How to scout?

Good scouting can help a team to win. Good scouting is difficult, and most new players don’t know how to do it. Here are a few do’s and don’ts on scouting.

There are two ways of scouting: Active scouting or passive scouting. Active scouting is used when you are in a fast light tank. You have to be in a forward position, and never, ever stop. Keep driving all the time, turning from side to side, avoiding hits. Change direction now and then so no one can guess where you will be next. Do not rush into the enemy base and get killed. Why? You will spot lots of other tanks, but your teammates won’t be able to shoot at them, because your teammates will be so far back that they won’t be able to see the tanks you have spotted. Therefore: Stay a bit in front of your allies, drive from side to side, so that the enemies you spot can be hit by your allies. From time to time you have to go back towards your own base and disappear from your enemies. Then you can move forward again. If you manage to stay alive long enough, and your enemy has lost enough tanks, you can start to spot for arty. When you are active scouting, you can shoot at whatever you see, just to annoy your enemy. But don’t ever stop. Keep driving.

Passive scouting is quite the opposite: Rush to a bush in a strategic place, and stop there. Don’t move your tank unless you are spotted. You will be able to see the enemy, but they won’t be able to see you. Your allies can then shoot at whatever you spot for them. Do NOT shoot at the enemies you are spotting, because this will reveal your position and you will be killed. I have tried this tactic a few times, and my record is more than 10.000 spotting damage. (They shot at what I spotted for them, and inflicted more than 10.000 damage points.) In one early game I drove to the other side of the  map in a tier 4 light tank and hid inside a bush. 6 tier 8 heavys drove close to me, unable to spot me. But since I was so far ahead, my allies couldn’t shoot at them. What did I do? I took a shot at the side of one of the heavys, revealing myself and got killed immediately.

Why should you be scouting? There are two reasons: Some light tanks are automatically designated for scouting, like the french ELC AMX. Sometimes you get an ordinary match making, but you often end up in a tier 8 match. If so, your role is to spot for your allies. The other reason is to get xp. When you spot an enemy and one of your allies inflict damage points upon the enemy, half of the xp your ally earn will be given to you. In the match where I got 10.000 spotting damage, the result was that I was second best on my team at earning xp.

This video shows how to do it: