OMG, there is a NEW premium tank I can buy!

Wargaming is a business, so the need to make money. One of the ways they earn their money is by releasing premium tanks you have to pay for (or buy using gold, which is the same thing).

Every now and then, some of them looks exiting, and you want to buy it. I would advice you to consider this before you buy one: Do I already have a premium tank of the same type (light/medium/heavy) from the same nation? If so: Are you going to play it because it seems good or because you need to train / retrain your crew?

If it is to (re-)train your crew you should focus on buying a premium tank of a different type and/or nation than you already have. This might seem obvious, but I have to admit I have spent far to much money on German TDs and Russian medium tanks. (I have six of the latter and five of the former.) Choose where you spend your money wisely!

A quick tip about crew skills

If you – like me – train your crew in a premium tank, there is one thing you should be aware of: Sometimes, the tank where the crew “usually” sits, have different tasks designated to the various crew members. This is most often the case when you train your crew in a premium tank with more crew roles than the ordinary tank.

Let’s say you have a premium tank with five crew members, but four of them “belongs” to a tank with only four crew members. In many cases the commander have more tasks in the ordinary tank, than in the premium tank. When you unlock a new skill or perk, place the crew in the ordinary tank when you decide what the new skill should be. There you will see what skills you actually have to choose from. Don’t keep them in the premium tank while you choose the new skill.

Of course, this means that the new skill you choose might be ineffective in the premium tank, but that is – in my opinion – a lesser problem than designating a skill that the crew cannot use while in the ordinary tank.

Two different strategies for increasing the skill level on your crew

When you play low tier battles, from tier I to tier V, the other players tend to have low skilled crews. Some players you will meet are likely to have played only a few battles in their tanks, and they might use crews at 90% base skill, or they have just started grinding their first skill.

But when you enter higher tier battles, tier VIII and above, you will meet players who use crews with three or more skills on their crew. If you use a low skilled crew, you will struggle a lot. Therefore you should take crew training seriously.

To train crew faster, it is advisable to use premium tanks, since they train crews faster than ordinary tanks.

There are two different strategies to training crews and prepare them for higher tier battles.

Strategy A: Boosting single crew members
If you are training a new crew for a specific type of tanks, and you already have one good crew for the same type of tank, you may use a “single crew member boost strategy”.

For example: My Cromwell (British medium) crew are all on their fourth skill, about 35-40%. I am also playing the tier VIII  British medium Centurion I. My crew on that tank is not as good as the Cromwell crew, since they are at their third skill, about 25-30%. What I do, is to use the Cromwell Berlin for boosting the Centurion crew, one by one. The Cromwell Berlin has a crew of five. When playing it, I choose four crew members from the ordinary Cromwell, and one crew member from the Centurion I. Then playing the daily double will boost all the crew, but the crew member with the “lowest” skill will get a double boost. So when I play the Cromwell Berlin once a day (or whatever), the one crew member from the Centurion I will get xp very fast.

The reason for choosing strategy A is obvious: You can grind a single crew members xp and still have a great crew in the tank. The tank will perform very good.

There are some downsides, however:

1. If – in my example – the Cromwell crew has Brothers in arms and the Centurion crew member hasn’t, I will not get a benefit from that perk, since all crew members must have it. Brothers in arms is only effective when all crew members has reached 100%.
2. The skill profile might me suboptimal. Again I will use the Cromwell Berlin example: On a tier VI medium like the Cromwell, camouflage is a bit better than repairs, because of the low hit points on the Cromwell. On a tier VIII, repairs is a bit better. Grinding a tier VIII crew in a tier VI might not be ideal, then. (But I still believe it is a viable strategy.)

Strategy B: Boosting multiple crew members

This is the opposite to to strategy A. Let me use an example from my recent battles: I have both the Ferdinand and the Jagdpanther II. Since I have multiple premium German tank destroyers, I decided to boost both of the crews on the Ferdinand and the Jagdpanther II. Therefore I played a lot of battles, constantly choosing the worst crew members from each tank in one of the premium tanks. I took me quite a while, but now both of these tier VIII tanks have crews on their fourth skill. I chose this way of doing it, since there are a total of 11 crew members on these tanks, and since I didn’t have a better crew in any other German tank destroyer.

The downside is that this takes a lot of time. I do not know how many battles I have played only to boost the crews on these two tanks, but it must be more than 100.

