the bottom of my dive only to discover that an enemy aircraft followed me in so I can't climb away safely, and then more and more enemies keep piling in - still tends to result in death, but at least I can be pretty sure I can take someone down on my way out.

I've now unlocked the floatplane variant of the Zero. I was a bit worried looking at the performance statistics listed for it ingame but turns out I can still kill stuff with it just fine; I'm curious to see how a "real" Zero handles, given that according to its stat sheet, it's supposed to perform far better in just about every category thanks to lacking the aerodynamic drag caused by the floats.

The flying sure is fun, so I think I'll be sticking with this game. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I'm missing that could help my piloting, but evidence suggests a lot of the people I'm fighting aren't exactly ace pilots either, so after initial difficulty bump, I've enjoyed learning by doing.

I need to try this out tonight. I absolutely cannot see tanks and ships ever working out, but hey. Just watching some videos, slow moving tanks and ships would just be murder bait.

Edit: tried it. matchmaking is trying to make WoT look sane. Had one match where a tier 20 jet bomber flattened our entire ground army solo. Basically if you play reserve (tier 0) you never see anything bigger than reserve. The second you add a tier 1 to your deck, you will see tier 1 through 20.

I can only imagine this is due to the low number of total players, and not actually the design. Because it's downright idiotic.

I saw this mentioned on the official forums... Basically the tiers are split into 3-4 ranges, and which range you are in determines the highest tiers you'll usually get matched up against. Tiers 0-1 are matched primarily against each other, then the tiers 2 to something against each other, then tiers something to something, then tier somethings to jet fighters. And, as you've seen, if there aren't enough players online, it'll just throw together whatever it can find. Setting the game to find battles in "any available" server (changed by clicking on the server name in the battle finder window) might help somewhat, if you haven't done so already, since it'll then have a larger pool of battles to draw from (if trying to play on the Russian server doesn't kill your ping).

Hmm, couldn't get it to create an account, kept giving me the error: Email or password is incorrect

Which is a bit annoying, as I tried names of random character strings and still got that.

EDIT: Nm, got it to work eventually, I think it's a bug with their stupid captcha stuff. If you fail a captcha, you have to enter a new name, or you will get that error above.

My god are the controls atrocious for joysticks. It is pathetic how hard it is to aim or do any kind of fine control with a stick in this game. It basically forces you to play with mouse aim. Utter bullshit.

Really?! That's very strange, as a flight sim is the one place you'd expect to find joystick support done right.

Well, it's not a flight sim.

Considering it simulates stuff like air turbulence on the plane's control surfaces, what would you call it?

Hey guys I don't have a bomber so I will run escort for you

I continue to be really bad at this game but enjoy it. Currently using an Xbox controller and after I remapped my mumble push to talk away from the reload button it has been smooth sailing.

It's very arcade flight in arcade mode. It's flight simmy in the flight sim mode.

Still kind of a messy game that needs more population. But on a high note, I wound up in a bomber on a domination map that was down to the wire.

.. and while mucking around at low altitude to mess with cappers, I dropped four 250lb bombs on a fighter trying to steal a point from under me.

Yeah, it's definitely a work-in-progress (for another example, a big portion of the planes still have placeholder flight models). They're supposed to be improving the joystick controls in the next patch.

Game is fun, but finding out the mouse/kb is superior to joysticks is disappointing. I experienced similar rudder spikes like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCOjgUWggPU

Guess I'll have to give the mouse a chance until they improve the joysticks.

So is mouse the preferred way? I tried my gamepad, but oh man was that awful, though maybe I just needed to muck with the sensitivity. Do I need to dig through my garage for my forcefeedback stick? Does anyone support force feedback these days?

I am reading their forum right now. Many have this issue even with expensive flight control/rudder set ups. Maybe it is intentional, but mouse users don't have the same wobble and therefore can put more hits on you.

Allegedly they are working on tweaking joystick controls to minimize the erratic rubber/nose behavior, but until then if I can get used to the mouse, I may have to try it for now.

I have a lot of wobble if I try and stay level and straight. I think where the mouse is working out better is that it's nearly impossible to not be trying to steer somewhere due to the sensitivity, and when trying to steer at all the wobble seems to vanish. It's only when flying flat that your plane shakes.

What I do have issues with is if I touch the keyboard movement keys at all my mouse loses focus for a bit and it becomes impossible to steer until it decides I wasn't trying to fly with WASD.

This matchmaking. It really is just one tier. Every fight today was a brawl with Yaks and Spitfires against my crappy german planes. (fun fact: no german plane under tier 3 has a heavier weapon than dual light mgs.) My saving grace has been german bombers, which are fun to fly.

EDIT: no sorry that was me getting killed by T1 planes, trying out mouse tomorrow. rage.

tried to download this over the weekend.
it's lame but only way to download the client is using their P2p only client.

only getting 1mb down with almost 500k upload, 200 p2p connection, basically just kills my internet.

so yeah not gonna even try it.

I ended up spending 15 bucks getting 4 of the medium premium planes. This game is the new world of tanks for me, sometimes frusturating and sometimes incredibly fun. But the key position to be in is always "the plane that has at least 2kg/s in damage" due to the lack of matchmaking tiers right now

Running 5 planes, I try and run 2 bombers that I take out either very early or very late in the match to capitalize on low fighter coverage.

