Then they have to make it popular – throw a huge incentive for ALL tanks in historical, not only low tiers. Of course, low ties have to have even bigger incetive. You surely find some ideas yourselves but apart from xp/credit multiplier, a good one would be FREE XP multiplier(or even full value temporarily), so you can grind other tanks while playing historicals – that is even more appealing than just earning credits (there are so few tanks fitting to historicals). Or throw symbolic one gold per win?

As for battle balance: definitely NO bots, NO respawn.
Allow platoons in historicals.
You are definitely too late to make it anything besides another competitive mode, so you have put stress on competitive instead of historicality (you can’t do much here).
You don’t want to make “special” map for historicals – byt you should (at least advertise as such) and then put these historical maps in random rotation too (why bother, they are still special ;) , historical, only avalible for everyone).

To be honest, you’d have to do another whole separate game for historicals – without bullshit “tree” and “tiering” (and hp too), but you most likely don’t want to now (and can’t fast enough or cheap enough either), so you have to live with what you have now and tweak it with minor improvements.

This also works from a historical perspective, as it allows for larger numbers of the more common vehicles in any given battle.

For example, let’s use the Ardennes battle.

On the German side, the Tiger II drivers and possibly the Jagdpanther drivers would get no respawns. The Panthers would get one respawn each, and the StuGs and Panzer IVs would get two or three respawns each.

On the American side, the Jacksons, Hellcats and Sherman Jumbos might get one respawn each (possibly no respawns in the case of the Jackson), and the regular M4s would get two or three respawns each.

Make sense?

BTW I prefered to play lower tiers there

I lost count of how many Kursk battles I played on test server where the match revolved around 12 SU-152′s and 1 T-34 and one KV-1S/T-70 and Germans were either all Tigers and maybe one PzIII or PzIV and a Ferdinand thrown in occasionally .

No one wants to play that. That makes HB slighly better than Confrontation and Confrontation was a unbalanced lopsided mess.

Part of it was a 25k credit bonus for playing a historical battle, up to 5x per day for each battle. So, you could get up to 375k credits in bonuses daily. They also gave you a free Gun Laying Drive if you played 60 HB in the first 10 days after the patch.

I played 15 battles a day for four days and got my Gun Laying Drive and a 1.5 million credit bonus. I found that scouting with the Churchill III in Kursk was the most profitable. The whole experience was tolerable but I’m not interested in playing more HB unless there’s an incentive again.