Changes in Historical Battles (based on Test)

Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/279323.html

Hello everyone,

Storm posted a list of changes, that will be made in the historical battles, based on the results of currently running test. These will include:

- added the switching of sides (just like in random battles) – Germans in Kursk will no longer always start in the south, it will be random
- all battles will have the amount of maximum MM weight points increased by 50-100 percent in order to increase the amount of tanks in battles
- the ammo setups for some tanks will change, they will get less useless HE shells, some will get more gold shells (but Storm states it’s important not to overdo it, when it comes to the shell price)
- some vehicles will get a hardcap on some battles, for example Tigers and SU-152 in Kursk
- MM weights of Panthers and Tigers in Kursk will be fixed (they were too low)

Reworked setups of tanks for individual battles

Balaton – added SU-85, removed SU-76, added Nashorn and Jagdpanzer IV, removed the Jagdtiger
Ardennes – changed the E8 gun to 76mm M1A1, added M4 Sherman with 105mm, removed Tiger I, added M10/Panther (premium), Panzer IV gun changed to L/48
Kursk – added premium Churchill, removed Panzer II

Also, for lowtier tanks, there will be separate special missions for historical battles for them only (as extra incentive)

From the discussion:

- SU-85 in Balaton operation is historical
- Marder won’t be added to Kursk, it would be too weak (it would get oneshotted)
- T-70 will remain as the only scout in Kursk
- the exploit, where under certain conditions it was possibleto override historical battle setups and force tanks in top configurations into battles was fixed – the bug had something to do with server instances switching
- dynamic reward coefficient (for example XP/cred income bonus depending on current number of vehicles in queue) is not possible
- noone will prevent you from selecting a popular tank (SS: like the Tiger for example), but you will have long queue waiting time
- Jagdtiger was removed from the Balaton operation, as it turned out no Jagdtiger historically fought there

80 thoughts on “Changes in Historical Battles (based on Test)

  1. Now I find historical battles broken.
    Idea is good, but the implementation – the worst I’ve ever seen. WG made them very wrong…

  2. thats quite a lot of change.
    i’d be really happy if there was an actual balaton map, not erlenberg… would be cool to fight in a familiar place :)

    • Yes. Historical Battles loose a lot of appeal for me if they’re played on a default maps. Perhaps I’ll try them few times, but I doubt I will be a regular player there.

      If HB would have their own, dedicated maps – they’d be by far more tempting to play as a break between random battles on usual maps.

  3. “- Jagdtiger was removed from the Balaton operation, as it turned out no Jagdtiger historically fought there”

    Yeah. Historical accuracy my ass.

    I just rolled over those commie bastards in my JT, laughing at them for invading and taking Crimea – that butthurt of _RU players was totally worth it. Hide LFP, show superstructure only – man, those ISU… they were dying one after another.

    So, no more JT for you, western nazi… capitalists!

    • What part of HISTORICAL BATTLES don’t you get. “Yeah. Historical accuracy my ass.” After that paragraph I thought you were going to say something moderately intelligent, like how Jagdtiger actually did fight there…
      And why would laugh at them for “taking” Crimea. You just said yourself that they were successful. You just congratulated “those commie bastards”. I think logic is to OP for Americans.

      • I don’t know if it was exactly the battle of Balaton, but I’m sure as hell Jagdtigers fought around the place, Vienna, southern Slovakia, Danube defense etc.

        But hey, as always, WG prefers gameplay (for the russians anyway) over historical accuracy.

        This one thing still drags me towards WT ground forces more and more.

        Sorry Wargaming. Historical accuracy is fun, if you can’t inderstand it, it’s only going to be your mistake and your income going down. Well, it’s not going up from my “donations” anyway. Damn. And I tought about getting those 10€a month for premium account. nope.avi

  4. No more Jagdtiger for you german fanbois huehuehue

    (The changes to the PZIV’s armament however, is welcome)

  5. I LOVED the Pz II…

    They always remove the fun tanks…

    Working on an 15vs15 setup for the Invasion of France… Because 3 vs 7/8 is just stupid.

  6. nice to see the Panther M10 in historical battles, its a great tank for me even though i rarely play it becouse of money missions, its going to be nice going against Americans in it and i hope to make even more money in it now.

    Also i think this will make it more popular, as things are now its as rare as a Maus.

    • I like how rare it is. I (almost) never encounter another pzV/M10 in a battle!

