WarThunder : Enduring Confrontation Thoughts & Tiger H1

In WarThunder, I've had a bit of re-grind to do, after months of absence from the game, I logged back in a few weeks ago to take part in the Enduring Confrontation test, they did two back to back, first was an EC with a set battle rating bracket, you chose your line up and the game put you into your battle bracket based on the maximum Battle Rating of the vehicle line up you selected, I only played air.

My immediate feel for this was, that I spent an eternity in my reserve bi-plane flying to a target, half way to which the timer for a better plane would be up, so I was stuck with trying to farm a ground kill or two before bailing for the better plane, or just being hunted by already airborne opponents, whom had fudged their battle ratings to overwhelm.

Now, the test was German versus Russian, and the Russian sides, in my experience dominated this and it was not very fun to play.  More fun than sitting in the Simulated Battle queue for 12-15 minutes without getting a game, but still not as fun as the next test.

The next battle test Gaijin undertook was an EC with a fixed set of historically accurate aircraft for the line up.  And you had the timers based on Battle rating for this.  I played both the Russian and German sides in this test, and I found it to be much more accessible, you understood much more quickly the tactical situation, you knew what the opponents would be flying, and as such you flew accordingly, it felt like you were more "there" in the moment, and you had a feel for what to expect and do.

For instance, in the first test, it was overwhelmingly, fly at each other, or over each others bases.

In the second, we have bombers, escorts, interdiction, interception, we even had some players flying to distant locations to kill convoys and targets, whilst others did diversions, we saw proper employment of the fighter-bomber role, we saw good use of fighters, and all in all it was a much better experience.

Whether gaijin took these same lessons away with them is unknown, becuase it's been weeks since that test, and there's been no sign of it, the forum post opened up for feedback is a whining nagging, rambling mess, which I can't make head nor tail of, there just seems to be great ideas for game modes from Gaijin, but then they ask the audience for feedback, and the feedback; as with everything on the internet; is so garbled they can't get a clear picture.

This echoes the tests some six months ago, of combined arms, where one selected tanks and an airframe or two and off you went, I remember playing excellent games with my BF110 flying close air support, I saw MagzTV publish videos in the same vein, showing how good close air support and working together is... You know what, not heard a peep about it since, can't find it in the game, can't get a simulated battle, can't play in those fun, real, ways.

So, I've spent sometime in Arcade Tank battles.  I can't stand arcade air battles, but I suffered them in this re-grind, to ace out all the lower planes again.  For some reason all the engine injection system perks were removed, and I had to re-earn them... Having done so, I then went into arcade tank battles, and set about levelling the new tanks in there up.

So, the Pz35(t) was brand new, and then I had to max out all the AA gun platforms.

The end result however, was my opening up the Hetzer and this baby....

As you can see, she's a beauty...

And that's where I stand with WarThunder, I wish Enduring Confrontation would come out.... I really do.

WarThunder - Simulated Log

I've been spending time, time after time, trying to get my Track IR set up just right for my new monitor positions on the desk.  Last night, I think I finally cracked it, but the unit does seem to be very quirky.

But, un-phased I went into WarThunder and queued for some Simulated Battle... Long Queue times they were too, 6+ minutes.

I flew out my BF109-G2/Trop three times in all... My take offs were good, handling was good, climbing to altitude and maneuvering all pretty good... I got one burst at a target and got hits, but beyond that my whole flyouts were total disasters, the first flyout, I was hit from below and behind by a Russian i185... This plane was painted bright red, and I simply never saw it, the rear view from the 109G2 is pretty bad with the armour plate, plus he was below me, but I was in a descending left hand turn and he just swiped up and got me, it annoyed me that I was at over 1800 meters, and he must have been at ground level and saw me against the sky, whilst I could not discern him from the ground clutter.

Next, fly out, twice I approached dots only to find they were friendly players, whilst watching in the combat log friendly bombers get slashed from the skies.  Not one of those bombers called out a location for the enemy, so ther was myself and two Fw190's flying from enemy bomb target to target trying to find anything to shoot at.  We finally ended up in a swirling fight around cloud level at 3000 meters, I closed on a target trailing an fw190, if the 190 had just turned or done something else it would have been a better engagement, I fired a burst, it missed, he then split S, and I went into a hi, yoyo turn... and boom, my tail was shot off by a second unseen Russian aircraft, not only did I not see him, but he was at less than 100 meters when he fired, and I didn't hear him... I could hear the other two aircraft, and was recording, I went back and could not hear this guy.

But, even with better look-out I would not have seen him, again because of the G2's armour plate arrangement.

