The garage

In World of Tanks, you control a single armoured vehicle in a battle between two teams. Your mission is to secure a victory for your team, either by destroying all enemy vehicles or completing the objectives set for the battle.

Your garage is the first thing you will see upon logging into the game. This is where you will conduct all your actions prior to battle. As you can see, there’s a lot going on here. But don’t be intimidated! By the end of this guide, you will possess sufficient knowledge to find your way around easily.

Mission 01: A Free Gift Tank

In this guide, we’ll occasionally highlight missions that are relevant to the topic being discussed. Although they’re not compulsory, we highly encourage you to complete them in the game as you go through the guide to have a maximum understanding about how the game works.

The mission for this section is an easy one. In fact, you’ve already completed it without realising in the first place! Here’s a specific description of the mission itself, which includes what you had to do, and the rewards that will be given to you once you have completed it:

Hold on to these first - In the later sections, we’ll tell you just what you’ve received and how to use them. For now, we’ll jump straight into action by joining a battle.

Selecting your tank

Every new player receives their starter tanks when they log in for the first time. The ones you own are displayed on the bottom of the screen and are ready for battle.

You may have spotted a T-127 light tank in your garage – that’s the one you received by completing the mission that we’ve just mentioned in the previous section. The T-127 belongs to a category called ‘Premium Tanks’, which offer more benefits than the regular vehicles like the rest that you see before you now (we discuss them in more detail in Section 8).

But since it's already in your garage, there's no reason not to use it for battle. Select the T-127 by clicking on it; You’ll now see that the tank displayed in the centre of the garage is now the one you have selected (if it doesn't feature the Premium tank already). When you join your next battle, this tank will be under your control.

Mission 02: Your First Battle

It’s now time to experience your first real battle. To begin, simply click on the red BATTLE! button at the top of the screen and you’ll instantly be queued up for a battle with other players.

Once the battle has concluded, this mission will be complete.

Repairing your vehicle

If you’re completely new to World of Tanks, chances are that your first battle will end up with your tank getting destroyed. Fortunately, you can restore it to proper working condition by repairing it.

First, click on the ‘Service’ button in the garage screen. A new menu will pop up, listing several new properties. Tick the ‘Repair automatically’ box and click Accept. Once you do that, your vehicle will automatically be repaired as soon as you return to your garage.

Mission 03: The Second Battle

Now it’s time for your second battle. Here’s a mission to go with it:

By completing your first two battles (regardless of whether you won or lost), you’ll receive a nice batch of EXP and Credits. Congratulations! In the next section, we’ll put these to good use and learn how to buy and upgrade your tanks.

Introduction to research and upgrading

Experience Points, or ‘EXP’ in short, is the currency you will use to research vehicle modules and tanks. Both modules and tanks are connected in a branching structure that we refer to as a ‘Tech Tree’. There are 7 in total, one for each nation represented in the game.

Premium tanks already come with fully upgraded modules, so we'll be switching to a Tier I tank for the following steps (you can also begin using other thanks in future battles if you wish).

Click on the ‘Research’ button to the right of the garage screen. You’ll be presented with your tank and the potential upgrades it can receive.

A green box containing a number and a silver star can also be seen under each module: These represent how much EXP you must spend to research it. Since you’ve gained quite a sum of those in your last two battles, you’re more than able to afford every single upgrade available here, so click on the green boxes to do so!

But it’s not enough to simply research something – it must also be purchased before use. Thankfully, our 10,000 Credits will come in handy for this occasion, so you can proceed to purchase any module you wish.

Buying a tank

You may also have noticed several items to the right of the screen that aren’t modules, but entire vehicles instead.

In World of Tanks, vehicles that were developed from the similar design schemes are usually joined together in their research options, but are separated using a ‘Tier’ system. There are a total of 10 Tiers of tanks - the weaker or older models usually make up the early Tiers, while the most powerful ones sit at the top levels.

