Monthly Archives: March 2014

“New Tank” in Developer Diary Videos

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Hello everyone,

this is something I kinda forgot to post earlier, for which I am sorry. In the last “Developer Diary” video (can be seen here), a strange tank can be seen in one of the scenes (5:41):

chtz

You can see even with one glance that it’s probably not a “regular” model, but a decoration – an interesting one though. What I think it is is some sort of “bronetraktor” (armored tractor) improvised armored vehicle. The Soviets built several of them, the best known of them being the famous NI Tank. I think that this one is actually called “CHTZ-16″ (or T-16 CHTZ).

kiev

There is a short wikipedia article on it as well. As I wrote, these improvised vehicles were not uncommon. Of this type (built around the STZ-3 tracked tractor), around 70-100 were built (numbers vary from source to source, Zaloga for example mentions only 60) between 1941 and 1942 in Kharkov. Originally, the entire class of vehicles (improvised modified tractors) was meant as a stop-gap measure, with the Soviets hurling every piece of equipment they had to stop the German onslaught. It was supposed to be produced not instead of regular tanks, but beside them. There were several armored tractor projects as I mentioned, but this one by Kharkov was the most successful.

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9.0 – Historical Battle Perspective

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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.

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8.11 – Crashes caused by Sound Mods

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Hello everyone,

just a quick announcement: today’s micropatch started causing crashes of World of Tanks for many people. This is, according to Gnomefather (prominent mod-creator), caused by sound mods, which the patch made incompatible for some reason. ANY sound mods are causing this, including Gnomefather’s historical sound mod. If the game crashes for you, uninstall them and wait for an updated version.

Tiger Tales: Type 102 – the forgotten VK.45.01(P)

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Author: CaptianNemo

Everyone remembers the Porsche VK.45.01(P) Type 101 and its failure to win a production contract against Henschel’s VK.45.01(H) c10. But there was another Porsche VK.45.01(P) in the early conception and design of the Tiger I tank. One, that did in fact make it to the prototype stage – the Type 102.

Early on in the development of heavy and super-heavy tanks, in competition with the Henschel organization, doubts were expressed from the Porsche company on the suitability and reliability of mechanical transmission. With that concern in mind, the Porsche company began to look into engineering an alternative. The concern with mechanical drives was not unfounded at the time, as it was a serious concern for any would-be designer. As if to reassure the Porsche company, Char 2C(1920), B1(1935) and B1-Bis(1937) also incorporated the gas-electric design with mechanical designs, at the time being limited to about 25-30 tons. And so Porsche produced their Type 100 (VK.30.01(P) “Leopard”) and Type 101 gas-electric tanks.

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Micropatch on WG EU as well

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Hello everyone,

as some of you might have noticed, a micropatch did hit the EU server as well (without any notice on the portal). This micropatch contains following fixes:

- hotfixed the disappearing arty shells in arty mode bug
- new hangar (WGL-themed), that will be active from 2nd to 6th April

Because that’s exactly what we need. Another hangar.

Changes in Historical Battles (based on Test)

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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)

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Posted in Q&A

RU Server: Micropatch Tomorrow

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Hello everyone,

tomorrow, a micropatch is going to hit the RU server cluster, with following changes:

- a new WGL themed hangar (because, you know, spamming that stuff everywhere is not enough)
- hotfix of the arty shells disappearing bug in arty mode

It is not known currently, whether EU and US will get the same patch.

Additionally, in order to compensate for server issues, Russian server is getting 1 day premium bonus code for everyone.

Tank Inspector Issues

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Hello everyone,

just a quick update – several of you have asked about Tank Inspector not working. I asked Hillin, the developer – basically their entire cloud service went down. The are working hard on fixing the issues, so please be patient.

-SS