War Thunder – Useful Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks

Сrеdit gоеs to Akagi!

General Tips

• Don’t rely on your teammates. Even level 100 players screw up sometimes. Don’t be too nice and helpful. Unlucky ones might take you with them too. Learn to accept losses. Even with an outstanding performance, you can still lose if your teammates are bad.
• Try finding people who’d like to squad up with. Maybe you can learn from some veterans.
• Try learning from your mistakes. Where did the enemy kill me from? Is this a good spot I can use myself in a later match or did I simply drive a way too vulnerable way?
• If you ever struggle to kill a tank, look it up in the tech tree (or though the War Thunder wiki and “show in game” if it’s currently hidden like rare event or premium vehicles), then go preview -> armor -> protection analysis to simulate how a shot from your tank would impact it. For your owned vehicles “preview” gets replaced with “customisation”. You can also go on X ray through this to figure out where enemy’s weakpoints like ammo magazines or the gunner is located.
• Try figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of your and the enemy’s tanks and planes.
• For planes for example, try sorting out if your plane is more of an energy boom and zoom fighter or a turn fighter and pick your fights wisely (don’t attack a fighter from below, don’t fly straight into a furball if you aren’t sure if you can shake them off.
• Understand how shell types work. Don’t always go fo for shell with most penetration if it has no explosive filler. Be aware that HEAT and HE won’t shoot through fences or bushes and explode on contact.
• Almost never bring full ammo. Only bring enough as you actually need to prevent your tanks from turning into a driving firework warehouse. Also make sure to always carry 2 or 3 rounds of HE, even on small caliber cannons to quickly deal with lightly armored SPAAs, trucks and SPGs. Also be aware how this changes the enemy’s weakspots. Also don’t waste your time shooting the same spot 3 times if you don’t have explosive filler and try aiming for another weakskpot or aim for barrel and tracks instead.
• For beginners choosing either US, Germany or Russia is recommended as they are most beginner friendly.
• Try having a solid line up for tanks (and planes if arcade). The vehicles you’ll meet is always according to your highest vehicle so you don’t want to drag weaker vehicles into those br ranges unless for few exceptions like SPAAs or maybe strong light tanks like the Sd. Kfz. 234/2.
• Don’t solely rush caps the entire time, try outflanking the enemy if possible and maybe just quickly tap an enemy cap zone for it to uncap if you feel like it is to dangerous to stay in the zone till it’s fully capped.

Ground Battles

• For ground realistic battles you can look at the spawn costs at the start of the match to figure out the br range of vehicles you are facing.
• Example: You have a 5.7 line up and your 5.7 medium tank’s spawn costs are:
  • 150 -> you are the highest br in the match (“downtier”).
  • 130 -> you face some tanks that are .3 br higher, here 6.0.
  • 110 -> you face some tanks that are .6/.7 br higher, here 6.3.
  • 100 -> you face some tanks that are 1 br higher, here 6.7 (“full uptier”).
• Use this to choose your tanks accordingly, heavy tanks tend to have a harder time in uptiers than light vehicles that don’t require that now barely usefull armor and in a downtier a heavily armored tank can fend of an entire cap or sector by itself and eat hits without dying

Controls Tips

• You can hold C and move your mouse to look around without moving your turret or plane.
• Use your binoculars with B, your commander usually has a higher position with binos than the gunner in sniper mode.
• Adjust your settings that you can scroll up and down the scope with your mouse wheel.
• Go into settings and disable grass in sniper mode and binoculars. Gives you an advantage while peeking over a small hill.
• Set up a button for range finding. It can help you figuring out the distances to certain hot spots on the map, even if without more modern upgrades it will only wirk till around 900 meters.

Mentality wse, don’t play for the grind, just play for fun and what you enjoy. No one forces you to play those shiny modern tanks and jets.

Bonus Tips

• Please do not buy into top tier without progressing to it first or wait until the update that’s planned in the future that will make newly purchased premiums come with limited backups (i still wouldn’t recommend it after this anyway). Buying into top tier makes you a detriment to your team while potentially making the game feel more frustrating to you and your teammates. Buying into top tier if you play exclusively air realistic isn’t as much of an issue in ground AB/RB or air AB.
• If you want to play modern stuff its better to slowly make your way up to it rather then buying a premium as typically people become more experienced as the br increases so taking the shortcut will just throw you into the deep end where you will be stomped.