Before you proceed with the purchase, take note: each vehicle you own requires its own garage slot. If your garage is full, you can make room for a new purchase by:

• Selling an existing tank, or
• Buying an additional Garage Slot (see the Gold section for more details)

If you wish, you can sell off a tank in your garage before buying a new one.

Go back to the garage screen and right click on the vehicle you wish to sell (Note: do NOT choose the T-127!), then click on the ‘Sell’ option. A panel will appear asking for confirmation and your instructions regarding the tank crew and ammunition. Choose the ‘Send to Barracks/Depot’ options, then click on ‘Sell’. The vehicle will be removed, and a new spot in your garage will be available.

Now, go back to the Research screen you were in and purchase the newly-researched tank. A new panel will appear with several choices. Tick the box that says ‘Load standard ammunition’ and choose the ‘50%’ option for Crew Training, then click on ‘Purchase’.

Congratulations, your new tank is now in your garage!

Believe it or not, upgrading modules is just one of several ways to customise your vehicle. In this section, we will talk about using consumables to improve your performance in battle. But first, a new mission awaits you…

Mission 04: Consumable Starter Pack

In this mission, you’re required to participate in a third battle. If you haven’t finished the first two yet, just refer to the previous sections for a brief overview of the topics we’ve discussed so far and join up to three battles.

Using Consumables

Now that you’ve received your rewards, it’s time to find out what they can do!

In essence, consumables are items that you can activate in battle for a variety of temporary benefits. To stock up your tank with consumables, click on the Service button located in the garage screen and select the consumables that you feel will be most useful to you. Remember, not every consumable type is included in the mission reward; those that you do not already have will require credits to purchase.

Once you are done choosing the consumables you want to use, the total fees to be deducted will be shown on the bottom right of the menu. Click Accept to confirm your choice, and the consumables will now be installed in your vehicle.

You can now go on another battle to test out the consumables if you wish. To activate your consumables in combat, simply press the corresponding number or letter on top.

Introduction to ammo types

There are two main categories for all ammunition: Armour Penetration (AP), and High Explosives (HE). Basically, AP ammunition allows you a greater chance of penetrating a tank’s armour, but if it doesn’t – due to it bouncing off– no damage will be dealt.

On the other hand, HE ammunition has a vastly lower penetration chance, but every HE round fired is guaranteed to explode, dealing some amount of damage even when the round is detonated on the armour’s surface.

Most, if not all other types of ammunition hover around these two types; some of them may even be a mix. Labelled as ‘Premium Shells’, they possess increased effectiveness against specific types of armour and are sold in the game at a higher price, which can be bought with either Credits or Gold.

Mission 05: Gold Ammunition

Our fifth mission will require you to put in a bit of work: complete up to 10 battles. Once you are done, you will receive some free Premium ammunition for your T-127.

Select your T-127 in the garage screen, then click on the ‘Service’ button. You should see three available types of ammunition. The first is a basic AP round. The second shows a Premium ammo option. The third is a HE round.

Premium rounds will ensure a much higher chance of penetrating and damaging your target as compared to the basic AP or HE rounds, but at a cost. For the T-127, a single Premium round will cost you 2 Gold or 800 Credits, a vast difference when compared to the normal AP round which costs only 14 Credits a shot.

If there’s one thing you should take away from this section, it’s this: don’t squander your Premium shells! They aren’t magic bullets that allow you to blow up your foes in a single shot – in fact, players who fire them blindly may come to realise instead that their precious Premium rounds are bouncing off the enemy!

About armour and penetration

To understand why tanks can avoid damage entirely (even from Premium rounds), we must first learn about armour.

Armour is one of the main gameplay concepts of World of Tanks, and may possibly be the most misunderstood one by players that are new to the game. When you fire a shot at an enemy tank, it is not guaranteed that damage will occur. The armour may be too thick, or the round you shot may be too weak to pass through. Some tanks are so powerful that parts of their armour can deflect multiple shots at a time with no damage incurred.