You can have 4 people in a squad when playing and I usually just cover my buddies.

Still playing this with josh and nate and walker and shadow and python and all the cool people in mumble.

Big problems still
-No tier system
-Ramming is weird
-Yaks are stupid
-German Tier 1-5 planes


Most fun things
-Catalina bomber is like flying a brick, even T8 planes cannot take you out easily(this is a tier 3 bomber)
-Flying friendly 4 man squads
-Landing planes

EDIT: if you want to try this out, tier suck planes are actually pretty good. Start with russians and just go really really really slow. People will overshoot you and you can pick up kills as they pass you by trying to go as slow as they can. Just avoid the germans- they dont actually get guns on their planes until like tier 6

This took a bit to get into, but is fairly fun so far. You know one little thing I miss? There is no description of the history of the plane, like they do with WoT. It's a small thing, and can be remedied with google or whatever, but its nice to have the flavor text right there, to learn a bit about the plane I'm flying. (Especially since I know very little about the planes other than the basic popular names, but like russian non-yaks, never heard of most of them)

Actually, if you go to the hangar view (the first of the little buttons you get when you click on a plane in your plane lineup/the research tree), there's an "information" button that will give you some historical information about that plane (seems to be a work-in-progress, some of the descriptions go into more detail than others and some are entirely missing).

This has been green lit on steam (as well as the company's other titles, like star conflict. Which is nowhere near as good)

Looks like the next major patch - 1.29 - is about to hit soon. The biggest change is probably that they're implementing a more detailed damage model, along with historical ammunition types for all planes.

At the moment (AFAIK) everything fires armor-piercing tracer rounds, but after the patch it'll be possible to upgrade planes with a choice of ammo belts containing different mixes of different types of ammunition, including high-explosive and incendiary, with or without tracers.

I tried a few battles on the test server - the German 20mm MG-151's (with an anti-aircraft ammo belt loaded) on my Ki-61-Ic definitely seemed to have more punch, I was able to reliably kill targets in one pass now. I also tried planes with machineguns, and it felt like the previous problem with plinking away at an enemy for no apparent effect might be gone - structural damage to the airframe seems to be more properly modeled now and can have a drastic effect on flight performance, so raking someone with machinegun fire without lucking into a fuel tank/engine/control surface/etc hit has a much more noticeable effect. Overall, combat felt more satisfying.

The German planes will benefit the most from these changes - for their cannons, they'll get the special "mine" shells they historically used, which pack a far more powerful explosive charge than ones used with comparable weapons by other nations, and the improved damage modelling will hopefully bring their durability more in line with the other nations', as it's been ridiculously poor in some cases (I've never seen another plane lose a wing as fast as a ME410, minding that we're talking about a 6-ton twin-engine fighter here, and I fly Zeros...).

Other major changes include a complete rebalancing of the economy, and the addition of a number of new aircraft. People are also reporting that joystick control is working better than previously. Here's some badly translated patch notes.

People complain about "noob rammers" a lot in this game. After about 10 games, I'm pretty sure that if you're good enough to ram someone who's trying not to be rammed, you're good enough to just shoot them down, and that 90% of the time what's happening is that dumbasses are playing chicken, crippling the enemy aircraft, then not leaving themselves enough time to turn away and slamming into the burning wreck of the guy whom they shot--who A) has no reason to avoid the collision, since he's dead anyway, and B) couldn't even if he wanted to because his controls are fucked.

Also, man, the joystick controls ARE awful. Mouse aim seems to work really well; in theory you can pull slicker maneuvers with the more advanced control schema, but whenever I tried to do something like that the plane essentially went into convulsions, so I gave up on that and just concentrate on shooting people now.

Yeah, I gave up on joystick controls for the evil that is the mouse and I went from 30 kills in over 9 hours played to... a much better number where I kill at least one plane per battle.

Ramming is mostly a problem with bombers. And certain very sturdy planes that can survive punching through a bomber's wing.

Most players I can deal with. But there seems to be this small subset that understands better how the controls work, because they are just able to turn twice as fast as everybody else, which basically means they win all fights. I've been messing around in test flights trying to use a combination of commands, but if I try to turn too hard, the cameraman has a seizure, I guess, and the view spins wildly around the plane until I don't know what direction I'm going in. This happens in cockpit view, too, which is extremely strange-looking. Anyway, if anyone knows what these guys are doing to turn so fast, it would help.

Using flaps and lowering speed, as well as using nimble planes. Biplanes turn on a freaking dime and get overshot easily, Japanese planes also turn crazy fast (but bleed speed so badly when doing it)

Hurricanes for example can't out turn a tank.

Patch 1.29 is out now. Here's the final changelog.

In addition to what Kildorn mentioned, there are certain tricks - or more formally, Aerial Combat Maneuvers - a good pilot can use to make their plane turn faster. I found this video instructional:



The maneuvers he talks about that are the most relevant in this case are the Immelman Turn & Hammerhead at 10:34 -> 19:30, and Low & High Yo-Yos at 21:40 -> 28:40.