Step 1 of 7 The seven-step path · Crest Space

What a desktop vehicle combat game actually is

Before installing anything, it helps to know what the genre is doing differently from other multiplayer games, because most of the early frustration comes from expectations imported from somewhere else.

The short definition

A vehicle combat game is an online multiplayer game in which the unit you control is a machine rather than a person: an aeroplane, a helicopter, a tank or a warship. You still play in teams, you still fight over objectives, and a match still lasts somewhere between a few minutes and half an hour. What changes is everything between your input and the result on screen.

In a game where you control a person, the connection is direct. You press a direction and the character moves; you aim and the shot goes there. In a vehicle game there is a machine in between. An aircraft has momentum and a stall speed. A tank has a turret that traverses at its own pace and armour whose usefulness depends on the angle it is struck from. A ship takes a long time to turn and its shells take seconds to arrive. None of this is a difficulty setting — it is the substance of the game, and it is why a skilled player from another genre can still lose badly in their first session.

The genre is also, almost without exception, a desktop genre. The number of simultaneous inputs a vehicle needs — throttle, pitch, roll, yaw, trim, gun selection, view control, and often a separate set for the crew — does not reduce comfortably to a touchscreen or a controller with two sticks. War Thunder, the title this site uses as its worked example, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and nowhere else.

The vocabulary you will meet in the first hour

Every genre has its shorthand, and this one has more than most. These terms recur across titles and across community guides, so they are worth having in advance.

Tech tree

The branching diagram of vehicles available to a player, usually organised by nation and by type. Progress along a branch is unlocked by playing vehicles earlier in it, rather than bought outright.

Research

The points earned by playing that unlock the next vehicle in a tech tree branch. Most titles award them per match, weighted by what you achieved in it.

Battle rating or matchmaking rating

A number attached to each vehicle that determines the company it keeps. Matchmaking uses it to decide which vehicles meet each other, so that a starter vehicle is not routinely placed against something decades more advanced.

Uptiering and downtiering

Community shorthand for being placed in a match where the highest-rated vehicles present are above or below your own. Being uptiered is the usual complaint of new players, and it is a normal consequence of how matchmaking fills a queue.

Spawn and spawn points

Where and when you enter a match. Many titles let you bring several vehicles into one match and spend a currency to deploy each one, which makes the choice of what to bring part of the game.

Crew

In ground and naval play, the vehicle is operated by modelled crew members with individual roles. Losing a specific crew member degrades a specific capability — a loader affects reload speed, a gunner affects aiming — rather than simply reducing a health bar.

Penetration and angling

Whether a shell defeats armour is usually calculated from the shell type, the range, the thickness struck and the angle of impact. Presenting your armour at an angle to an incoming shot increases its effective thickness. This is the single most important mechanic in ground combat and the least obvious to a newcomer.

Repair cost

An in-game currency charge applied after a match for the vehicles you used and lost. It is the reason an experienced player will tell you that finishing a match badly in an expensive vehicle can cost you more than it earns.

The three ways the same match is usually offered

Most titles in this genre present the same content at several levels of assistance. The names differ between games, but the structure is consistent enough to describe in general terms.

The practical advice is to start in the most assisted mode, regardless of how confident you feel. It teaches the maps and the vehicle silhouettes, which are the two pieces of knowledge you cannot look up mid-match, and it does so without the long dead time that comes with a single life per match.

How progression actually works

These games are built as long-running progression systems rather than as a fixed set of content. A new account begins with the earliest vehicles in each nation’s tree — usually inter-war or early Second World War equipment — and works forward through decades of development. That structure has two consequences worth understanding on day one.

The first is that early vehicles are not a tutorial stage to be rushed through. They are the part of the game where the mechanics are legible: slow aircraft, thin armour, short ranges, and outcomes you can actually see the cause of. Players who buy or grind their way to modern equipment quickly often find it harder, not easier, because the margins are finer and the mistakes are less visible.

The second is that progression is deliberately paced, and a paid path around that pacing is the commercial model of the genre. That is not a criticism; it is simply how these games are funded, and it is worth recognising the mechanism before you meet it rather than after. Step six deals with spending in detail, including your position as a consumer in Australia.

What the genre asks of you

Where this leaves you

If the description above sounds like something you would enjoy, the next question is a practical one and it is worth answering before a large download: will the game run properly on the computer you intend to play it on? That is a more subtle question than comparing your machine against a published minimum, and it is the subject of the next step.