So how should you get around it? Find their weaknesses. Study the surface for a literal chink in the armour and look out for features like viewports or flat vertical edges; areas like these are most vulnerable to penetration. Once you find a suitable spot, aim carefully and shoot. You may well find yourself doing more damage!

Unlike consumables and ammunition types, a tank’s equipment permanently enhances its capabilities in combat, from increased gun reloading to faster aiming times.

Each aspect of a tank can be altered to suit your preferences, but with a limit of 3 slots per vehicle, it is up to you to decide which property synergises best with your preferred field tactics.

Mission 06: Equipment Starter

For this mission, you are required to complete 20 battles. Upon doing so, you will be rewarded with your first equipment:

The Improved Ventilation equipment is highly useful and is fairly popular even amongst veteran players, as it increases your Crew effectiveness by 5% (we will discuss Crews in more detail in the next section).

To install your new piece of equipment, first select the tank you would like it to go to in the garage screen, then click on any empty box you see right in the middle. A full list of compatible equipment will be shown to you.

You should be able to find the Improved Ventilation Class I on the list, with a yellow tick next to it instead of its cost price. This means that you already own a piece and it’s ready to be installed. To do so, simply click on it. The Improved Ventilation will now occupy a slot.

Equipment can be transferred between vehicles – some can only be removed by paying a small fee of 10 Gold – but take note! Not all tanks can receive the same Class of equipment. As a general rule of thumb, the more advanced the vehicle, the higher the equipment Class required.

The crewmembers of your vehicle can also aid in customisation, as they can learn different abilities that enhance its operation.

Each crewmember has a personal ‘Major Qualification’ rating, which is used to measure their proficiency with the tank they are assigned to. Major Qualifications are presented as percentages; the higher the percentage, the better their performance.

Training a crewmember

If you’ve purchased a new tank back in Section 3, you’ll remember that we picked a crew with 50% Major Qualification rating. That’s because at 50%, the crew is provided free-of-charge. To get the other two options (75% or 100%), you’ll need to pay either 20,000 Credits or 200 Gold.

Once you’ve saved up enough Credits or purchased some Gold to use, you may wish to retrain your crew by sending them to the academy. To do this for a crewmember, bring up their Personal File by right-clicking on their name in the Garage screen and selecting it, then click on the ‘Training’ tab. Make sure that the tank you’ve selected is for the correct one (click on the ‘Current Vehicle’ button to set it automatically) before browsing the 3 boxes available at the bottom.

Select the option you wish to use, then click on ‘Train’ to set it permanently.

Hiring new crewmembers

You can also jump straight to hiring new crewmembers if you wish, by right-clicking on a blank crew slot and choosing the ‘Recruit’ option. Take note however: crewmembers, like tanks, also require spare barracks slots before they can join you.

To increase the size of your barracks, click on the corresponding button in the Garage screen to bring up the menu. From here, you’ll see the number of available space remaining, as well as an option to enlarge your barracks at the price of 300 Gold.

Another alternative to train your crew would be to join more battles. A portion of all EXP earned in each battle will be used to gradually increase crew Major Qualification ratings, which means you’ll be training your crew every time you use them.

Crew Skills

Aside from Major Qualification ratings, crewmembers also have a secondary property called Skills. Similar to Equipment for tanks, Skills allow crewmembers to specialize in particular techniques and enhance their combat capabilities. There are a wide variety of Skills available, some of which are role-specific and cannot be accessed by other crew members.

To begin training a Skill, the crewmember must possess at least a 100% in their Major Qualification rating; any lower and the option won’t even appear. If it does, you’ll see a small glowing icon below the crewmember’s name. That means a slot has opened up and he is ready to learn a new skill.

We’re not going to examine every skill here as it would take too long, so we encourage you to have a look at them before deciding on one (it’s located in one of the tabs on the Personal File menu).

