Gaming Update – So Many Games

Tags

Ingress, World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, World of Warships

Gaming progress for the last week includes :

Ingress : Double AP until December 1 is being very kind to me.   Sometime this weekend I hope to make Level 14, and an important fellow agent just made 16 with the boost.

• 1.5 million MU captured
• 40k Translator (Glyphing) points, means 10,000 to go until the way is clear to 16.

I enjoyed making this field, 2K MU, but it was just such a long and large blocking field as well.

Warplanes : Hawk 75M purchased and fully upgraded, and continuing to accrue the XP for the F2A.   All other aircraft (Tier I mostly) are elited.   I am avoiding purchasing more stuff until I know more about the grind, or elite one of those two aircraft.

Warships : My fleet includes the Dresden and Hermelin (German II and I) ships.   I like the Germans for some reason I haven’t carefully analyzed.   The Americans are the tree I’m planning to fully explore, and I own 5 ships there, mostly working to elite the St Louis cruiser.

I figured out how to play the Sampson destroyer after a lot of false starts.   The torpedos have a tiny range, so you have to sneak up on other ships or wait for them to move near, fire torpedos, and take evasive action.   Generating smoke helps keep you hidden.   Most of the time when I get near a ship, they fired torpedos at me, and had a good kill rate.   I don’t think Destroyers are my kind of ship, but who knows.  I did manage to elite it, but I’m not buying the next one immediately at least.

I haven’t played my starter Battleship (South Carolina) yet.

Tanks : AT2 elited and removed from the grind list.   That is a TD very much my style.    Still grinding away otherwise.   E-75 (German Heavy), The Toaster (German TD), AMX 46 (French TD), Chi-Nu (Japanese Medium), and the B1 (French Heavy) round out the list.    I’m kind of afraid to play the E-75 since I lose 10k credits every match, usually.   Still need more than 100k XP for the E-100 unlock.   I must not play the AMX 46 very well since I often lose credits, and I’m still playing this thing after such a long time.

The B1 is hysterical to play as a stock tank.  It can’t pen ANYTHING at all.   Not a Tier 3 scout from the rear.   Enemies were nervous about me until they realized I was stock and then chewed me up and spit me out.   But I persevered, did not spend free XP, and managed to get all the gear upgrades and am now working on the next tank.   I don’t know – I might end up enjoying this one.   We’ll see.   56% crew means there’s nowhere to go but up.

The weekend special is 50% off Tier 4-5 heavy tanks (none for me), and 30% of Tier 6-7.  For me, this means the KV-85 is on sale.   Bought, and stocked away.

World Of Warplanes – Second Look

Tags

World of Warplanes

Thanks to a comment below, I decided to take a second look at World of Warplanes after all.   I’m glad I did.

New cinematic shots, before the game begins.

After patching the game up and trying it out, I find that the controls are still squishy but it doesn’t matter that much – the game is populated by bots now.    Yes, Wargaming has such a low level of population for the game that most matches are populated more by bots than by human beings.     Doesn’t bother me any.

One of the things I didn’t like about how the game came out, was getting smashed into the ground constantly by the other players.   And I mean, smashed hard.    It was discouraging to find yourself with a 40% win rate and it just keeps dropping.    But the bots are much easier for me to deal with, and I’ve racked up some nice kill totals and several wins.

That’s new – I get a birthday surprise for my premium plane. Plus 1,400 free XP.

Apparently things are pretty dire for this part of the franchise – it’s rumored that it will be shut down by the end of the year unless player population improves.    Based on the one Veteran’s Day set of games I played, that would be a shame.   I enjoyed it, and will probably attempt to unlock the two planes that sound cool based on real life –

• The P-38 Lightning, built in Burbank, made for the inexperienced pilot.
• The ME 262, the first jet, that tore allied prop planes to ribbons if it was in the air.

I have the Tier II US plane that moves me in that direction, and I unlocked the Tier II German plane as well.    Apparently I’m pretty well captured by Wargaming, again, at least for the moment.

 

Tableting and WoT

Tags

World of Tanks, World of Warplanes

World of Tanks loves the holiday season.   Code for the New Year’s bonus is 2015WGNY.    This will get you one free day of premium.

