Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sheb]

Okay, tonight I had my most entertaining mission so far, I just can't resist telling the tale.

So I was playing the Ruhr map, Realistic Battle, flying my Hurrican MkIIB. I go ahead, do my stuff, shoot down a Bf110 and a destroy a couple artillery and AA emplacement, when I realize I'm low on ammo and return to base. After landing, I look up the stats page, and realize we're down to three planes, me, a Wellington and a P-36 versus four aircrafts. Uh-oh.

As I'm finishing my reload, the P-36 gets shot down. Now, it's me and a bomber versus 4 planes. The pilot of the downed P-36, a fellow name reaero, tells me I'm facing a Bf 110, a Bf 109, a Fw 190 and a Ju 87D. I'm normally a mediocre player, so I tells him I don't expect to win, but that I'm going to give it my best shot.

So I take off, jettison my 2*250 lbs bombs, and get ready for some hot dogfighting action. A few km beyond my airfield, I see the Bf110, alone, about 800 m below me. I dive on him, miss him on the first try, then gets behind him and start shooting. His gunner was shot down quite rapidly, so it wasn't hard to kill him. Three to go.

As the heavy fighter crash into the trees, I see the Bf109 closing down on me, a couple km away. While I was hunting the Bf110, he downed our Wellington. I'm now alone versus two fighters and a Stuka. I turn around, trying to get some altitude before fighting the Bf109 (The Bf110 was flying nap of the Earth, so I lost all my altitude following him). We meet head on and spray some fire, I hit him while he seems to miss me. As I turn around, trying to use my better turning radius, I realize that I'm dry. Not a bullet left: I expanded most of my ammo downing the Bf110 (reaero, who spent the rest of the game coaching me and watching my back, helpfully pointed out that I hve a tendency to underlead.)

Luckily, we are quite low and really close to the airfield, so I decide to go and attempt a landing. It's not like I can hope to shoot him down without bullets anyway, and with any luck the airfield's AAA is going to get him. I manage to escape most of his bullet and manage to land. But now, I'm a sitting duck, and too tempting a target. Ignoring the AAA, the Bf109 turns around and dive on me. He sprays and sprays and sprays, my whole plane turn dark red, but by miracle no bullets hit the pilot. He sprays and sprays and sprays, my plane is engulfed in a cloud of dust and trace smoke. He sprays and sprays and sprays and... crash. So focused was he on shooting me that he forgot about the ground. Two to go.

I reload, repair and I'm good to go. Once more I jettison my bombs, once more I start climbing, when reaero spots the Fw190, 1000m above me. That's when he game me a great tip: lure the enemy into a low-altitude dogfight over friendly AA. After a few circles, and a coupe hit on each side, the AA around the airfield send him flaming down. At this point, me an reaero are fairly exultant. We only have a Ju87 to shoot down and the battle is ours! Once more I land to repair and reload, but this time I do not jettison my bombs, as we are behind in the ground game, and I hope to maybe net a ground kill while hunting for the Stuka.

So I climb, and climb, and no sign of the enemy. reaero looks up his player card and he's a noob, so we think he must be happily hunting ground targets somewhere. And I stay just below the cloud layer, about 2 km up to have a nice view of the battlefield.

At this point I had a little fright: while still searching for him, I decide to bomb some enemy tanks (I mean, I'll have to drop these bombs at some point anyway), and for the first time ever I get a carburator failure from the sharp negative-G dive. I didn't know that Hurrican and Spitfire suffer from an engine defect where their carburator can fill with fuel when diving, so I freaked out when I saw the "Engine Died: Carburator failure". Killing 3 out of 4 enemies, leaving only a Stuka behind, to die for what seemed like no reasons? Thanks god, it was only temprorary and I didn't die. At least I learned something. Still, it's a pity you can't buy Miss Shilling's orifice as an update.

So at this point, not finding the Stuka, me and reaero reach the conclusion that he must be hiding in the base. After all, the ground game is favouring him, so waiting rather than picking up a fight with a Hurricane is a rational option.

I'm halfway to the enemy base when a stream of tracer pass meters ahead the my plane. The enemy was hiding in the cloud layer. Worse, he was not a Stuka as we thought, but a Fw 109! Quickly I turn, trying to get him in my sights. After a few turns, he realize I can outturn him and use his speed and climbing advantage to get away. Since I know I can't* possibly catch up with him, I turn around to trick him into attacking me. He turns, once more we exchange fire, and he run away, disappearing into the cloud. I try to follow him, but quickly loose him the the dense clouds. After looking for him for a few minutes, we decide to return to the airfield. It is possible that I can trick him into attacking me again. Otherwise, I might grab some bombs and try to turn the ground game in our favor.

I'm only a few meters over the landing strip when the red dot shows up on my minimap. He couldn't resist the though of strafing a landing aircraft. Once more I start turning in tight, slow circles over the airfield, tricking him into attempting a dogfight that the AAA wins for me.

In the end, I only got credit for one of those four kills, and I know I only won because of my opponent's noobiness, and, more importantly, reaero's patient coaching. But I had more fun than I can remember, and I'm prouder of this mission than of any other. So proud I rushed here to write it down, lest I forget. So if you happen to meet reaero, give him a shout from Sheb!


* Don't think I'm better than I am, reaero was giving me plane statistic over the chat.

[TheBronzePickle]

Strangely, I've literally never had a carburetor failure. I guess I've never dived steeply enough.

