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…

How to make your in game credits last longer

As you already know, you earn in game credits by playing, and hopefully winning games. You can earn a great deal extra by completing missions or by using premium tanks. And you already know that buying tanks and equipment and retraining crews is what you use your in game credits on.

But you may not know that there are ways to make your in game credits last longer.

The trick is to wait for sales. Every now and then, Wargaming put equipment and tanks on sale. The discount on tanks will then typically vary between 50% and 15% off. If you have grinded a new tank, but do not need to buy it right away, try to wait for a sale. As I’m writing this, there are discounts on a number of vehicles:

15% discount on tanks

So if you can wait before you buy a specific tank, you can save a great deal of in game credits. At the moment I have six tanks in my garage which I haven’t started playing, all bought on a sale.

Right now, there is also  a 50% discount on crew reset:

50% discount on Crew Skill Reset

Again, if you can wait for a sale, you should do it. With a 50% discount, you save 50.000 in game credits when retraining a full crew on a tank with a crew of five.

Every now and then, there is also a discount on consumables:

50% discount on consumables

When this happens, I usually buy so that I have 100 large repair kits in my depot. Full price on a large repair kit is 20.000 in game credits, so if you buy 100 of them, you save 1.000.000 in game credits.