              • Ideology has nothing to with it. Disguising your troops as enemy troops and then opening fire is a war crime. Some people don’t like the idea of doing it, therefore it is perfectly reasonable to say that might explain why people don’t drive disguised tanks. This would apply regardless of which nation did it. The Germans claimed the Americans used disguised tanks (or rather captured panzers still flying german colours) first at Aachen and i would expect some people to be uncomfortable with that if it was put in a game too.

        • it’s because in normal battles, you’re facing targets that most of the time, you either can’t pen or have a hard time penning. the E25 is fun because of the mobility, but the gun requires the speed and mobility, and it’s the same gun on the PzV/M10, but with an even lower ROF.

  7. “- T-70 will remain as the only scout in Kursk”

    scout tank with 300m view range against tigers? (380m viewrange) Why would anyone play T-70?

        • was it? slow, clumsy, can’t pen a thing, poor view range, gets one-shotted all the time… sorry, I made my share of HB in PzII and “fun” isn’t exactly the word I would use there.

          • It did a good job as scout tbh, i finished top xp in a few battles with it. It was better than T-70 anyway, you could do the T-70s job with one of the small tds and still have a gun that could actually do something.

      • The Pz II also had the advantage of having the most powerful radio among the Germans (in the historical battles) it was good for passive scouting and allowing everyone to remain in radio contact with each other.

    • @OP: Did you know view range isn’t the only factor coming into play when calculating spotting range? That T-70 has crazy camo, the Tiger has none. Ergo, a well positioned T-70 will spot a Tiger way before he’s spotted himself.

      • People will never understand this, they always think scouts are usless “because view range”. T-70s base camo alone reduces Tigers view range to 300. The camo skill boosts the T-70s camo far better than recon or situational awareness boosts the Tigers view range, so more skills wll always help the scouts more (the heavies are less likley to train view range skills anyway. Similarly the scout is more likely to have a camo net than the Tiger is to have binos. Then of course there i sthe bush the T-70 is hiding behind.

        The problem comes with how the Germans can take a defensive posture in the battle (despite it historically being a masisve German assault) meaning a scout has to move forward to spot them. So hard to stay in cover, no camo net active vs tigers who are stationary, probably behind a bush and if they have binos they will be active.

        In the Kursk battle it should be assault mode, this would counteract the Germans superiority since they would be advancing against th su-152s with their forward passive scouts rather than the other way round.

        Ardennes is much the same, it was a German assault, they should be the ones having to attack thus reducing their advantage over the US since they will be advancing into the tds hidden fire rather than just turtling behind the north bank and popping tier 6s that pop their heads over to try and kill them.

        Balaton was a German offensive as well, but i don’t know much about it either in rl or in the game.

        German heavy tanks in defensive positions were extremely powerful, throw them into an assault and the enemy can pick them apart, hence why all these offensives were you know, German defeats. These Historical battles play like the allies are the attacker rather than the defender and that more than anything else puts them at a disadvantage which in turn means the number of German tanks needs reduced which means the battles are smaller.

        I know people don’t like assault mode but I think it would solve many of HBs problems.

  8. I will be dragging my Panther/M10 out for these. It might encourage more to play this mode if they were on maps that were unique for that particular match.

    What happens to the shells that aren’t expended during the match? Do they go back to the depot for use in random matches?

  9. - Jagdtiger was removed from the Balaton operation, as it turned out no Jagdtiger historically fought there
    ____________
    One day it’s historically accurate, another it’s not. Srsly. Is it so fucking hard to tell players that JT is too OP for HB instead of talking bullshit about fucking historical accuracy we all know WG pulls out of their arses more than one would thought.

  10. “- the ammo setups for some tanks will change, they will get less useless HE shells, some will get more gold shells (but Storm states it’s important not to overdo it, when it comes to the shell price)”

    Pardon my language, but who gives a shit about shell price?

    Ammunition limits should be set based on balance and fairness. They should be less inclined to add more gold ammo not because it’s expensive, but because the same goddamn thing will happen in historical battles as does in normal randoms: player sees tank with small weak spots, player ignores weakspots, player loads gold and shoots heaviest-armored locations that should normally be impenetrable.

    Forcing people to use normal AP forces them to *think* and actually *try* to play skillfully, use tactics, coordinate with their team. The more APCR/HEAT you add, the less important all of that becomes.

    ” Ardennes – changed the E8 gun to 76mm M1A1, added M4 Sherman with 105mm, removed Tiger I, added M10/Panther (premium), Panzer IV gun changed to L/48″

    I realize that some howitzers were historically used against other tanks to some effect, but was the 105 on the Sherman ever used for such? I thought it was mainly for anti-infantry and smacking emplacements.