A word of advice: don’t be too hasty to learn a skill! Switching from one to the other is a costly process and may cause you to spend more gold than you wish. Instead, play more battles and learn about your own preferences before taking the plunge and selecting the best possible one for your tastes.

You’ve seen these words several times in the course of this guide. What is gold? What can you do with Premium accounts? And what’s the difference between normal and Premium tanks anyway?

Gold

Gold is another form of currency in use within World of Tanks. While Credits are used to pay for almost everything – regular tanks, equipment, ammunition – Gold allows players to progress faster and enable more flexibility within the game. Credits can be earned by joining battles, but Gold is primarily gained by paying for it with real-world cash.

But what exactly can spending Gold do for you? In short, it can:

• Be exchanged for more Credits
• Purchase Premium tanks
• Convert excess EXP from Premium tanks to Free ‘EXP’
• Purchase Premium account time
• Retrain crewmembers to 100% rating instantly
• Re-pick crewmember skills
• Purchase Garage slots (for additional vehicles)
• Purchase Barracks slots (for additional crew)

And that’s just part of a bigger list; the rest you’ll learn about when you start getting more into the game. The point is, Gold can be advantageous if you wish to trade money for time.

Premium Tanks

A Premium tank refers to one that is bought solely with Gold or Real-world cash. These vehicles come with fully upgraded modules and cannot be further improved (except for Equipment, Consumables or Ammo).

Premium tanks offer several advantages:

• Increased credit income in battles.
• Crews from other tanks can be assigned to a Premium tank without having to switch their tank proficiencies.
• EXP earned can be converted to Free EXP by spending gold. Free EXP can then be spent on other tanks to research modules or vehicles.
• Accelerated crew training, where all EXP earned by the tank is funnelled to the Crew to speed up their training in either Major Qualification ratings or Skills.

In addition, some Premium tanks are also classed as ‘rare’ in terms of availability. These vehicles only appear during special sales, contests or gifts and while they perform worse in battle against fully-upgraded regular tanks, their distinctive appearances more than makes up for that fact in the eyes of tank collectors. Keep a lookout for them if you wish to own them all!

Premium Accounts

A Premium account is essentially an enhanced version of the default Regular account. A subscription service of sorts, a Premium account confers the player more benefits, such as:

• +50% more Credits per battle
• +50% more EXP per battle
• A nicer garage (you won’t believe it until you see it!)

It’s important to note that Gold by itself will NOT allow you to purchase top-tier equipment and give you an unfair edge against your opponents. Higher Tier vehicles will still have to be researched and paid for and crew Skills must be trained in battles.

While High-tier Premium tanks can be purchased with enough gold, they are by no means the best – in fact, chances are that if you bought one today and tested it out, you might find your tank shot to pieces in moments. The best tank commanders rely not in money but in skill.

Now that you’re familiar with the basic functions in World of Tanks, it’s time to talk about teamwork and combining forces with friends.

Platoons

It’s no secret that teamwork is essential in any team game, and it's doubly so for World of Tanks. Fortunately, getting into a group with other players is not only possible, but encouraged as well. All players can form Platoons, which are essentially a group of 2-3 players that will be sent to the same battle together, fighting side by side.

To create a Platoon, click on the sign with the same title just to the right of the Battle button. You’ll be greeted with two new menus, one showing the chatroom for your Platoon and the other that allows you to invite friends, clanmates (See the Clans section for more info) or other people you know.

Once you’ve selected the people you want in your platoon, click on the ‘Invite’ button to send an invitation to them and they’ll soon appear in the chatroom once they accept.

Now it’s time to prepare for battle. Go back to the Garage and select the tank you want to use and any other customizations you feel is necessary, then return to the Platoon chatroom and press the ‘Ready’ button. As soon as the rest of your platoon clicks the Ready button, you will be automatically transferred to the waiting queue for a battle.

Mission 07: Platoon Challenge

Here’s a little mission to encourage you to create a platoon:

Remember, you can add almost anyone in your Platoon if you know their IGNs (In-game nicknames), so invite away!

