Dear players,

We have another round of questions and answers for you, with War Thunder producer Vyacheslav Bulannikov!

Aviation

Q. Around a year ago, you introduced “temporary” measures for aircraft matchmaking above 7.7 which made mixed battles and allies vs allies / axis vs axis more common. Now a lot of time has passed and there are more vehicles and players at those ranks, do you have plans to return to normal axis vs allies matchmaking? 

First of all we would like to say that the concept “normal matchmaking with allied-axis” sounds rather strange in relation to aircraft BR above 7.7. Basically there are aircraft from times when the meaning of axis or allies didn’t apply for existing alliances. The question then becomes: for which alliance should we count Germany in such a setup? However some time ago (couple of months) we added to the top ranked aircraft battles (BR above 10.0) the possibility of creating matches not only “all against all” but also “nation preset against nation preset”, which means USSR + China + Germany against all others because at that time top ranked German aircraft were represented by aircraft from GDR. This option proved to be well balanced so we plan to add a similar option in addition to the current “random” also to the BR range between 7.7 and 10.0.

Q. The current aviation maps are increasingly too small for Mach 2 capable aircraft, when can we expect new larger air maps better suited to Rank VI jet gameplay?

The size of the locations themselves is ok, it is usually 64x64 km and some locations have a size of 128x128 km. In the missions the size of the battle zone and the distance between airfields can be really short for top ranked jets this is why we are reworking all aircraft missions at the moment so that the size of the battle zone better matches the flight characteristics of the aircraft. Some of the missions have already been redesigned and are in the production server (both Smolensk locations, Guadalcanal, Berlin).

Ground Forces

Q. The Stormer HMV is extremely inconsistent in terms of hitting a target and doing damage. Most of the time it appears to phase through or just miss entirely, making it very unreliable for anti-aircraft operation. Do you plan to do anything to improve this vehicle to make it more usable? In reality it should have automatic target tracking lock on much like Helicopters have for ATGM’s rather than having to manually lead targets. This sort of system could greatly help the missing targets issue if implemented. Or perhaps introduce a new top rank British SPAAG such as the Warrior ADATS prototype, Tracked Rapier or Canadian ADATS? 

According to our statistics it isn’t as described. The efficiency of the Stormer HMV is comparable to the efficiency of  2S6 or ADATS at the 7th rank in RB it is in 3rd place among all SAM’s. So there is no great need to implement a new SAM right now. However this doesn’t mean that any of the proposed vehicles will not appear in the game in the future.

Q. Can you tell us why USSR ground forces have been without T-90 and later T-72 models for quite some time now? Is it due to technical limitations? The USA already has the M1A2 Abrams and Germany the Leopard 2A5 for example. Can we expect T-90 and other more advanced Soviet MBT’s to come soon?

One of the most perfect if not the most perfect serial soviet main battle tank, the T-80U is already implemented in the game. It isn’t significantly different from the M1A2 or Leo2A5 with its “build time”. The regular T-90 and even the T-90A are inferior in mobility to the T-80U and do not differ much from it in protection or firepower. What about plans to add it? Yes, we are already working on the T-72 and several modifications of it and one of them might have already been released in the last major update, but for objective reasons it wasn’t possible due to time deficit, so we plan to implement it in the next major update.

Q. It's been sometime since you last gave an update on the M60 turret and gunshield situation. Recently we have seen a lot of new volumetric amour schemes being implemented, can you tell us when we can expect the corrected M60 gunshield and turret with the values that were reported? 

Yes, we are working on the task regarding converting the M60 gun mantlet armour to volumetric armour technology.

Q. Is it possible to implement the ability of air-to-air missiles to hit ground targets? For example, for Type 93, which lacks other types of munitions, or Sidam Mistral?

No. First, it is not realistic to launch an air-to-air missile from a ground carrier to ground target. Yes, we do know about test launches of the IR-guided air-to-air missiles on ground targets, but these vehicles will not benefit from this, since the missiles are too weak to destroy any ground vehicle, except unarmoured/lightly armoured ones. However, we plan to give these vehicles abilities, similar to light tanks (repair help, scouting, etc.) to make these vehicles useful even when there’s no threats from above.

Naval Forces

Q. The Admiral Graf Spee and the Prinz Eugen/Admiral Hipper class have remained a dominant power in Naval Forces since they were first introduced. Most nations still don't really have balanced counterparts to them which can make gameplay very one sided against them. Do you have any plans you can share with us to address this matter and prevent such a situation from occurring in future? 

Their combat efficiency is no different from similar ships nevertheless. Most of the gaming nations have 8’’ guns, similar to the Hipper - sometimes slightly better, or slightly worse. Graf Spee is outstanding here, but its high calibre is compensated with a higher reload time. So we can’t agree with this observation.

Other

Q. Both Naval Forces and Ground Forces maps suffer common issues with people having direct line of sight into spawns from reasonably early on from even distant parts of the map. Do you have any general plans to better balance and improve maps by putting more physical / terrain barriers in front of spawns to stop people from simply abusing map design?

We have such plans. And each update we make changes on many maps including those that were designed to solve the problems described above.

Q. Do you have plans to review the HUD to give more info about hits and rewards? Maybe it is worth moving this data somewhere on another part of the screen?

We will consider this suggestion.

The War Thunder Team