9.0 – Historical Battle Perspective

Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/279729.html

Hello everyone,

what follows is the third article on historical battles’ future from Storm, posted today (two hours ago or so). Here’s what he wrote:

After heated debate on the historical battles, I would like to share with you the plans for their further development. Now, in 9.0, we will not introduce any serious changes. There will be just minor corrections. But for the following future versions, we gathered several interesting ideas:

- mass-used (lowtier) tanks will recieve the ability to respawn on the battlefied. 2,3 or 4 times (this will be set in advance), with player choosing the respawn point out of several possibilities (the enemy will not be able to control all respawn points at once).
- mass-used (lowtier) tanks will recieve premium status, when it comes to crew, eg. it will be possible to use crews from other tanks of the same nation and class on them
- third, what many players talked about and what Wargaming kept “in reserve”: there will be overrides on tank characteristics in historical battles: what it means that a tank will have two different sets of characteristics (hitpoints, rate of fire, viewrange, terrain passability, hull and turret traverse rates) – one for random, the other for historical battles. The mechanism of the fight will remain the same (SS: eg. no “hardcore mode”), but this will allow for better finetuning of the tank characteristics without being influenced by the main problem – tank tiers. In the end, there will be two different balance sets for each “historical” tank – one for random, one for historical battles.

These plans will come “when it’s done”, this year.

From the discussion:

- Storm states that while HE shells are not useful in historical battles, their issue is not connected with them. Developers would like to make HE shells more attractive for players, but have no idea how to do that without buffing arty in the process, which is definitely something they don’t want to do now
- (connected to the point above) apparently, giving arty their separate HE shells is not an option
- the intended goal for the respawn is “more battle dynamic, more influence of lowtier tanks on battles, less camping”
- the tests of the mechanism mentioned above look promising
- it’s not yet known, whether there will be special maps for historical battles
- various tiers of the same battle (one battle in Kursk of T-70 vs Panzer III, another of Tiger vs SU-152) will likely not come
- apparently, bunkers and airstrikes are planned for clanwars, maybe in the future there will be NPC bunkers firing at tanks
- bunkers and airstrikes will come this year
- NPC bunkers are not planned for historical battles for now
- Storm fully expects there will be a lot of whine about the separate characteristics of tanks in historical battles, but it will allow the developers to implement the battle in higher quality
- this historical rebalance shouldn’t take long, because few new tanks are coming, so there will be time to do that
- captured tanks will not come anytime soon, because devs need to make new HD models for them and there’s a queue for that even now already
- list of historical battles’ tanks is still being worked on
- premium T-54 wasn’t modelled yet, “it’s still early”

27 thoughts on “9.0 – Historical Battle Perspective

    • I was a bit WTF on that. But once you are away from 15v15 balance then they can play with other factors. I often thought about a random 10v20 assault mode where the defenders had really good positions. This could be that.

      • All of it is to stop the issue with camping and on the opposite end the issue with en masse rushes.

  1. Wouldn’t HE shells become more atractive, when destroying buildings with the new havok engine ?
    i thought AP shells would only make a little hole into a building, while HE will destroy it ….
    atleast thats what i remember from the phisics video..

    • Not just in the video but IRL also.
      And most tanks were used as “mobile bunker buster machines” anyways it would be great that WG would add a new mode dedicated to this task (let’s call it “Destruction”. You spawn in Point A, must secure Point B to be demolished and must protect Point C to turn into dust [and this mode is like random-assault-encounter] [and it sounds like a hybrid of assault and encounter just with new flick in it]).

      • Or just change up assault to where they need to stop the enemy from destroying your CP or a village. Would cut back on the camping in assault mode but would bring out all the spgs.

  2. “Developers would like to make HE shells more attractive for players”

    Don’t worry there are plenty of E100s that fire HE exclusively since they say “UGH HE does more dmg UGH UGH”

  3. I don’t like respawns and never will. Though I love the Premium Tank idea. As for balancing all the tanks out. They really, really need to do this game-wide. The Alpha Damage and HP bloat due to the Tiering system needs to be better balanced. I mean, a Leopard 1 would pwn a Panther and a Panther pwn a Pz III even without the bloated numbers.

  4. So Jagtigers “rebalanced” Mausgun will do 200 dmg, have a rof of 2 and the the whole thing will do 12 kmh at best and has 500 hitpoints.

    Of course I am exeggerating but I expect it to go in this direction. Was looking forward to owning in my JT, well no “Historical” Battles for me then.

    • ”Was looking forward to owning in my JT”
      I think you just said why it shall not be, why would they want one tank to own everything, huh?

      Also, inb4 KV-1S, quess SerB still doesn’t went it nerfed, or they’re waiting for the optional hulls. Anyway, it’s easier to balance the tank for historical battles now that they’re not even finished yet.

      • You could balance it with respawn ONLY, have 5 Shermans on 1 JT. Now, if they implement both rebalancing and respawn, we are going to have a super-nerfed JT vs 5! Shermans, yay sounds so balanced to me

        • Why is everyone jumping to conclusions without either A: actually playing HB and/or B: thinking

    • Yeah Fred perfect example and illustrates my point in earlier post perfect. Ofc people want this, everyone are dirty cowards. Thats why this testserver is the biggest fail in wg testserver history. What a joke 15k players all randoming with tier 10′s (this is 100%normal tho.. sadly), or queued up as jagdtiger in historical refusing to accept what is obvious.

      Dont misunderstand me. I like that idea too, its just never gonna work. To many cowards to few “heroes”

  5. This is really good news, the worst part about the German forces except for Kursk is the numbers disparity, which is essential because the likes of the Tiger 2 and JT having >1.5k health whereas the max the Russians get is 1.2k with the IS or the US getting 800-ish with the Shermans.

    With this gamemode-dependant stats they’ll be able to tune the HP values for each tank, balance them out, and we might get the numbers disparity under control, allowing for a better balanced game.

  6. The problem with the idea of simply one more set of statistics for each tank is that the historical battles are all different; some have huge tier disparity, others not so much. I could only imagine all tanks and guns having the same hitpoints and damage, thereby making armour, penetration and cover use critical, would be balancing. As in real-life, lower RoF would be a considerable handicap, enough to boost the allowed team size for the German teams. (In fact, I wouldn’t mind that in normal battles, as a good compromise between arcade and sim; HE rounds could still have damage disparity.)

  7. That’s a very nice up and coming things aka Respawning and etc. At least they are using their “Garage Battle” system for that I guess, and enjoyin’ the fact that lower tier vehicles will be more or less ‘free’ premium tanks to grind up your insanely high crews that is.

  8. One more reason to drive my shiny PzIII; guys from my Leo1 are eager to join battle and kick some commies ass :) sherman would be also quite nice choice for M48 crew…. all in all, I see this as a great way to improve crews and have fun at the same time instead playing thousands of battles in the same vehicle over and over. I just hope they will boost their income at least to mid tier premium level