Achievements

Achievements are a minor feature in World of Tanks that’s tailored specially to achievement hunters and perfectionists who seek a way to track their progress in the game. There are achievements for nearly every action in the game and they all vary in difficulty.

Mission 08: Achievement Challenge

Time to start earning your first medal if you haven’t already. For this mission, simply attain one of the medals listed below for a small Crew EXP bonus.

No matter which medal you’re gunning for, just remember that patience, good positioning and a great aim are critical to your success. Onwards!

Several weeks or months from now, you might be doing battle in a Tier VIII heavy tank in Mines and you’ll be wondering: ‘Is this all it’s going to be? Just playing with strangers over and over?’

In a word: No. There is much more out there, if you wish to explore it. Of course, there’s always yet another Tier X vehicle to work on, but World of Tanks isn’t all about researching, purchasing and upgrading tanks (unless you’re a tank enthusiast). There’s more that awaits you, like…

Clans

With any luck, you’ll be joining a clan soon, which will give you more buddies than you’ll ever want for to platoon with you in battle. Clans are social groups that can be focused around anything and everything. Some are set up to welcome friendly players residing in the same country. Others are united around their love for Japanese anime or other interests, and a select few are there to dominate the server and prove to the rest that their skills are unmatched.

No matter your interests within and outside of the game, it’s a safe bet that you’ll find a good clan that you feel at home in.

Clan Wars: Global Map & Strongholds

The Global Map is an artificial world where every clan can stake their claim in the territories, expanding their empire through conquest and defending them from rival clans when threatened. All battles are waged in the way you know best, through battles in maps using your trusty tank. Only this time, a loss doesn’t just mean a sore ego – whole territories can be swallowed whole overnight.

The Strongholds mode is a recent addition to World of Tanks, but is fast becoming a popular one. Each clan now possesses their very own Stronghold, a virtual base of operations that can be built upon and expanded. In here, the leaders of your clan can upgrade structures to provide more benefits to all clan members, organise battles to gather more supplies to improve the Stronghold and plan attacks on rival clan Strongholds.

If you wish for your battles to have meaning in a persistent world where every action matters, fighting alongside friends that feel the same way, joining a clan that is heavily focused on Clan Wars is the best choice for you.

eSports

If you’re the best player you know of and you relish the chance at a duel with someone of equal skill, you may well find the tournament circuit worth your time… and money.

Wargaming-sanctioned tournaments are always running on a weekly basis, and there’s enough competition for everyone. Newcomers and veterans alike are welcome to join the Quarter-year Championship where everyone gets a Tier V tank and 7 minutes to eliminate the enemy team. Winners and runner-ups are frequently awarded in-game gold and even real-world cash as prizes.

But that all pales in comparison to WGL APAC-Asia. The largest World of Tanks regional tournament has been through several seasons now, and the tournament is getting better with each iteration. Throughout the past year and a half since its inception, champions have arisen and fallen successively. After all, who can resist training endless hours for a shot at being champion of APAC and the cash prize of 60,000 USD?

The arena awaits you if you wish to take on the challenge. In here, only pure skill, field tactics and supreme teamwork will carry you to the top.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you very much! Hopefully you’ve learned just enough to truly begin your World of Tanks career.

Although we’ve completed quite a few missions throughout this guide, there’s more to tackle. Click here to see the full list of missions available to newcomers, or go straight to the page using the sidebar menu.

Documenting every single thing about the game in this guide may be an impossible task, but there is a ton of info to be discovered at the World of Tanks Asia portal. The Newcomer's Guide and Full Guide in particular will be able to answer any detailed questions you may have, as well as answer some that you haven’t even thought about yet. So do take a look when you are able!

To keep yourself updated on the ongoing status of the game, don’t forget to bookmark the main page of the portal, where the news will be refreshed almost every day. Lastly, join us in the Community Forums to discuss about the game with other players like you.

Thanks again, and Let’s Battle!