Patch up, and log into World of Warplanes, and you’ll get another day of free premium.   I didn’t even need to fly a battle!

In the meantime, I continue to grind the matches.     Bought and elited the T-60, a Tier II Russian tank.

The T-60, nicely skinned even.

This has a machine gun to even rival the T7 combat car.     Had to stop to fire it, but when I managed to do that, it chewed up every enemy I could keep the shells flying into.    5 matches elited it, and I moved on to the T-70, which I managed to buy just before the special ran out.    Hey, saving 20k credits is always a good thing.    I own two additional soviet TD’s, but now am mostly concentrating on credits and matches.

Now I own a tablet – a Nexus 7 handed down to me after my wife got her Ipad for Christmas.      I’ve not really found much of a use for it, but it’s nice to have apps to view when playing Tanks.

WoT Community Assistant

I get stats, stats, and more stats with this one.    It’s also nice enough to give me an updated WN8 rating after every battle, along with Wargaming’s rating.     I have to admit I’m fonder of Wargamings, since WN8 is biased against lower tier players.   But getting my WN8 rating for each tank is very instructive.

Top tanks by WN8

My top tank for WN8 with a meaningful number of battles (100) is…….. the Hummel.    I’m not too surprised.    This is from many matches before the arty nerf, after all.   But it’s also interesting to see which tanks I “did well” with according to that formula as well – and the well known seal clubbers T-127 and T18 are of course on the list.     The Jackson is a bit of a surprise, but I always felt I did well in that beast.

The MS-1 gets a high rating of 1211, with the KV-2 showing 1331.    So it’s not my imagination – I drive the KV-2 pretty well.    Lowest tank on the list is the T1 Cunningham with 0 – although that’s after five battles.     Lowest with 100 battles turns out to be the VK1602 Leopard.    No wonder I hated driving that thing.   You can get the app here.

Then there’s this app.

I grabbed this app (WoT Knowledge base) as a helper to see where to penetrate specific tanks.    (Shoot the IS-6 in the TURRET from the side!)    It has a wealth of information about all of the tanks in the game for you to page through as well.    I haven’t explored this carefully other than the armor penetration models. You can get this app here.

Merry Tanksmas !

New Year Specials

Tags

World of Tanks, World of Warplanes

Wargaming is giving a number of interesting Christmas-time specials on its two “World” games.

#1 – 50% off garage slots.      I’ve been waiting for this for planes.    Think I’ll buy a few.

All the rest of my interest is in Tanks.

#2 – Tiers 8 to 10 : 15% off all month.     Time to buy an M103 and an ST-I, just before it gets nerfed.

#3 – Combat mission : You can get a free 3 days of premium by earning 100k in one nation’s Tier 6 vehicles as specified on a list.    I own a lot of these tanks, so this shouldn’t be much of a problem.

#4 – IS-6 : If you can complete all of the combat missions (one for each nation) you can get a free IS-6.     This is very doubtful for me, since it includes the need to earn this driving Chinese (Never done it) and even the soon-to-go-live Japanese vehicles.    With that, it almost sounds impossible.

I decided it was worth it, for once, to buy a premium account for the month of December to take best advantage of the special combat missions.    It’s not likely I could get the IS-6 but you never know.   I could probably add 12 free days of premium.   Given this, it’s not that interesting that the 3-day premium account is also on sale.

#5 – Tiers 1 to 7 will all also be on sale.    This is at different times for different nations.     This is of some interest to me for Tier 6 and 7.   I probably have a few I would like to buy.   Then again, who am I kidding ?     My current garage can’t even get finished, and I’m worried about buying lowish tier vehicles ?

Special appears to start at 3 am on Monday for me; we’ll see how it goes at that time.

I have successfully elited the M7 and am ready to buy the T21 (Yet another Tier 6 vehicle) when needed.      Earned more XP on other tanks, but have taken all the Tier IX – X’s off the list.    And I expect to primarily or even exclusively play Tier 6 beginning tomorrow.

Gaming update post – Thanksgiving

Tags

war-worlds, World of Tanks, World of Warplanes

I continue to log into World of Warplanes.   But I seem to be getting three or so matches in before logging off again.    It’s a bit too fast-paced and irritating to me – I get knocked out of the sky so quickly, or the match is just over.

