CB First Impressions

So last night I play WT GF for like 4 hours - I also showed DrayWolf (who is a long-time WoT player - and very good at it) and he takes to it immediately.

Those who can get keys, get it. I cannot recommend the ground combat in this game enough.

It is slower than WoT, more tactical and more challenging overall. You're fighting limitations of your equipment, you're trying to find a good position, you're trying not to get hit (because a heavy-enough round will still spall the shit out of your equipment and crew) all the while trying to fight through a forest at dusk with no real visibility to speak of. And you actually have to use the mil-dots on your sights, because gravity. And you also don't really get WoT-style random dispersion as you'll hit what you're aiming at (provided you aimed properly).

The list of basic gameplay improvements over it's main competitor is a long one. While WoT remains relevant as an e-Sport type game, it is a far cry from WT GF.

The impressive is the sheer feeling of it all. There's real gravity to the machine - a real sense of weight. The sound design thus far is truly impressive. Overall, it's awesome.

I'd like to know how others felt first time in. Share, but keep with the NDA please.

 

I am waiting for full release , your review encouraging, so it is more sim then WoT ?

 

Far more - turret traverse is realistic, so is engine performance and gun performance. The WoT idea of adding a 120mm howitzer to a platform that never had one is a long way from WT GF. I'll take the Panzer IV Ausf C as an example. It is equipped with the historical 7.5cm KwK 37 L/28 infantry support gun. In real life, it was rather shitty at anti-armor work with normal point-blank penetration of 45mm with PzGr 39 APBC ammo. However, that's your lot in WT GF - you don't get to shoehorn a long 75mm on there because you've been grinding longer.

As with History, the deciding factor is a good combination of tactics and equipment. Until you unlock HEAT rounds, you have to think your way around your enemy's flank or rear, or switch to the more effective HE shell that causes more spalling.

 

looking toward to playing this. So how to anti armor planes come into this, what is your defense from being bounced, how effective are the anti air platforms. U

 

Excepting Arcade mode, Realistic and Sim battles allow players to select a plane instead of a tank. The maps are normally sized for the planes (who can, from a tank's perspective, fly off map) while the tank's area of battle is literally a box-within-a-box, or a zone in the middle of the map where ground forces are restricted to fighting.

As you might guess, this gets interesting. Some eagle-eyed testers have shot down planes with their main guns, but there are SPAA (Self Propelled Anti-Aircraft) tanks available, but they're relatively low tier. German SPAA (as in real life) was capable of laying it's guns flat to fight off light vehicles and infantry (this is handy when being attacked by Soviet light tanks). Soviet SPAA - well, it's a beat-up old GAZ Lorry with a massive fucking AA -gun bolted to the rear bed. And it can't lay flat - however, against air targets, its the only cannon that can sustain fire virtually until it runs out of ammo (it's the mechanical gravity-feed from their naval AA).

How do we stop from being bounced on the ground? Well, firstly, it makes better sense to have friends that fly multi-role aircraft. Focke-Wulfs are seemingly far more popular than Stukas (because player-aimed AA is a damn-slight deadlier) - and because Fw's can drop bombs, and provide fighter-support for the ground forces being hit by Pe-2's and the like. Stukas are of course ridiculously effective against most armour, but can't really fend for themselves after their runs.

It's crazy in Realistic mode - watching planes having a brawl up above, seeing bits of planes fall all around, laughing at LaGGs who think their puny nose-mounted 20mm cannons are enough to hit my Pz IV for anything more than a scrape on my paint - doubly hilarious to see MiG's take a swing with 7.65mm MG's.

TL;DR - They made it work quite well.

 

Just don't gauge Ground Forces on the Arcade mode. It's far too much like it's competitor with far too many assists and performance increases to the vehicle, such as turret traverse speed and horsepower being nearly doubled in some instances, yet reload rate is slower for some arbitrary balance reason.

I would only add that the best Tanks experience, for me, of course, is in Realistic Battles (formerly Historical Battles) mode. It mimics real tank performance but is newbie-friendly enough in terms of identification and spotting assistance. And it allows aircraft with combined-arms tactics.

I couldn't find a Simulator Mode battle yesterday, but that promises to be interesting as well, as it provides quite a few new challenges, such as: reloading takes much longer while moving, as the loader is being shaken about; reloading is much faster while the tank is under fire; there is no spotting assist - camping a bush is a fully viable tactic; no identification assistance - it's up to you to identify what and who you are shooting at and finally the camera is locked to the commander's hatch and gunner's scope.

 

That does sounds really good.

 

Unlocked the Tiger last night - matchmaking at Tier III is horrid, as all the Germans want to play the Tiger, Panther and Panzer IV Ausf H while none of the Russians want to see their beloved KV-85's, T-34-85's and IS-1's get eaten alive. Well, the IS-1 is very much a touch nut to crack...

So I find the match... wow. Sound design, the detail in the model, and just the general feel of gravity of it all made it such a wonderful experience. Listening to that massive petrol Daimler roar, propelling all that steel at the horizon was something of a visceral moment for me.

The Tiger, like the larger Soviet tanks, has a beast of a gun, but the tactics change. They're more shoot-n-scoot now that a reload takes a fair amount of time. 1st shot accuracy is something of a must now.

 

The matchmaking is pretty bonked at the moment, you can easily come up against tanks you literally cannot damage at point blank, I'm going to assume that'll get fine tuned in the future.

I haven't played much WOT but I've played Warthunder planes for a long time and have played a few CB tank matches both with planes and with tanks.

Tank gameplay seems fun to me, I've been playing mostly realistic. Positioning matters, hitting the right spot on the enemy tank matters and hitting different parts damages different things about the enemy. Killbox had a good review in general.

As for planes in tank battles, if anyone's played Warthunder previously I can say the Anti-air fire coming from the tank zone is muuuch deadlier than usual. There are usually about 6 AA guns (AI) placed around the tank area that can lay down some real hurt, so until someone takes those out going on a bomb run on a tank is a deadly affair for the plane. However, in realistic its fairly easy to spot and blow up a tank below since friendly tanks can spot and highlight where the enemy tanks are. I took out two tanks in one bomb in my Stuka earlier. Realistic is also good because you can only drop your bomb load once and have to run back to base to reload, so you wont' have to deal with an infinite stream of bombs falling on you, and especially not if you have any type of competent fighter cover.

But I will say diving down on a Russian tank with my dive horn screaming is great. The plane version will hit some major FPS issues compared to vanilla WT, mostly because the trees, etc, have to be much higher quality rendering for tanks than just planes mode, they're still working on optimizing that stuff.

I'm definitely playing tanks and planes going forward.

 

There are few things like watching your allied Stukas dropping death on the SU-122 that's had to pinned for 5 minutes. The unifying of the air and ground elements are, of course, what is going to sell this part of the game - earlier a Pe-2 got it's tail torn off by a 37mm FlaK gun. He did a belly flop, skidding to a halt basically 30 meters away from my Pz III Ausf M... he started to spam cannon-fire, so I put an HE round into the cockpit, earning me my 2nd "air" kill.

It's truly visceral experiences like these that puts Realistic and Sim above the Arcade mode.