That or one of the upgrades makes it so you can't.

[Cthulhu]

I've gotten them with Zeros before (rolling over for more than a couple seconds in a zero will also starve the engine) but I never saw it happen in a spitfire.

In Il-2 pretty much any forward pitching will choke the engine, it's much less forgiving.

[ukulele]

Engine choking its quite common on earlier planes, but iv never seen a message about it before. Its usually a instant recovery.

[TheDarkStar]

As a WoT player, would I like this game?

[TheBronzePickle]

More likely than not. It's generally better optimized and the textures are better, if nothing else.

You might have some difficulty adjusting, though, at least with the tank side of things. Most people at least claim to vastly prefer War Thunder over WoT, but there are plenty out there who like both, and even those who think WoT is better.

WT requires you to be more aware of your surroundings. Combat can take place over much greater distances, and one shot can cripple or kill your tank. Tanks are almost always drawn (though admittedly there are a few glitches sometimes), so you can sometimes see tanks before your crew does. Also, module damage is much more significant: most shots that hit you will break something in your tank, and in fact, that is how you kill tanks in the first place. Killing the crew, damaging the tank beyond repair, or most impressively, ammo racking, are the only ways to take out a tank, and if your shot goes through the armor but doesn't actually hit anything important, it might as well have missed.

There's also a lot less randomness. Shot dispersion is a fraction of what it is in World of Tanks, and only really comes in to play at over a kilometer's distance. The main thing that you'll have to deal with (except in Arcade Battles) is the fact that the shots drop, and the only thing you have to judge range and drop is a mil sight. The only other big random thing in WT is spall and fragmentation, which can sometimes kill something when you really think it shouldn't or fail to kill something that it really should.

Finally, WT has some buggy stuff relating to netcode, latency, hit boxes, and similar things. WoT probably has it too, but generally you don't notice it as much because getting hit usually isn't enough to dramatically decrease your combat effectiveness or outright kill you. It can get ridiculously frustrating... but thankfully it's not excessively common. Just enough so to keep you on your toes.

War Thunder's air side is a completely different beast, though. You'll have to try that out on your own, it's almost completely incomparable to World of Warplanes and definitely a different beast from WoT.

[BlindKitty]

I have just recently started to play War Thunder, so I will just chime in here. Do we have some sort of B12 - based organization or something? If not, I'm AbimelekZero in WT, and I'm looking for friends. I was actually going to ride some tanks around, but after I started flying the planes, I'm mostly hooked up on that now. Right now I'm playing Arcade; is there anyone else doing that, or is everybody Realistic/Simulation?

Also, give it a try, TheDarkSky. It's free and only about 3 GB download; it would be easiest to just try.

[Sonlirain]

As a WoT player, would I like this game?

Depends what you like in WoT.

Personally i couldn't stand the horribad hit detection (i had a video where a shell phased a 2.5 meter thick stone wall and killed off my tank.
Then i had a game where my tank clipped into another causing the physics to spazz out "x simulator 20xx" style.
Then i had a game where the game downright spawned my tank inside a tree... so i had to abandon it because i couldn't move. Selected another tank and got spawned in the exact same damn place.
On another game i shot a tank behind a rock in SU-122.
The shell missed hittign the rock but shrapnel from the splash phased into the rock and destroyed the tank that was on the other side of at least 2 meters of stone.

So if you value working mechanics over graphics expansve terrain and planes screwing you over at random you should stick to WoT.
Quite frankly WoTs only strong point in this comparison is simply not being so damn random when deciding who is going to die and who won't.
In WT a 88 mm shell can pen and go along the entire leanghth of your tank doing no damage while another exact same AP shel withh cause the spalling to erupt like a volcano and kill everyone inside and detonate the ammorack while it's at it.

Personally i play a bit of both... but so far WoT is just the more complete/working game. And hilariously it looks better on my year old PC because just to have WT:GF running i had to cut on just about every graphical setting making the game look... sorta shit. And both work at around 45 fps for me.
But that's just me and my PC.

[10ebbor10]

Might just be me, but the hit detection is not that volatile for me. Sure, sometimes it does something unique, but for the most part it tends to work.

What you should remember is that the shots you fire are rendered locally, but the hit detection is done on the server. This means that if you have some connection troubles, that you might appear to be hitting someone while actually you're slightly under/overshooting them.

[LoSboccacc]

Started playing yesterday.  I kind of like it, even if it's a little too arcadish with the enemy highlighting and whatnot.

The other battle queues have a wait time too long.

[Sheb]

We do have a Bay12 squadron, I think girlinhat is managing it.

Also, LoSboccacc, what mode were you playing? I pretty much only play realistic mode for tanks. And the same for planes (except when I want to divebomb with my wellington because it's hilarious).

[Aseaheru]

Sim for tanks isint bad either.

[LoSboccacc]

I faced up to 5 minute time to enter in a simulation battle last time.

I just started, that might be the issue, I don't know how matchmaking works.

[ukulele]

You can usually get into any sort of RB in around 30 seconds be it tanks or planes, and its what i recomend. Arcade is boring and the skill cap is having 2 hands.

[TheBronzePickle]

Simulation battles unfortunately took a downturn of players after Gaijin implemented the system that now makes up RB, and it hasn't quite grown back.

There's a decent population on between 2 and 5 EST, but the rest of the time it can be very dodgy whether or not you can get into a game. Tier III tanks are the most popular.