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[Jopax]

So I thought we had a thread for this already, but it appears not. So now we do.

Obligatory link: http://aw.my.com

What's AW? Well it's basically a clone of World of Tanks but with tanks going from early 60-ies to five minutes into the future with some of the top tier tanks still being prototypes like the Armate or the PL-01
So what's the point of it other than shiny new tanks?
Well the devs took note of what WoT was doing right and copied that, they also took note of what could be improved and improved that.
Main selling points:
-Lowered the RNG, here it's 10% IIRC
-No oneshots other than ammoracks, a big one, pretty much no tank can oneshot another one unless there's like a five tier difference, and even then it takes a lot of luck
-Arty isn't gamebreakingly retarded, here, instead of playing with the RNG arty is fast firing and accurate, but deals relatively low damage per shot. This means you're more of a support role for critting and flushing out tanks out of cover, also support shells for spotting or providing smoke cover. There's also a neat little game within a game of cat and mouse with the enemy arty because every time you fire you get revealed and there's a ping one the map of your general location. Stand still too long and you get counterbatteried.
-Tank roles are neatly defined and each offers varied gameplay, the MBT's are your heavies with big guns and lots of frontal armour but low mobility and weak sides and rear, AFV's are the scouts which can mark targets for extra damage, usually have autocannons for flanking or ATGM's, Arty is arty, TD's are quick and pack a punch but can't take one and light tanks are usually fast with good guns but no armour
-PvE missions where you stomp bots of varying difficulty, quite a refreshing thing when you get tired of PvP, also a great way to make sure none of your tanks face players stock
-No crappy gold ammo, only ammo of varying effectiveness which you unlock by playing the tank. Also loads of different kinds of ammo, each working in a different way. From AP which comes in several flavours and is good for armoured targets but tends to overpenetrate thin armour and do little, to HEAT which is good if it pens, countered by composite, ERA and cage armour tho, HE and HESH/HEP which do damage wherever they hit but deal massive damage if you heat a weakspot like the engine deck, also critting modules everywhere. Also ATGM's of various HE and HEAT flavours which you guide to your target and which deal massive damage, but can be dodged or shot down by APS
-All the tanks you want, as in, no garage slots needed, if you can afford a tank you can own it, about the only thing they charge for is skill resets, xp conversion, premium time and premium tanks
-There's a base thing which you build and which gives bonuses, still in development so there's not much to do atm
Then there's stuff which is different to WoT but not neccessarily better or worse, like a completely different crew system, where each tanks crew sticks to the tank and has several skills and perks which you can pick, but you also have commanders which you unlock or buy which can be moved from tank to tank, they have different specialities and perks which help with them, from guys specialised for MBT's and tanking damage, to gals who work best in zippy scout tanks or bastards whose main desire is to get as much crits and fires started (my favourite so far tbh).
So jump in I guess, the grind isn't too terrible for the first five tiers (out of the eight so far in the game), mostly because no tank is shit out of the box and no tank is there to just make you waste money on skipping it. They're all pretty fun once you get the hang of them, even arty (tho there's a lot of those around so waiting times are long, ingame they're not that bad since they're capped to 2 per team).

I think that wall of text summed it up nicely, so join me, I'm Djoze on EU.

[Jopax]

Kinda, battles are instanced ordeals of usually 15v15 could be less depending on the population of players at the time. There's a couple of modes, standard battle has each team with a base which can be capped by parking your ass in it and not getting damaged in the process or encounter which has a single base for both teams, usually in the middle of the map, serving the same purpose. Killing everything that's red is a very viable tactic and usually the way most battles end.
No skill based matchmaking yet, not sure if they'll implement it, also not sure if that's what you're asking about. Teamwork is generally good and leads to winning since the classes usually counter and complement each other, sadly, it's not always present so you have your fair share of idiots who refuse to listen or pay attention to the map. Luckily PvE missions are a bit more personal with squads of five people so you can and should work together because the swarms of bots can easily overwhelm a single tank.
Not sure about the fun part since I know about tanks, but I guess the basic mechanics are that of a slightly slower paced and more tactical shooter, if you enjoy those you should feel right at home here. Also no optical camo yet, not sure if there's any of that in development that they can use either.

[Tnx]

It's definitely better than World of Tanks, they've basically copied that arcadey formula and defined the niche roles more (instead of WoT, where you're hurting yourself if you play anything other than a heavy).  It's a good game if you like quick matches where the skill ceiling is not too high (basically point and shoot, aiming angles and velocity is calculated out for you, shells do a range of RNG damage).  For me though, after playing War Thunder Ground Forces, I couldn't go back to this type of tank gameplay.  Everything drives like a fast go cart, turret traverse is insanely fast, HP based combat, positioning is not important (when I say position, I mean presenting a diamond to your opponent, or going hull down position).  Artillery tanks are toned down compared to WoT, but people still call them skycancer, no amount of hard cover will save you from an arty tank slowly taking your HP bar away.