    • Considering there’s witness descriptions from Normandy of the effects (or rather lack thereof) of the 105mm HEAT shell on Panthers…

      The assault gun platoons were an organic part of the armoured companies and went into battle with them; not like they were going to just drive away if they ran into enemy tanks even if trying to deal those wasn’t exactly their primary job.

  11. Good, they fixed the Panzer IV’s gun for the Ardennes, now fix the engine

    Lake Balaton’s Panzer IV’s gun is still screwed up though

  12. first jagdtiger WAS historical, no it’s not

    so germany gets screwed on that map even more

    <.<

  13. “- Jagdtiger was removed from the Balaton operation, as it turned out no Jagdtiger historically fought there.”

    :D Ahh smug mode.

    “Kursk – added premium Churchill,”
    :D Its fun time!

  14. Historical Battles should have tanks locked by amounts and stats and players should be placed randomly in the tanks. It should not let the player choose a tank but the game style should place the tanker in a random yet accepted tank.

  15. Why don’t wg give bonuses for trying out tanks like the t-34,t34-85,panthers,pz-4s,panthers,stug. For e.g, if they use such tanks they will receive more experience and credit multipliers than tanks like tiger,su-152,ferdinand and tiger…by that way i guess it might increase the number of people playing those tanks and not flood the game with the german heavy beasts.

    • “Also, for lowtier tanks, there will be separate special missions for historical battles for them only”

      Which means for example a mission like this might appear:
      Fight with one of these vehicles in a histortical battle: Panzer IV H, M4, T-34
      Reward: credit and experience factor 1.2

      Pretty easy for WG to implement this.

    • Low-tier tanks already get a bonus for playing in HB against high tier tanks (it’s like 50% more XP (on top of usual bonuses) + something in cash if I remember well)

  16. ” Balaton – added SU-85, removed SU-76″

    That’s impossibru!!!

    Something bad will happen…I’m going to Minsk…

  17. When is second round going to start? I can’t access test server because of the beta-account bugs and I really want to test new graphics and history battles. :)

  18. - Jagdtiger was removed from the Balaton operation, as it turned out no Jagdtiger historically fought there

    what happened to their source claiming otherwise? did it vanish into thin air?

  19. Is there any list of tanks and maps they are allowed on historical battles?. For example Tiger 1 allowed on maps xyz, Su 76 allowed on maps xyz etc.

  20. How about the Dicker Max? I think I heard somewhere that the prototypes thought in Kursk or some other battle around that time.

  21. I hope the add some early-war historical battles too. It would be neat to see some Pz II and PZ III fight against other low tiers like the French or British.

  22. Ardennes – removed Tiger I

    Soooo, there surely weren’t Tigers in Ardennes…just saying, fuck WG -,-””

  23. To be honest, after looking into this a bit more, you can basically disprove with wikipedia already that JagdTiger could have been part of the Operation Frühlingserwachen. Schwere Panzerjäger Abteilung 512 was deployed on the western front until the end of the war. It fought at the battle of Remagen, which happened at the same time as Balaton.
    Abt. 653 was reformed in February ’45 in Landau (near the French border in Southern Germany, so pretty much exactly 1000km away from Lake Balaton and in April it was withdrawn to Vienna. Wikipedia doesn’t state from where, but the order of battle for both the German and the English wiki do not list Abt. 653 being part of Frühlingserwachen.

    Which makes me wonder why WG put the JT in there in the first place.

  24. I don’t think Jagtigers ever fought in the east, they were pretty much reserved for fighting the allies in the west.

    The changes sound good, but I just hope they don’t increase gold ammo allocation too much; 3 or 4 rounds is about right, more than that and it becomes a joke like Random battles.

  25. Pingback: 9.0 – Historical Battle Perspective | For The Record

  26. After doing research, I can confirm that there were no jagdtigers on the eastern front.

    “Only two heavy antitank battalions (schwere Panzerjäger-Abteilung), numbered 512 and 653, were equipped with Jagdtigers, with the first vehicles reaching the units in September 1944. About 20% were lost in combat; most were destroyed by their own crews when abandoned, chiefly due to mechanical breakdowns or lack of fuel in the desperate final stages of the war.”

    After doing some research regarding the battle of Lake Balaton , I was able to find a website showcasing the armored casualties of that battle.

    http://englishrussia.com/2012/01/12/equipment-of-the-balaton-battle/

    From what I see , it seems that they had Tiger II’s , Tiger H, Panthers, Jagdpanthers, Stugs , jagdPZIV and hezters.

    Probably some PIV’s in there also…