I spend a fair amount of time like this in WoWP

War Worlds still sucks in attention, but it’s starting to feel like a job.    I don’t need more jobs.    The maximum 5,000 fighter build guarantees you a long sitrep unless you log into it constantly, especially once you pass 100 star systems.    For now, I’m still expanding and will continue playing it.

World of Tanks, however, remains a fantastically fun game as evidenced by the number of matches I got in over Saturday and Sunday.     I am not quite at the goals I have set but I’m expecting to hit them soon.

I ultimately decided against buying the KV-220 because I really don’t need any more tanks.  I have a KV-5, in the event I want to train up a Russian Heavy crew faster.    Plus, this.

Don’t laugh – I believe I may have a few too many tanks already.

Several of those I have no intention of playing again.   But why sell them, with 28 empty slots remaining to be filled ?

No, my problem is much more one of advancement.   I should probably start accumulating more free XP and burn some gold to move lines forward faster.    And its probably time to quit worrying about buying tanks on sale considering I have 20.6m silver and can’t find anything useful to spend it on.    Good problem to have.

Improving At Warplanes

Tags

World of Tanks, World of Warplanes

In the quest to start getting better at the game, I’ve got a few extra data points to pay attention to.

First off, someone already has put a blog together with lots of useful Tanks and Warplanes information.     My regular readers get a sense of how games play, but RocketBrainSurgeon is more of a teacher.      Now I have a better idea of two key Warplanes gameplay styles, Boom N Zoom, and Turn N Burn.

I haven’t taken advantage of flaps to turn faster.    I should probably do that, considering I’m going up the US “Climbing” line, where I can realistically climb better than most of my opponents.    What I haven’t paid enough attention to so far, is the vertical ceiling.    I keep trying to get the plane as far above the deck as possible, and once you pass the vertical limit that’s a bad idea.

I’ve been too lackadaisical about stalls too, I believe.    Have to make very sure that the plane doesn’t stall out.    If I can’t reach someone really high up, just keep climbing and you’ll get to their level eventually.

And I managed to have my best game so far :

Three damages plus two kills. That was fun. I even survived.

One thing is for sure – I enjoyed the “Zoom To The Top” enabled by the special for quite awhile, but I’m starting to get burned out.     12,500 XP is quite the barrier for flying the F2A – and this is only for the Tier V unlock.    Eh, maybe I’ll change my mind, but I’m not too enthusiastic about flying at the moment.

Tanks now – that sounds more like fun.    And I did manage something I’ve been trying for, for a long time :

And elited the MT-25

What was even more fun was the way I did it – three kills as the low man on the totem pole.

Luchs, natch. Hellcat, surprising. Panther, Awesome 🙂 .

Not planning on going forward anytime soon after the unlock, but it’s nice to have.    I only have 9 other primary-marked tanks, meaning I have goals to achieve with.   I don’t need any more, despite my pile of credits and tons of slots.

Searching for what’s wrong

Tags

World of Warplanes

It’s time to face the fact – I completely suck at World of Warplanes.

Yeah, this isn’t being a noob any longer.

In my Tier 4 plane, I win less than 1/3 of the time.      Overall with almost 80 battles, I win just over 1/3 of the time.

I don’t know what I could be doing wrong.      Every match I have tried a variety of strategies.     The first is the obvious – go in whatever direction you’re pointed, and shoot at the enemy.

Hmm, that didn’t work.

Based on tips of other players, I started gaining altitude, as much as possible, so I can dive down and take others out.

Well, that didn’t work either.

And flying into the scrum and just staying alive as much as possible, to tie up other players, and permit the rest of the team to win, doesn’t seem to do much good either.

Invevitable with this strategy. But we still don’t win, usually.

One of the things I’ve noticed about the game is you could also call it “World of Ramming Airplanes”.

I turned. He didn’t.

I cannot tell you how many times someone starts head on towards me, and never turns even a bit.     I avoid them, which usually keeps me alive for a few seconds longer, but this also means I get much less damage into them.     And I’m not the only one noticing how often collisions are happening.