This game does not reward smart tactical gameplay.  If you get the jump on a guy, you can expect to kill him first BUT you will also get your health whittled down as well.  The guy will swing around and shoot you back until he's fully dead.  1 health left on your enemy?  Doesn't matter, his tank will drive fine and his cannon will work as if new.  Spotting is dumb too.  You can literally be on a flat test map, and if your enemy is X meters over your "sight range" you will not visually see him (if he fires though, he will appear momentarily).  I'm guessing this is for the sake of balance and to discourage people who sit at the far edges and snipe people.

Regardless, if I ever steer people towards tank arena type gameplay, I'd definitely pick this game over WoT.

[lastverb]

-No oneshots other than ammoracks, a big one, pretty much no tank can oneshot another one unless there's like a five tier difference, and even then it takes a lot of luck

There is no oneshots even with ammorack from the time they removed Centauro 155 (with new HE mechanics it wouldn't oneshot anything anyway). The only way to oneshot a vehicle is to kill all its crew (red) - that is so rare to do to another player you can send a lottery ticket and better count on that.

-PvE missions where you stomp bots of varying difficulty, quite a refreshing thing when you get tired of PvP, also a great way to make sure none of your tanks face players stock

With the upcoming grind rework, there will be no point for good players to play pvp with anything else than a premium. PVE gets higher reputation rewards right now, and new patch (0.9.5) will increase it even further. The only thing you want from PVP is credits and a break from shitty, easy to do PVE missions (waiting for INSANE missions - but those will make PVP reputation rewards completly obsolete).

[Flying Dice]

Way better than WoT.

Note that the dev is Obsidian. They've got in-depth outside-of-battle stuff, including a base that you can upgrade using daily-reward tokens to increase credit/exp/crew exp/commander exp gain, decrease repair costs, &c., as well as more involved crew/commander management stuff. Tech trees are more fluid because they're based around different PMCs instead of nations. Arty isn't a shit/overpowered binary setup; it does relatively minor damage per shot but tends to fire rapidly, and they've got a counterbattery system set up so that each shot an arty takes from the same location pings the map for enemy arty, first broadly, then narrowly, then revealing them outright.

ATGMs and similar are in. The WoT roles don't really carry over as much, given the differences in performance and &c. caused by the different era focus.

Also? They have functional, fun PVE with rewards that aren't trivial. Both PvE and (IIRC) PvP have more dynamic game modes than "no cap kill all" in three flavors.
--

The biggest problem with the game that I'm aware of is a section of a map with a bunch of bugged invisible terrain, and that some PVE maps can literally spawn enemies on top of you.

[Cthulhu]

That description sounds unbelievably shitty, to be honest.

[Flying Dice]

That's your opinion, sure.

Mine is that even a steaming pile of shit would be better than WoT or WT GF.

[Astral]

Snip

Sounds like what freemium games have been doing to mobile gaming for a while now, but I'll have to wait and see how implementation is actually done.

[Jopax]

The base thing is pretty basic atm, and they've said you'll be able to earn the resources trough battles and PvE missions. I think it's best viewed as some sort of long term progression thing that you can take part in if you want, but is completely optional since the bonuses aren't that big atm.

Also yeah, compared to WoT and WT this is enjoyable because of the gameplay, not the want to grind shit. Because the moment I lost the reason to grind new tanks in WoT was the moment I stopped enjoying it, or atleast thinking I enjoyed it, same went for WT, except there it came even faster. Here on the other hand, I pretty much have most of the tanks I want already, those being the Scorpion and the Sheridan, alongside anything that's armed with autocannons. And I still find the game enjoyable even when the gameplay is for gameplays sake, not grinding out the next tank that you might enjoy more.

[Flying Dice]

Snip

Sounds like what freemium games have been doing to mobile gaming for a while now, but I'll have to wait and see how implementation is actually done.

It's absolutely not. AFAIK the only things you can buy with real money are the same old premium tanks and 50% bonus to credits/exp.

More points in favor of it:

1. Unlimited free garage slots. Want to have every vehicle in the game in your garage at the same time? You can do it without spending a cent.

2. One of those base buildings that you get without spending any money? It decreases the cost of premium time.

3. Actual variation in ammo types; blindly loading your highest-pen shell gets you nowhere. This is alongside different armor types.

4. Wheeled vehicles a) are a thing and b) handle differently than tracked vehicles.

5. Remember all those extra equipment upgrades in WoT? They're dirt-cheap, do more things more directly (i.e. the first one you can get increases vehicle HP by 7.5%). They're also tiered and can be upgraded directly.

