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!

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.