My current aircraft is the F2A Buffalo, which as I remember historically isn’t that good of an aircraft.     I could discount a little bit of statistical variance, but I don’t think that’s what is going on here.     I am absolutely a hindrance to my team, and I can’t figure out for the life of me why.

 

Launch Night

Tags

World of Warplanes

I dipped my toe into the waters of World of Warplanes.      This is the first time I’ve participated in a game at launch day, so documentation was in order.

My first aircraft was the American tier I, the P-12 .     I managed four matches, with three of them losses, and one apparently a win while I was AFK.

Pretty much just got shot down a lot.

What surprised me was the size of the battles.    Most of the Beta battles I participated in were six on six, but every battle so far has been a full 15 on 15 conflagration.

And it didn’t take too long until I decided what tree to race up towards.   So I purchased my F2F and started off in the battles.

Fat and stubby little thing.

It didn’t take long until I realized, if I’m racing up the tree, I probably should ignore the low tier equipment.     After engines, the rest of the stuff for the F2F costs about half of the next aircraft.

OK. Straight to the unlock.

I managed two kills due to noobishly being clueless that an enemy, coming straight towards me, is gonna ram me and blow us both up.   I eventually recognized that as a problem.     And finally on the 10th battle got my first real kill – the last enemy of the match.

There ! Harder than I would have thought.

And after that, I managed the odd kill, and did a lot of waiting for a match to end.   No matter what my intentions, I most often got shot down very quickly.    Every match tended to be finished in the first few minutes.   No exiting the match and trying a different aircraft for me – my goal is to race up the tree as fast as possible.

And by the end of the night I had purchased my F3F.

Oh my. Cringeworthy.

I’m hoping I get a little bit better at the game.     Seems for the moment, having me on your team is an asset to the enemy.

 

Russian Planes Duking it Out

Tags

War Thunder, World of Warplanes

And today is the long-anticipated go live for World of Warplanes.     This being a game that’s been hotly and vitriolically hated by many, bored several, and made a very large turnaround in the process to come out and (to me, at least) be something fun to play.

I fired up the patcher before leaving for work – it didn’t quite finish before I left the house, unfortunately.

Last night, being both in the mood for plane battles, and fresh off reading TAGN’s enthusiastic posting, I reloaded War Thunder and took it for a spin.     And I had quite the fun time with it!

The battles remain overly long.   I don’t like the “Garage battle” format and can’t quite find a setting to let me fly one plane only.     But the skill level of my opponents seems to have gone down.    Queue times were reasonable at 25 – 40 seconds.    And instead of finding my reserve planes getting jumped by veterans flying jets, instead I fought and died, and figured out strafing.

I had one battle in the “African Canyons” where none of the enemy molested me while I shot their entire column of armored cars to pieces, using a level one reserve plane.    It was great practice – I managed to go from barely able to strafe, to taking out target after target as I passed overhead and they scattered and drove for their lives.

Now I discover that the battle isn’t only the virtual one between players (H/T Hzero again).     It’s also a hot war between developers.    Gaijin is throwing down the gauntlet with an offer to help them test their version of tanks – and you get into the closed beta by playing their game.    Tonight only.    Warplanes release date.

What a nasty, dirty….. and effective trick.    I sure would love the chance to get early access to another tanks game, and I really honestly enjoy the bug finding and reporting process.      It appears I’m going to be pretty busy tonight, beginning the rocket up a tree process in Warplanes, and blowing up ground targets in War Thunder.

Gaijin the company is not something I am fond of – I think their general ethical level is pretty low, while Wargaming comes across to me as a professional and interested group.    I know, they both exist to make money, but they get mine by treating me well.    So far, and by all expectations, Gaijin gets none of mine.

But I just might be playing their games in addition.

Well – Not release day, after all.

Tags

World of Warplanes

Boy, it sure took them long enough to let us know.   (H/T HZero)

So Beta goes down, tonight, and tomorrow the servers come up with the release version of the game..

The question being, do I want to get up extremely early tomorrow morning and fly a bit before work ?    Probably not.    Not a morning person.    So I’ll kick the patcher off tomorrow morning and try the game out during normal gaming hours Wednesday night.