The final flyout, just annoyed me, I flew at near tree top level, against the ground clutter, I circled over brown fields using the brown summer camo the aircraft has to best advantage... I'm there looking all over, I see dot after dot coming from the German direction, finally see a dot coming from the Russian base direction, and move to intercept... As I move... BOOM... one shotted by a Yak.

I just, don't know... It's clearly player skill, or their knowing how to spot me, but I didn't see this guy, and I tried every trick I know to stay low and fast to blend into the ground clutter.

I'm playing the game on Ultra high settings, and I'm figuring I might do better on ultra low, because it's just a case of who see's whom first in Simulator... or of course as GrmlZ pointed out this week, who is in a bomber wins.

My X55 Settings in Elite & War Thunder

Last night, I spent a fair amount of time setting up my new X55 Rhino some more, firstly I spent time sorting out the wires, as I need to be able to insert and remove the sticks depending on how I want to play different games.

But once that was done, it was into various games to set up the controls... Elite Dangerous was one, as we saw in the sneak peak I had no joystick inserted playing the other night.  This was interrupted somewhat by having to download and install the new beta.

However, I also went to set up my full controls in WarThunder for flight... And I needed to do something different than before, as I'd found the stick really twitchy in the elevator and somewhat sluggish in the roll.... This is just for loading the X55 profile in the game itself.

Luckily, I did spot this video....

And it gave me a couple of tips, the first was to change the sensativity of the rudder (yaw) and the elevator (pitch).

I also changed how I was doing the trimming.

But the biggest change, and it really made a difference - at least in test flight - was to raise the seat.  I had never spotted those controls before, but I've attached them to the X55's throttle onto one of the lovely silver switches.  I raise it just as we see in the video, so the cross hair is just a touch inside the glass.

Even resetting the Track IR, I do raise the head position up.

With these new settings, and the lightest spring in the X55, test flights were excellent, the standard BF109 loop I do, under the bridges, through the rails of other things and then through the chimneys in the town was brilliantly light to the touch.

My next challenge is going to be to improve some of my pilot's spotting skills, and taking flight to fight.

War Thunder - BF110 Skin Grinding

I've been playing WarThunder and continuing my work through of skins for aircraft, my current target is both for the BF110.  Yes two skins, however, for the poor old 110 they're not farming ground targets these are for player air kills, AI don't count.

So it is a much different prospect to farming ground targets in the Stuka.

I figured however, in Arcade the 110 gets burned down too quickly, in Simulator it gets out matched, so I need to use Realistic battle, primarily for the good view compared to Simulator and that performance is still modified with the Instructor helping.

I'd not fully unlocked all the modifications when I started, I have now, and I've been having great fun with the plane, it is actually a very punchy aircraft when it gets into a tier 1/2 game.  However, I have found myself being matched with BF109F4's, so that's edging into Tier 3 and in those games where everyone climbs high I often find myself climbing up to the same altitude in a lazy oval or in tight zig-zags, because the single engined opponents simply get the jump on me.

The first of the two however, I think, looks great.

I've also started, with the aircraft fully upgraded, to take on the role in my team as the bomber killer, I can knock them down and take the punishment for doing so, when I'm forced to take on fighters I try to dive hit and run for my life.

It can work out to be fun, and profitable... if you vary your role as well, with bombs kept and used as the enemy team dwindle in number.

WarThunder on Linux

Yes, it is official, WarThunder is available on Linux!  This was a bit of a secret as I had access to the game on Linux with thanks to Gaijin.

http://warthunder.com/en/news/2608-war-thunder-is-now-available-on-linux-en

There were a few bugs, and communication was sadly pretty poor as rather than reviewing the game in any fashion one was simply playing and reporting bugs.

The experience however is identical to the Windows and Mac release, the graphics being rendered in OpenGL (which you can even do on Windows and you always do on Mac all the time) so the porting of the game was essentially down to their moving their implementation.

With libraries like SDL this is an easier task then before, however, WarThunder is now, without doubt, the most complex and detailed game I've seen on Linux. 

And it marks a massively interesting change in the fortunes as game developers look at the platform.

The Witcher 3 and other AAA title games are also appearing for the platform, however, WarThunder with both it's land, air and soon to be sea game modes is far above those scripted screen play type games.

I'm certainly interested in how head-tracking and complex flight stick controls now start to improve on Linux, with this fantastic game now on the platform.

WarThunder - Stuka Bad Day

My apologies for the lapse in posts over the last couple of days, however, I've been a. Very Busy and b. Very Ill.  So ill in fact that on Wednesday last, I was vomiting at work - proper up chucking - and the wife had to come get me, and then I spent time pulled over in a lay by vomiting some more with traffic hooting at me... Yes, all you bastards on the A52 near Bardills Island Hooting at the guy vomiting blood into the bushes, that was me, your hoots of hilarity didn't improve my day.