But from now on, I will choose strategy A to boost my Rheinmetall Borsig crew, one by one. I will soon have unlocked the tier IX tank German tank destroyers, and I will be able to put very decent crews in them.

The tanks I’m going to keep – UPDATED version

Here is a list of tanks I am going to keep, and why I’ll keep them.

• Tier I: T1 Cunninngham. Because I might need a tier I tank sometime.
• Tier II: None. Because I don’t need any tier II tanks.
• Tier III: Renault UE57 and FCM 36 Pak 40. They are fun to play sometimes. The FCM is a premium used for training crews.
• Tier IV: SU-85B, Hetzer and Matilda. These are the three best tier IVs. Playing lower tiers every once in a while is fun.

How to improve your tank

This post will cover how to improve your tank. I will use the tier VIII German heavy tank Löwe as an example, since it seem to be a popular premium tank for newcomers. Remember: Tier VIII is very different than tier I to III!

The Löwe isn’t a very easy tank to play, due to it’s low rate of fire, it’s low speed and it’s obvious weak spots.

Löwe, German tier VIII premium heavy tank

Once your crew reaches 100% base skill, the Löwe will fire 5 rounds per minute, which will give an average damage per minute of 1.600. (As long as you both hit and damage your opponent.) This is a very low number, but here is how you can increase it:

• Getting Brothers in arms as a perk on all your crew members. This will give 5% improvement on all qualifications.
• Mounting ventilation. This will give 5% improvement on all qualifications.
• Mounting a Gun Rammer. This will give 10% improvement on reload time, by decreasing reload time.
• Using a consumable. For German vehicles you can use Chocolate. This will give 10% improvement on all qualifications. This is, however, not recommended on a vehicle like the Löwe, where your normal equipment should be a repair kit, a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher (since it has got a 20% chance of being set on fire).

Let’s see how this will affect your DPM. All these values are fetched from tanks.gg:

1. Base DPM: 1.668,57 (this really should be 1.600, but I don’t know how tanks.gg calculates this number)
2. Brothers in arms: 1.706,29 (2,2% improvement compared to line 1.)
3. Ventilation: 1.706,29 (2,2% improvement compared to line 1)
4. Gun rammer: 1.853,97 (10% improvement compared to line 1)
5. Chocolate: 1.744 (4,5% improvement compared to line 1)
6. Brothers in arms + Ventilation: 1.744 (4,5% improvement compared to line 1)
7. Brothers in arms + Ventilation +  Gun rammer: 1.937,78 (16,1% improvement compared to line 1)
8. Brothers in arms + Ventilation +  Gun rammer +  Chocolate: 2.021,59 (21,2% improvement compared to line 1)

These values are estimates, and not correctly calculated. Using Brothers in arms in combination with ventilation gives a cumulative effect, which should be 5% + 5% = 10%. Based on this, the total effect of using all these ways of improving the Löwe, the DPM number in line 8 should be 2.080 (5%+5%+10%+10% =30% improvement), since these values are cumulative. (If they had been additive, it would have been  2.134,44, since 1,05*1.05*1,1*1,1*1.600 = 2.134,44.)

The only one of these improvements that only affects DPM is the gun rammer. All the other elements also improve the Major Qualifications of the entire crew and in any of the common Skills (Repair, Firefighting, and/or Camouflage).

Anyway: The best way to improve the tank is to play according to it’s strengths and weaknesses. The Löwe has got decent turret armor, although there are weak spots. It has a very accurate gun and high penetration, and the side armor of the hull makes it a decent sidescraping tank. So you should hide your hull and you can use it for sniping, but in tier VIII battles you can’t camp in the base…

Some words about classes of tanks

When you have played a number of battles, you will start to move up through the different tech trees of various nations. At tier V you will unlock your first heavy tanks, even if there are some at tier IV also. (And even one at tier III.) You have probably have noticed what characterizes a heavy tank:

• High alpha damage, but slow rate of fire
• Better armor than other classes
• Slower than all other classes (except artillery/SPG)
• Worse camoflage rating than the other classes

But every now and then, you will find that some medium tanks check one or more of these boxes. The Matilda is one of these, by having great armor for it’s type and tier.

