We’re continuing to move along with our Roadmap that we released back in June. First and foremost, we’d like to start off by saying thank you for your patience and understanding whilst we progress through it. Recently, after releasing other roadmap changes, we’ve noticed your anticipation and enthusiasm about progression changes and today we’re pleased to announce that we’re ready to talk about these changes with you.

When we initially released the roadmap, we set out to improve research and progression by condensing tech trees by grouping vehicles with each other, and alongside this, reduce the required amount of Research Points by 50% for these grouped vehicles, except the first in the group. We’re happy to say that this change has been worked on extensively and will be implemented, as previously promised.

As we have been doing throughout the roadmap cycle, we’d like to explain the inner workings and decisions made whilst we looked into these changes, and how they will affect your time playing War Thunder.

Changes to Research Trees

We'll be open with you: War Thunder’s research trees have not gone through much reshaping over the years — we add vehicles in logical positions within the tree, group a limited number of similar vehicles, and make research point adjustments down the line where necessary. Because of this, the planned grouping of vehicles within research trees can be considered one of the largest progression changes that we’ve made since the game's inception, and will affect almost all players.

When we sat down to make these changes, we also realized that we could carefully look into the position and ranks of all vehicles, and streamline them where possible. Therefore, we are not only reducing the amount of vehicles to research to progress down a tree by grouping vehicles, but we are also making trees more logical and better structured — taking into account the large number of vehicles that have been added to the game in the past few years.

The result of these changes, for many nations in the game, are significant. For this reason, we'd like to give you time to prepare for them, while also ensuring these long requested changes arrive to the game in a quick manner. Your valuable feedback and suggestions about this topic are very important to us, and we’ll be collecting and considering them as much as possible. Because of the magnitude of these alterations, we’ve decided that the best way forward would be to announce these changes to you today, and release them with the next major update, which is scheduled for September. Going ahead with this decision will allow you to test these changes in real-time on the dev server before they come to the live server, and, as mentioned, leave feedback and suggestions.

We also want to talk about some additional changes that we’ve been working on alongside the grouping of vehicles. Previously, we removed the requirement to research and purchase a previous vehicle for some, in our eyes, easier rank II and rank III vehicles. This in turn allowed players to easily switch to a more convenient vehicle (and the branch that follows it) if their initial choice was not to their liking. However, with smaller, newly added nations that have arrived to War Thunder, the amount of vehicles in ranks I-II was not sufficient enough to have this rule function effectively and therefore there are no gaps in newer research trees. We also actually noticed that gaps between ranks didn’t actually help new players in a meaningful way.

Therefore, for all nations, we have decided to remove the research link between rank I and rank II vehicles for the Ground Forces (Army) and Aviation research trees. This in turn will make rank I feel like more of a “preview” rank for each research tree, giving players a small taste of how the nation’s vehicles may play. This will also give new players the ability to learn how vehicles are linked in a research tree, and what the requirements are for unlocking the next rank. All this whilst being able to research any vehicle they want when they reach rank II.

We’d like to note that each nation is different: they have a different number of vehicles with different characteristics, and because of this, some vehicles that are similar or the same, but in different nations, may be at slightly different ranks. This is similar to how Battle Ratings of the same rank may significantly vary between nations and vehicle types.

Let’s take a look at an example of these changes. For instance, Israel, where the Magach line within rank IV of the ground forces tree has 6 vehicles in it, will now only have 3 vehicles in it (with the other 3 being grouped with them). With the upcoming changes, all ranks will not exceed 3 vehicles vertically downwards.

We’re not forgetting and would like to mention the 50% reduction in the required amount of Research Points for vehicles that are nested into groups of similar vehicles (which we also call folders). This welcomed change will allow you to research and expand your vehicle line-ups much faster!

Let’s show you another example: the new research route from rank VI, starting from the Chieftain Mk 3 to the Challenger 2E in the British research tree will now take 1,600,000 Research Points, instead of the previous number of 2,690,000 Research Points — quite the difference, and also almost half as much! Another example we’d like to share is the Shermans within the US research tree at ranks II-III — they’ll now take 100,700 instead of 162,000 Research Points.

You can take a look at each research tree in full screen in a separate tab with this link

Increasing the ranks of certain Premium and Event Vehicles

When purchasing a premium vehicle, or completing tasks during one of our events to obtain an event vehicle, players are already familiar with its characteristics, what the vehicle may be capable of achieving, as well as its position and rank within a nation’s research tree. Over time, the effectiveness of these vehicles may change, and alongside it, the Battle Rating. As a result, these vehicles may no longer correlate with other vehicle Battle Ratings within its rank.

We’d like to mention that in the past, a general rule we’ve followed is that we try not to change the rank of premium and event vehicles. We do this because these vehicles already had a set rank when purchased or obtained, and increasing or decreasing of these vehicle’s ranks may positively or negatively affect its ability to research vehicles within a tree. But because of the scale of the changes to vehicles in research trees, we’ve decided to adapt some premium and event vehicles to better fit trees. We would like to make a clear note that these changes will only increase the rank of a premium or event vehicle, which in turn will allow its owners to boost the research of more vehicles! No premium or event vehicle will be lowered in rank.

Moreover, we’d also like to let you know of some premium vehicle price changes. Premium vehicles that are available to purchase in our store and for GE that will have their rank increased in the next major update will also receive an updated price in relation to their new rank in the tree. There is still time until the next major update in September to purchase these premium vehicles at their current prices.

We’d like to also note that premium vehicles whose Battle Rating corresponds to the maximum rank will be moved to the maximum rank in that vehicle’s research tree. Having said this, we do not plan to add premium vehicles that have a maximum Battle Rating and the best combat abilities to the game. These types of vehicles will still remain in the regular research tree for all players to research towards if they pique their interest.

Let us know what you think

That’s all for now! To wrap things up, we appreciate that these planned changes are a lot to digest and would like to reiterate that we thank you for your patience whilst waiting for these changes. We would like to emphasize that we are reading all of your comments: be it either on our official forums, social media, on Steam, Reddit, as well as other platforms that we read. We greatly appreciate your support through this process — please let us know what you think of these changes: we’re listening.