6. Vehicle unlocking isn't done by buying them with exp from a prior vehicle. Each vehicle has a progress bar of exp: at 50% every module is unlocked (though you can also use exp to get lump sums of credits which scale with vehicle tier, titles, &c.), and at 100% you automatically get access to each vehicle in the next tier of that line for purchase with credits. Individual lines are unlocked by doing things like getting a certain number of kills or amount of damage dealt with vehicles of that supplier under different conditions (at all, while >50% health, under or over a specific range, &c.).

[Dorsidwarf]

This is basically all the best bits of war thunder and world of tanks, except set pretty much right after them (T10 leopard 1 prot german medium is the T1 MBT).

This means that unlike wt and wot, the starter tanks are actually fucking playable, rather than being from the "WHAT HAPPENS IF WE DO THIS" era of tank design.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's definitely part of the appeal. You can hop right into the stock M113 and still do something meaningful, even if it's just spotting or plinking a MBT's commander's hatch for little chips of damage. First time I took out a T2 MBT I got wrecked because a M113 with the upgraded sabot AP rounds managed to get my side. Pretty much all of the AFVs have autocannons (as opposed to dinky little popguns as was the case for WoT/WT light tanks) and are fast enough to do a lot of crazy shit. The first time I played my XM800T, I accidentally boosted off a hill at something like 60km/h, killing my driver and leaving me at ~2/3 hp before we spotted any enemies. How'd that game go after? I spotted some stuff and plinked, dodged fire by driving off a cliff, hid for a while, dueled another AFV and won, and finished by killing an MBT in a knife fight. Fun, fun, fun.

But yeah, the ammo types and armor types are a big part of what makes it fun, since every ammunition type is viable and the differences are largely situational.

The different way they handle crews and commanders is nice as well--crew level quickly (typically you'll hit your first crew skill point at around the same time that you fully rank up a tank), and commanders are shared between multiple vehicles, retaining their skills.

Basically the easiest tl;dr is that they learned every lesson from WoT and WT and then used those lessons to make a better game set in a more interesting technological time period.

(Also, the Leopard 1? GET THAT SHIT. So much fun.)

[Astral]

So I've downloaded it, and I'm not quite sure what I should be doing. I prefer the heavier, slower starter tank over the quicker, multihit one, and have run a few PvE missions (including the sparse tutorial), a single PvP mission (in which all the new guys got wrecked, and the people in decent tanks lasted to the end of the round), and dicked around in the menus a bit.

I tend toward playing the rogue or sniper archetypes in these sorts of games; what tank should I be aiming for?

I'm currently on a backup video card so I'm not too sure how much I'll be able to do at the moment, but I'm still not so sure I see the draw of this sort of game yet. I just find it frustrating as someone who hasn't play World of Tanks or similar fare, with most of my experience coming from Battlefield 4.

[Flying Dice]

You'll probably want to follow Sofie Wölfli's tech tree (the dealer whose symbol is the field of blue diamonds). Of the two available in OBT right now, that one will probably lend itself better to your playstyle. The Leopard line is full of fast, accurate, high-pen MBTs, you get access to the only line of TDs in the game right now (which play very differently from what you'd be used to in WoT/WT--they're mostly very fast, wheeled, and armored with nothing but paper). The BMP line gets access to ATGMs, which are the other big option for sniping.

You'll probably get the Leopard 1 unlocked first, after that it's fairly straightforward: lines of vehicles are unlocked by accomplishing a certain goal (for TDs, it's getting an amount of damage done with vehicles from that dealer from beyond 300m), and can also be unlocked with Global Rep (the equivalent of free exp).

That said, you'll have to play the M113 to get there. It only takes maybe 3-4 matches to get the T2 tanks in the core block unlocked, though. The Patton is probably what you'll want to play, but the LAV-150 will give you experience driving wheeled vehicles before you unlock the TD line.

[Ozyton]

Interesting fact: you can unlock tier 3 vehicles just by playing your tier 1 vehicle, so it you like your M113 or PT-72 (whatever it's called) you can skip over the tier 2 tanks. Also interesting is that after reaching 50% reputation in a vehicle some of them unlock special things such as retrofit upgrades (modules you put on your tank to improve acceleration, crew skills, reload time etc.) or even tank commanders with special skill sets. Look through the tech tree and see what modules and tank commanders you want to unlock.

My friends (who are WoT veterans) have a group and we play, mostly PVE because it's generally more lucrative a the moment (but PvP seems to give you more credits if you can't afford an upgrade or tank), and you can platoon with 5 people if you do PVE.

So far I haven't found a tank I didn't have fun in, but my friends are looooathing the M60 Starship and I haven't tried SPGs yet. Right now I simply don't have enough credits to proceed since I want to unlock all the things, but it leaves no money to get next tier tanks.