VK 30.01 (p), German tier VI medium

The VK 30.01 (P) is another example, as it’s 220 alpha damage is (almost) twice that of other tier VI medium tanks. Therefore, it is meaningful to characterize some mediums as “heavy medium tanks”.

In other cases, you have some heavy tanks that could be characterized as “medium heavy tanks”, like the KV-1S, at least when compared to it’s brother, the KV-1.

Advanced crew training

When you buy a new tank, and put a crew in it, it performs rather bad. This is because the crew is not fully trained, and because the stock modules on the tank more often than not are rather bad. The gun, the engine, the turret, and so on, make the tank perform badly.

As I have said earlier, you can use free XP to grind a tank before you use it in your first battle. This solves one of the issues, but not the issue with low crew skills. I will now explain how I do this. But first, let’s talk about the commander. As you have seen, the base skill level of a commander reaches 100% before you can unlock a second skill (or perk). On the rest of the crew, however, they will have to reach 110% before you can unlock a second skill (or perk). This is because 10% of the commanders base skill automatically is put on top of the skills of the rest of the crew.

When the commander reaches 100%, the gunner (or any other crew member) get a “bonus” skill from the commander. So the base skill of the gunner is 100% of his own skill and 10% of the commander, giving him a total of 110%. 1/10th of the commanders skill will be assigned to the rest of the crew. If the commander only has 90% base skill, the gunner will get 9% bonus skill from the commander.

As you can see, the commander is clearly the most important crew member. As a consequence, I often pay gold when I move a commander from one tank to another. If you can afford it, I recommend you do it. For the other crew members I pay in game credits, 20.000 “silver” for a 90% skill level when I move them to a different tank of the same type.

If you buy a new tank, 20.000 silver will only give you 75% base skill level on the crew. This is also the situation when you move a crew from a tank of one type to another, for example from a medium tank to a heavy tank.

The method I use to train my 90% crew for a new tank is based on two assumptions:

1. You have another tank of the same type and nation
2. You have a premium tank of the same type and nation

If you take a look at the tech tree, you can see that for many nations there are often two different lines of tanks. Let’s look at the russian tier V tanks:

Russian tier V heavy tanks

If you plan to go along both these lines of tanks, leading to great tanks as the IS-3 tier VIII or the fun beast at the same tier, the KV-4, it is kind of time consuming to first go along one of the lines and then the second line. One way to do this is by putting your T-28 crew into the KV-1, spending gold on the commander and silver on the rest of the crew. When you get into the KV-1, you can choose to unlock all the modules on it with free XP or by playing it. As soon as you have unlocked all modules, you have the option to unlock three different tanks:

KV-1 and it’s succsessors

If choose to unlock the KV-1S first, as I would recommend, you have a heavy tank, but no crew. When you have unlocked the KV-1S by playing the KV-1, your KV-1 crew should all have reached at least 100% base skill. If you then buy the KV-1S with a brand new crew with 75% base skill, you will have these two crews:

KV-1:

• Commander (100% base skill)
• Gunner (110% base skill)
• Driver (110% base skill)
• Radio operator (110% base skill)
• Loader (110% base skill)

KV-1S:

• Commander (75% base skill)
• Gunner (83% base skill)
• Driver (83% base skill)
• Radio operator (83% base skill)
• Loader (83% base skill)

Needless to say, the KV-1S crew will perform very bad. Aim time, reload time, view range, traverse speed and so on will affect your matches in a very bad way.

Enter the premium vehicle! There are at the moment three different premium russian heavy tanks to buy for gold: The Churchill III, the IS-2 (only for a short period) ant the IS-6. (Remember: If you have only played low tier tanks, it may not be a good idea to buy a tier VIII heavy premium tank. You should really have played about 2.000 matches before you try a tier VIII heavy.)

So even if the Churchill III is not a very good tank, it will get the job done: To train a new crew. Let’s say you now have the above crews for the KV-1 and the KV-1S, and you have bought the Churchill III. What to do?

The answer is to be a bit patient. Put the first four crew members from the KV-1 (commander, gunner, driver and radio operator) in the Churchill III, and put the loader from the KV-1S in the last spot. Premium tanks can use any crew from any tank, as long as they are from the same nation and same type. And you can use crew members from different tanks. Check the box “Accelerate crew training“, and go into a battle. Since the KV-1S crew member has the lowest skill level, he will get a double amount of skill points from the battle. In addition to this, a premium tank crew get 50% extra crew XP for a single battle.