But, before I was down and out I did spend sometime playing about with my recording settings, both with OpenBroadcast, then Bandicam and then nVidia Shadowplay.  The latter producing Blueray quality footage with absolutely no lag - I was mesmerised by it - and so I used it as the source for some footage for a video I'm putting together about flying the BF109 series in WarThunder under Simulator Battle full aerodynamics, so expect that as soon as my new mic arrives from the folks at Amazon, because the narration I had recorded was terrible on my headset.

Other things which made me laugh in WarThunder was this... Notice the German AI plane in the foreground, it is locked on to and chasing a player landed at the Russian base, whilst the Russian AI you can also see there are locked onto a German player attempting to kill said Russian... The AI however, are simply flying formation with one another in the race to blindly follow whoever has aggro on them... This is Simulator level play... Hmmm... 

This is also a reported bug, which reading the reply from Gaijin they're not saying much about, check out the Moderated bug report forums for the thread - I can't find the link at the time of writing.

Another annoyance was I decided to stop playing BF109's and grind some skins, the first being the Skins for the Stuka B2 model, there are a LOT of skins (6 I think) for this little rank 1, level 1 plane which gets ignored...

When you're winning a 17 ground streak plus one human Air Kill streak in Realistic in the B2 STuka, you do not want to then see this:

I can tell you now there was nothing wrong with MY network, I was connected, able to open other websites and had up and download speeds reported of over 6mbps... Yet, the server decided I had a problem and kicked me.

At this point I was something like 21 ground kills and 2 air kills, I had landed and returned to the battle three times.

This was utterly frustrating... But you know what was worse?

In the next battle over Malta, I was 12 ground kills up and in the middle of a turning fight (which I win easily with my air brakes) against a Nimrod Mk 2... And suddenly this happened again, and gave the nimrod a kill for me slamming into the ground out of my control!

To then rub shit into the open wounds created by this the game then chides me for "Leaving the Battle Early"... I never, you kicked me!

This server instability was reported by Jingles, but I'd not seen it, until now... This was a weekend day, and there were a lot of players on, but... still...

These two shots also show a problem I had over the weekend of the 27th October, the massive number of American playing players in the queues, world wide... It was very interesting to play German, as one either got a swarm of B25's flying formation which one was totally unable to tackle without bursting into flame... Of we got people flying P38's, P40's or P26's who simply didn't know how to fly...

War Thunder - Bugs and Brush Offs

Played a lot of WarThunder over the weekend, and I have to thank my friend Craig for signing up to WarThunder and reaching Rank 2 so very quickly... Was great fun introducing a new player to the game.

I was only a little jealous of how good his first few battles went, and it was very interesting watching how his account was reduced to just one Nation and then slowly opened up...

But the tutorials are still terrible.  Improved since I started, but still terrible, and whoever their narrator is... Christ what an annoying voice, and his pronunciation is shite!

I spent much of the weekend however playing with Craig, and his low level Brits, so we spent a lot of time with me acing out planes - since I started playing before there were half as many modifications as there are now.  My British Ace aircraft swelled from two to thirteen by the time we were done, and when Craig unlocked his Hurricane IIB I received a nice 50,000 Lion bonus :)

He's determined to get to Rank 3 now on his own and earn me my 100 gold, as he says he likes the game so much...

I however spotted this problem:

Take a British bi-plane, so we're talking Nimrod I or II, Fury I or II or the Swordfish above their max speed in Arcade, so you get the "Reduce Speed" message and the flutter sound from the rigging... Jump out or die and get into a Gladiator, and you start off with the aircraft well below the max speed of the Gladiator, but you still have the warning and sounds playing!

It also felt like my Gladiator was responding to motion like my Swordfish, but that's hard to tell for sure with the Arcade flight model.

I reported this, but Gaijin don't seem impressed...

I had another bug report accepted...

And another rejected... 

For the rejected one I have two Videos, and they are different situations, but I don't see the point of allowing for trimming in the test flight models... Surely it will result in NOT comparing like for like... I felt very much as it I'd been given the brush off, despite making the post, making it informative, I obviously see this as a bug, eve the original responder must because he didn't know the policy was to have trimming in the test flight models, so not a 100% match up there and very much not testing what is happening in the game for real.

The code may behave differently with or without trimming...

And certainly for pilot training - which was why I noted the problem - it made for a false impression, in the FW190, I used the Aileron trimming on take off to stabalise the torque... I used it and was very thrown after traning for 4+ hours to go into a full real battle and suddenly not have it available!

So, available in test....

Not in simulator battle...

I dunno, I just get the impression that as excellent as the code and ideas from Gaijin are, their development style and especially testing is very much "We Do As We Want, You Follow"... I dunno, maybe it's a Russian thing?