ever since the entire 9.0 mess with FPS drops and other issues, I kinda dropped World of Tanks, but it got fixed (sort-of), so I decided to try historical battles once again. I mean, I have a 5 perk crew in the most ubiquitous vehicle of all, Panzer IV (and StuG), how hard can it be to get into battle with that? Time to get that 50 percent more credit income for playing Panzer IV in Ardennes!
Well… I play on EU2 server (65k players online at that moment about an hour ago) and…
Yea… literally nobody playing the Ardennes. After a few minutes of wait, there was not a single battle in any vehicle. Oh well, time to switch server. Switched to EU1.
players Rabiesdog and IRSanchez contacted me with a link to their big post made about their trip to military museum in Warsaw (Poland), dedicated to weapons Poland and Polish troops used. The post was excellent (very informative) and with Rabiesdog’s permission, I am going to repost it here (with a bit different formatting). The original post can be found here.
Enjoy!
From here on pics from the Museum and some explanatory text from the info plaquettes.
it’s been a while since the last part, but I hope you haven’t forgotten – it’s time for one of the most interesting parts of the EU tree concept: Sweden.
Hearing about Sweden in connection with computer games always makes me smile – the reason for that is my experience with Warcraft, specifically Frostwhisper server, which was predominantly Scandinavian and “SWE???” equalled to World of Tanks “Siemka kto PL” – it practically became a meme of the server at one point. Make no mistake though – there is nothing funny about Swedish tanks – in fact, using currently known rules for tree creation (“all classes have to end either with a merge, or a tier 10″), Sweden is the only nation in the prospective EU tree, that could actually build a tree of its own, having enough vehicles for each class.
I will be drawing heavily from the work of Renhaxue and sp15 – the first being well-known for digging through Swedish archives on his blog, the latter being the author of the Swedish series on this blog (in case you are interested, click the “History” button, scroll to the bottom of the page, find “Sweden”, the links are all there).
I was a bit reluctant to post about Sweden earlier for four reasons:
- I know only little about tanks
- sp15 is already doing it
- not to steal anyone’s research
- there is SO much stuff and the proposal is quite complex
So, I am going to give you an overview of what the proposed Swedish branch (or more like a tree) is about and will either link you to details, or sp15 will just get to them eventually in the Swedish series on FTR.
This is the draft of the Swedish tree, as proposed by sp15.
Yea, there’s a lot of stuff. Columns from left to right: heavies, meds, lights/meds, tank destroyers, tank destroyers, artillery. Let’s start with the easy stuff.
Thanks to Looser78V for posting this, I kinda missed it. At first I thought “that has to be the ugliest animation I’ve ever seen”, but it’s kinda funny. Guess who the bald guy is…
Russian portal Kanobu.ru made an interesting survey. The post author, Sergei Kolokolnikov, compared, how friendly is the community of various online games towards newbies (not to mix that term up with noobs!) – and he also included World of Tanks in the survey. This survey is “tainted” a bit by the fact that as far as I know, some games have exclusive Russian servers (WoT), some games are almost exclusively Russian overall (Warface) and some games have mixed audience. Either way, here’s how the author considers the communities:
DOTA 2 – some swearing, as you progress, there are less and less “gentlemen”.
Friendliness score: 6/10
Slovak player Elnorka was kind enough to share some pictures from his trip to Piešťany military museum in Slovakia, which focuses on vehicles, used by the Czechoslovak army. I think some are pretty interesting.
Also, thank you all for sending me many, many photos – from Munster, Overloon, Latrun, Saumur and others. I will post them all eventually.
T-72 model – a military school item for teaching the soldiers about tank construction
I am sure you can imagine that Wargaming success with World of Tanks drew a lot of “flies to the cowpie”, so to say. Here and there, games “inspired by” World of Tanks (or even outright clones) appeared. The biggest of them is… what, War Thunder? Nope. It’s Ground War: Tanks. If you are now starting to think “oh, I gotta check it out”, don’t bother. It’s a browser-based game and it looks ugly as all hell. It was created by Mail.Ru, one of the premiere Russian software companies with huge revenue. Anyway, the point of this article is something else – check this out, this is a “poster” of their recent promotion:
Two interesting things there. First is the E-90, which is an ancient fake, coming from one alternate history design. I wish people stopped spreading this shit – it pops every now and then. There was never a “Henschel” (Tiger II-looking) turret for the E-100 hull, it’s a fake. But whatever, I guess these Russians don’t bother with historicity.
They don’t bother apparently with copyright either – VK7201. Yep, that’s a Wargaming invention. Yesterday, Yuri Pasholok posted an amused thread on LJ community, pointing that out. It’s not the first time Mail.Ru used WG stuff either, last time, it was the Jagdpanzer E-100 model (that was apparently settled out of court by Mail.Ru removing the model). Looks like another job for SerB’s black helicopters lawyers then…
I am pretty sure you all know (or know of) The_Chieftain, US server military expert. He’s the great guy doing the “Hatch” videos. Either way, according to what he wrote, WG US organizes trips for their employess and this time, they visited the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation (“Littlefield collection”) in California. What is interesting is that Chieftain had an RC helicopter, taking shots of the tanks from above and commenting. You might have noticed that this is “Part 2″ – Part 1 doesn’t have commentary, simply an annoying engine buzzing sound, hence it’s pointless to post it.
