War Thunder SHIPS - Anybody play and general points?

[Destraex]

Tonight's festivities.... showed a new gent warthunder ships and did not realise how deep it was. It's hard to teach a new guy that's not really switched on. That just wants to play because the rest of us are playing.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

boom

[Destraex]

I have definitely died a couple of times in much smaller ships to very accurate level bombing with massive bombs like this. Makes you wonder because the bomb sights of the time and the evidence for successful level bombing attacks on ships in ww2 indicate that it would be very rare. See Midway.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I think they need to be stationary, like the Tirpitz. 

[Destraex]

Yeah I think even then they had trouble. I seem to remember the Germans raised it from the shallow harbour it was in and just kept it on supports of some kind iirc. But even a near miss from one of those tall boys would do damage. I imagine that is why I died rather than having been directly hit.

[Gusington]

Those screens are awesome. How do these games work? Is it a tournament style? Free for all? Are there campaigns of any kind? I've never played any of these types of games.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It's free to play. 

There are 3 main branches.  Tank warfare, naval warfare, and air combat.

Tank and naval have arcade mode and realistic mode.  Air warfare has those 2 modes as well as simulator mode for the old school flight sim pilots.

Air combat is strictly aircraft  (although you can control some guided weapons like the Fritz X glide bomb when you use them)

Tank and naval allow players to control aerial vehicles during the match once they accrue enough points during the round.  These include planes, helicopters, and drones.  Naval is further divided into coastal battles featuring smaller ships and boats (destroyers, mine layers, torpedo boats, etc) and blue water navy featuring the bigger ships (destroyers and larger, although players can use small boats if they really want to).

The default match is a team-based affair.  They used to make teams to roughly represent WWII adversaries, so you woukd get Soviets vs Germans, or Brits and Americans vs Japanese but as rhe number of nations increased and the vehicle rosters expanded to add Cold War stuff, the nation specific battles went by the wayside.

Now quick matches are basically a random grab bag.  The matchmaker will make two pools of nationalities and pit them against one another so you might see Brits, Germans, Israelis, and Chinese vs Americans, French, and Italians.

You choose one nation's vehicle pool to play as and you build a roster of vehicles that you've unlocked (some nations have other countries within their tree.  Britain also includes Canucks, and S. Africa for example).

Vehicles are ranked from 1 to 11 and you'll be assigned to a battle based on your best vehicle's rating.  Tanks and naval give you 3 spawns at a minimum while Air gives you only one.  If you do well during the fight and accrue enough points, you gain more unlocks.

Most tank and naval quick matches involve capturing and holding objective zines whereas Air usually involves bombing certain targets.  There are some  aviation, but that's basically it.

In addition to the quick matches, there are also events.  These can be reenactments of historical battles like Kursk or Midway or sometimes something silly like tank races.

There are campaign modes.  Shorter ones are called enduring confrontations and are basically 2-3 day battles where players drop in and out and it's an attrition battle to try to grind down the other team's points pool which is spent to spawn in vehicles. They take place on a single map.

There is also a World at War grand campaign system.  These are only offered intermittently and usually last a few weeks or a month.  Similar to the enduring conflict but it also involves capturing objectives.  Once enough objectives are seized, the campaign migrates to a new map.

Finally, you can create private battles where you choose map, weather, time of day, nations available, vehicle ranking limits, etc and set up your own scenarios.

[Gusington]

Thanks SDR. Does not sound like I would be interested in much of the above except the campaign modes. How well-behaved or not are players on these servers?

And when you set up a private game, can AI bots take the place of humans like in Verdun, Tannenberg, and Isonzo games?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It's the internet.  You get a collection of idiots. Most players are perfectly fine but there are always a few outliers.   Arcade tends to be where the majority of them congregate but you do get a few cropping up in Realistic.  Not many in Simulator mode but almost nobody plays simulator mode anymore.  Ever since War Thunder went cross platform and they implemented mouse and keyboard controls for planes, joystick optimization has gone by the wayside.  It's quite hard to get your stick set up in a way where the responses feel natural.

At any rate, there was enough griefing and general idiocy that the game devs turned off nearly all friendly fire and removed collisions on runways.

I think the only place where friendly fire still exists is with aircraft bombs on the tank and naval maps.  I like to fly my Lancaster Mk III bomber and drop 12,000 lb bombs on tank maps but the blast area is so huge that I nearly always manage to get one or two friendly fire kills when I bomb.  It doesn't really endear me to my teammates...  AA vehicles can also shoot down friendly planes.  This usually only happens when they fire at a dogfight and end up accidentally tagging their teammate instead of the enemy.

These days, apart from the occasional random imbecile dropping mini nukes from his Lancaster, the only real toxicity you'll see is in the chat but that's not all that common and muting people is easy.

Yes, you can set up private matches that include bots or are exclusively bots if you wish.  They are pretty brain dead but can still take you out on occasion. 

[Gusington]

Thanks again SDR. Getting a team together of trusted peeps sounds like the way to go.

[Dammit Carl!]

Loved "Simulator," and whatever else mode in tanks; the lethality of the platforms made it a unique kind of hide-n-seek plus the occasional weather effects making a hard thing that much harder.  Damn.  Really need to get back into this game now that I think about it.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I watch DollarPlays whenever he posts his videos and then I get sucked back into playing tanks.  Then I get killed without ever seeing an enemy, remember I suck at tanks, and scurry back to naval.

The dude's situational awareness boggles my mind.  He tooled around in an absolute garbage French aa truck in his last video and still managed to have a better match than I do on my best day.

[Destraex]

Thanks again SDR. Getting a team together of trusted peeps sounds like the way to go.

I'd turn up, timezone permitting... trust me, trust me. (C3PO).

We even have created a little clan BTW (which cost real money) and have 6 out of 128 people already... only two of us really active. The way that works for the green clan ship research is that you play to a maximum points level of 360 every 3 days. Every 3 days the game distributes research points based on your ratio of activity compared to the rest of the clan. The more people active the bigger the research point bounty I believe.

[Gusington]

^You're in Australia though, aren't you?

[Destraex]

The grind at rank IV is almost unbearable because you have to have every ship in the tier.... some of which I needed to go back to rank III to get preceding ships in the column for. But once you get past it and get your first BB I imagine it's where you relax a bit more and enjoy the game again.

Does anybody have any idea what the actual warthunder ships population is? I know it is the smallest out of ships, aircraft, tanks etc.