If you follow this method, your crew as a whole do not suffer to much from having to “drag around” the KV-1S crew member, and this crew member will quickly reach 110% base skill level. Once you are done with the KV-1S loader, you can start training the radio operator, and then the driver and so on, until your KV-1S crew have reached 100%/110% base skill level.

One way to do this even faster, is to play only the daily double with the Churchill III. This will take more days, but fewer battles.

More about premium tanks

As I recently posted, you should consider using premium tanks both to increase the skills on your crew and to make more in game credits. I found a couple of videoes explaining how to do this. I advice you to watch these three videos to understand how to use premium tanks:

 

What are premium tanks, and should I buy one?

Premium tanks are tanks you can buy for gold or for real money on the World of tanks website. They only have one standard set of modules, so you cannot unlock better modules than the ones they have when you buy it. The generate a lot of in game credits per victory, the increase in crew experience is higher, and you can put a crew from a different tank in it, as I explain below.

In my opinion, they are in some ways worse then their closest “sibling”. Take the Russian heavy tank IS-6 at tier VIII. It is in many ways similar to the one of the other standard Russian heavy tanks at tier VIII, the IS-3.  However, there are several differences:

• The gun on the IS-6 only has far worse penetration, at 175 mm, versus 225 mm on the best gun on the IS-3
• The rate of fire is better, at 5,13 shots per minute, against 4,51 at the IS-3
• The IS-6 has a lower top speed, at 35 kph, versus 38 kph with the IS-3
• The armor is weaker, at least on paper, but in reality the difference is negligible

To make a long story short: The premium tanks have distinct weaknesses and strengths and have to be played accordingly. Take the “Dicker Max” as an example: It is slow, has a long reload time, but the gun depression is great, and the gun is quite good. A very popular premium tank is the german E25. It is very fast and has an excellent camo rating (is difficult to spot behind bushes). The gun has decent penetration and high rate of fire, but it has a low alpha damage (the number of health points the enemy loses per hit).

However: The point of using premium tanks is – besides getting more in game credits per battle – to increase crew skills on the crew from another tank. If you buy the IS-6 and also have the IS-3, both Russian heavy  tanks, you can play a match in the IS-3 and get the “daily double” for the first win of the day. Then you can move the crew to the IS-6 and get the daily double on that tank as well.

You must NEVER put a designated crew in premium tanks. ALWAYS use a crew from one of your non premium tanks of the same type and nationality. You can mix crew from different tanks and put them in your premium tank, as long as they are of the same type and nationality.

Remember that playing in higher tiers is very different from playing in lower tiers. If you are new to the game, and have reached tier 3 or 4, buying a tier VIII heavy like the IS-6 or the German “Löwe”, you have to play in a completely different way than you do in a tier 3 medium tank. If you do not know what “sidescraping” is, for instance, you should probably not buy the IS-6 or the Löwe.

The way I use premium tanks is as I have described above. In addition, I often use premium tanks directly after buying a new tank. I recently bought the SU-152, a standard tier VII  Russian tank destroyer. The crew was moved over from the tier VI SU-100. When you start playing a new tank, it is most often stock, unless one or more of the modules used on it has been unlocked in a different tank. Therefore, the tank is not as good as it “should” be, and performs significantly worse then when all modules are unlocked. I had a couple of matches in it to see what it was like, and decided I needed to increase the basic crew skills from 90% to 100% to decrease loading time, aiming time and so on. So I put the crew in my premium tier V Russian tank destroyer, the SU-85i, and played a number of matches until the crew had reached 100% basic skills. Then I put them back in the SU-152 and started to grind this tank.

Another way of using premium tanks to increase crew skills, is what I did with the Sturer Emil and the Jagdpanther, both tier VII German tank destroyers. Both of these two tanks have a crew of 5 (commander, gunner, radio operator, driver, loader), and this is also the type of crew that fits in the Dicker Max, premium tier VI German tank destroyer.  On days where I wanted to grind one or both of these two tanks, I first played a match in the Dicker Max and got the daily double. I always put the worst crew member, position by position, from both the Emil and the JPanther in my Dicker Max: The worst of the two drivers, the worst of the two gunners, and so on. Soon I had very decent crews in both tanks, long before I had unlocked then next tanks.