Vanguard Digital

A question-and-answer resource for players in Australia

What do people ask before they install an online war game?

Mostly the same eight or nine things: how long the download takes, whether an ageing laptop will cope, what the account needs, what the game will try to sell them later, and whether it is a reasonable thing to have running on the family computer. This site answers those questions one at a time.

How this site is paid for

Vanguard Digital carries paid links. When a reader follows our link to the War Thunder sign-up page and creates an account there, the advertising network pays us a fee. The reader pays nothing extra, and nothing about the sign-up changes because the visit came from here.

That fee is the only income this site has, which is worth knowing when you read anything we write about the title it applies to. Every paid link is marked where it appears, and the arrangement is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page.

Start with the question you actually have

There is no reading order. Each page below stands on its own and answers one cluster of questions, with the short version first and the detail underneath.

Four answers, one line each

Is a modern vehicle game a big download?

Assume tens of gigabytes rather than a few, plan for a patch on the first launch, and check the publisher's own page for the current figure before you start.

Do I need a joystick?

No. Keyboard and mouse is the normal way in, and most titles in this category are built around it. A stick is a preference, not a requirement.

Why does the game want my email confirmed?

Because the email address is how you recover the account later. An unconfirmed address means a locked-out player with no way back in.

Can I play on a phone or tablet?

Not for the title we cover, and not for most of this category. These are desktop games — Windows, macOS or Linux on a computer you sit at.

What this category actually is

A vehicle combat game puts you in the seat of something built for war — an aircraft, a helicopter, a tank, a warship — and drops you into a match against other people doing the same. That is the whole shape of it. The differences between titles are matters of degree: how much physics is simulated, how much is smoothed over, how many vehicles there are to unlock, and how long the unlocking takes.

The vehicles are usually real designs from real conflicts, which pulls in a particular sort of player. Someone who can name the variant of a Spitfire is often here for the machines first and the shooting second. That matters when you are deciding whether a game suits you: the appeal of the category rests on detail and progression as much as on reflexes, and a session can be slow in a way that action games are not.

Two structural things separate this category from most other online shooters. The first is scale — a match may cover many kilometres of map, so spotting an opponent is itself a skill, and a fight can be over before you knew it started. The second is progression. Nearly every title runs a tree of vehicles you unlock by playing, and the pace of that unlocking is the lever the publisher uses to sell you things. Understanding that lever before you start is the difference between a hobby and a slow irritation. The jargon page covers the mechanics; the costs page covers the money.

The one title we cover in detail, and why it is only one

Vanguard Digital has a commercial arrangement with a single advertiser, for a single game: War Thunder, an online multiplayer vehicle combat title published by Gaijin Entertainment, with aircraft, helicopters, ground vehicles and ships. The page about it sets out what the publisher says the game is, what the sign-up involves, and what we cannot verify and therefore will not claim.

We do not maintain a league table of competitors, because we are not in a position to run one honestly. Covering one title we are paid for, and saying so on every page, is a narrower promise than a ranking — and it is one we can keep.

Visit the War Thunder sign-up page

That button is our paid link. If you create an account after using it, the advertising network pays Vanguard Digital a fee; your sign-up is the same either way. The publisher's own site, which pays us nothing, is at warthunder.com.

Questions we are not the right place for

An honest resource is partly a list of things it will not do. We do not publish prices or discounts, because they change by region and by week and a stale number is worse than none — the publisher's own store is the only accurate source. We do not publish benchmark figures or frame rates, because we have not run those tests and repeating someone else's numbers as our own would be dishonest.

We cannot help with an account problem. No one here can see your account, reset a password, restore a deleted vehicle or answer a ban appeal; that is the publisher's support desk, and anyone on the internet who offers otherwise is worth being suspicious of. We also take no view on which game you should play. That depends on your hardware, your patience for progression and who you intend to play with, and a stranger cannot weigh those for you.

Words you will meet in the first hour

Tech tree
The branching chart of vehicles a game lets you unlock, usually grouped by nation and ordered roughly by era. Your progress through it is the game's main long-term structure.
Grind
The playing time between one unlock and the next. A short grind keeps players moving; a long one is what premium currency and accelerated progression are typically sold against.
Battle rating
A number attached to each vehicle that decides which other vehicles it can meet in a match. It is the matchmaking dial, and misreading it is the usual cause of a very one-sided first evening.
Repair cost
An in-game charge deducted when a vehicle is destroyed, in the game's own currency. Higher-tier vehicles usually cost more to repair, which is why a bad match at the top of a tree can leave you with less than you started.
Crate or case
A purchasable container whose contents are randomised. Whether you can see the odds before buying, and whether you can buy one at all, varies by title and by country. Treat it as a spending decision, not a reward.

The full glossary goes further, including the difference between arcade, realistic and simulator play.

Australian services worth having bookmarked

Three of these come up repeatedly in the questions we answer. The Australian Classification Board is the body that classifies games sold and distributed here, and its database is where you look up what a specific title has been given rather than trusting a forum post. The eSafety Commissioner publishes practical material on online gaming for parents and carers, including how to handle abuse and unwanted contact in chat.

For the money side, the ACCC explains consumer guarantees, which apply to digital products bought in Australia. If something goes wrong in a way that looks deliberate — a fake storefront, a stolen account being resold — Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, is where reports go, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes the passphrase and multi-factor guidance we point to on the account safety page.

How a page here gets written

Subjects are chosen from questions that come up over and over in public gaming forums and help threads — the ones with dozens of near-identical versions. A page is only worth writing if the answer is stable enough to stay true for a year.

Anything specific to a product comes from what its publisher states, and is attributed to them rather than asserted as our own finding. Anything about Australian law, classification or consumer rights links to the government body that says it, so you can check the wording yourself. Where we do not know, the page says we do not know. The about page sets out the method and its limits in full, including the commercial arrangement that shapes what gets covered.