Without calendar:

With calendar (Russian):

Hello everyone,

so, since it’s the X2 day, I thought I would give WoT a spin for a while. You know how I was earlier happy that the FPS drops got fixed? Yea well, fuck you Silentstalker, no smooth gameplay for you! For some reason, I get massive FPS drops in any city areas – Lakeville city, Himmelsdorf etc. – check this out:

Mines – low details, medium textures (*remembers War Thunder FPS with sad expression*) – 40-50 FPS

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

one million “likes” on FB is quite a milestone (hell, I wish FTR had 10k) for Wargaming – and one that Wargaming decided to celebrate by giving us x2 XP event for free. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? But… how good it really is? Perhaps it is more like a… “Greek gift”?

Now, I don’t want to sound ungrateful – but first thing anyone has to understand is that nothing is for free, not even this event. There is a price to pay – it will draw out crowds of tamatoes just like other infamoux “x2″ or “x5″ events and that is not a good thing. But what sort of annoys me are the conditions.

In order to get this x2 bonus, you have to

- win
- be in top 10 of the 15 players

Continue reading →

Part I – Introduction
Part II – Italy, Czechoslovakia
Part III – Hungary
Part IV – Sweden
Part V – Yugoslavia

Hello everyone,

welcome to the sixth part of the European Tree series, showing you the vehicles, that could appear/fit in the possible European tree. Today, we are going to talk about Poland.

Of the major EU server communities (GER, CZ, PL), Poland is the largest, but also the most problematic, when it comes to their own tanks. Poland certainly has its place in the tank development history, but if we are to be completely honest – Polish tank development before and right after the war cannot match the Hungarian or the Czechoslovak one. This was caused by the historical factors, including:

- Czechoslovakia being an industrial superpower (literally, in the early 30′s, it was the biggest arms exporter in the world), inheriting most of the Austro-Hungarian industry potential
- insufficient armor production capabilities (manufacturing thick and hardened armor is actually quite complicated and only a few countries in the world had the capability to do so)
- importance and influence of other branches of the military

One of the most common armored vehicles in pre-war Poland (apart from armored cars) were the notoriously known TK tankettes, including those equipped with a rather powerful 20mm cannon. While Czechoslovakia experimented with tankettes as well in early 30′s, we got rid of them rather quickly after the infamous Tančík Vz.33 disaster – for some reason, tankettes prevailed in Poland.

Continue reading →

Okay… where to begin. As you can imagine, I recieved literally dozens of e-mails over last couple of months, inviting me to try War Thunder (not only Ground Forces, just War Thunder in general). I resisted for quite some time, but about a month ago, I was like… fuck it, I should try it after all – and I got to try it today.

Trying it is one thing, writing about it another matter. I really wasn’t sure, whether to do it or not. I still am not, but what the hell, right? Anyway, my reluctance obviously comes from my position. This is a World of Tanks blog. If I bash War Thunder, I’ll get the “OMG SS TEH WARGAMING STOOGE!” reactions – as I did before. If I praise it, I will get “OMG SS HAETS WARGAMING FFS WT SUX!” – also happened before.

But I’m gonna write it nonetheless. I will try to express my feelings and compare these games regardless of my alleged affiliation. If it’s good, I’m gonna praise it. If not… well… the bashing will at least be honest.

And yes, I am completely aware that this is the closed beta stage, there is no need to remind me of that.

Disclaimer

I approached War Thunder as a complete newbie, who turns the game on for the first time. I did not read any manuals or anything about it on the web, apart from the “standard” stuff on War Thunder page. I did not read any guides, because I believe that a good and successful game has to be intuitive and easy to grasp (I am sure you already see where this is going and why I mentioned this specifically – if not, well… you’ll find out).

Installing War Thunder

Installation was very easy and user friendly. The game is not a “hog”, it has 8 gigs or so, not bad. There was however a mess, when I (based on some March WT post) installed something called “nightly client” or something like that – should have been specifically a closed beta client for tanks, but apparently this was cancelled earlier, the tank testing was moved to regular client and so I had to install the entire game twice. This has left me… annoyed. Another annoyance (this time caused by myself) was that I logged with wrong account (not the CBT one) and spend an entire afternoon figuring out why the fuck can’t I access tanks, when I realized I registered another e-mail for the CBT. Thanks for everyone who tried to help me by the way (especially Ronineter) and sorry for this, mea maxima culpa.

Continue reading →

Source: http://gamegpu.ru/mmorpg-/-onlayn-igry/world-of-tanks-9-0-test-gpu.html via Wotleaks VK community

Hello everyone,

the abovelinked Russian site made an article about the changes in graphics in 9.0 – and how the FPS changed on the same settings. The differences are… impressive. The resolution measured is 1920 * 1080, the configuration of the computer is Intel i7-3970X 4,9 GHz, 16GB RAM, 120GB SSD.

Hello everyone,

today, a player Frag_Attack sent me a picture of the SU-85I engine in the game, claiming the engine to be underpowered. Here it is (in German, but I am sure everyone can figure the numbers out)

The HL120TRM in Panzer III has 440hp and in SU-85I, it has 300hp. As you probably know, SU-85I came to be as a conversion of captured Panzer III hulls, using the original engine. So, is the SU-85I engine underpowered, compared to the real one?

No. It’s the Panzer III engine, that is overbuffed.

Check this out – the ultimate source on German tech, Panzer Tracts – this is from PT8, StuG Ausf.G entry:

This is from Panzer III Ausf.H entry (PT 3-2):

The engine is also rated for 300 horsepower at 3000 RPM (Schiffer, Doyle). So, the value for SU-85I is correct. What todes that mean for the Panzer III? Well… exactly what you think it does. Rebalance.

Several German engines in the game are overbuffed and with the upcoming changes to Panzer III in 9.1 (they were scheduled for 9.0, but they got postponed), chances are they will be brought to their historical values.

Hello everyone,

we all know that RU server has the biggest influence on vehicle balancing (simply by the virtue of being the largest server cluster) – so, how do tier 10′s look over there?

I guess there are some tier 10 candidates for buff after all…

Part I – Introduction
Part II – Italy, Czechoslovakia
Part III – Hungary
Part IV – Sweden

Hello everyone,

today, we are going to talk about another quite original branch or branches, that could appear in the European Tree – the Yugoslavia ones. There is an old myth running around that the “smaller” nations had no original tanks of their own – I hope that in previous parts, we debunked this sufficiently and today, we will continue to do so.

Unlike relatively rich Sweden’s tank development, Yugoslavia’s tank development was born out of necessity to counter both western and eastern tank designs with indigenous resources due to the precarious and complicated situation after the war. Where Sweden simply developed their tanks because it was advantageous for them and Czechoslovakia was satisfied with improving Soviet armor from 1950′s onwards, Yugoslavia had to make do with a mixture of American and Russian vehicles and go on from there, developing an entire series of their own original medium tank projects.

This time, I will be drawing upon the work of Yugomaniac and Bojan, both well-known for, amongst other things, proposing a Yugoslavian branch for World of Tanks. Early Yugoslavian designs are very closely tied to Czechoslovak branch (some of the tanks being basically entirely Czechoslovak, made however solely for the purpose of export to Yugoslavia). Here’s a variant of Bojan’s and Yugomaniac’s tree – another proposed variant would completely lack low tiers, starting straight from the Czechoslovak branch. Obviously, that’s something that should be avoided.

Unfortunately, there is not that much info I could find about these vehicles, not nearly as detailed as the Swedish tree – more research is required I guess.

Continue reading →