Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/279729.html

Hello everyone,

what follows is the third article on historical battles’ future from Storm, posted today (two hours ago or so). Here’s what he wrote:

After heated debate on the historical battles, I would like to share with you the plans for their further development. Now, in 9.0, we will not introduce any serious changes. There will be just minor corrections. But for the following future versions, we gathered several interesting ideas:

- mass-used (lowtier) tanks will recieve the ability to respawn on the battlefied. 2,3 or 4 times (this will be set in advance), with player choosing the respawn point out of several possibilities (the enemy will not be able to control all respawn points at once).

- mass-used (lowtier) tanks will recieve premium status, when it comes to crew, eg. it will be possible to use crews from other tanks of the same nation and class on them

- third, what many players talked about and what Wargaming kept “in reserve”: there will be overrides on tank characteristics in historical battles: what it means that a tank will have two different sets of characteristics (hitpoints, rate of fire, viewrange, terrain passability, hull and turret traverse rates) – one for random, the other for historical battles. The mechanism of the fight will remain the same (SS: eg. no “hardcore mode”), but this will allow for better finetuning of the tank characteristics without being influenced by the main problem – tank tiers. In the end, there will be two different balance sets for each “historical” tank – one for random, one for historical battles.

These plans will come “when it’s done”, this year.

From the discussion:

- Storm states that while HE shells are not useful in historical battles, their issue is not connected with them. Developers would like to make HE shells more attractive for players, but have no idea how to do that without buffing arty in the process, which is definitely something they don’t want to do now

- (connected to the point above) apparently, giving arty their separate HE shells is not an option

- the intended goal for the respawn is “more battle dynamic, more influence of lowtier tanks on battles, less camping”

- the tests of the mechanism mentioned above look promising

- it’s not yet known, whether there will be special maps for historical battles

- various tiers of the same battle (one battle in Kursk of T-70 vs Panzer III, another of Tiger vs SU-152) will likely not come

- apparently, bunkers and airstrikes are planned for clanwars, maybe in the future there will be NPC bunkers firing at tanks

- bunkers and airstrikes will come this year

- NPC bunkers are not planned for historical battles for now

- Storm fully expects there will be a lot of whine about the separate characteristics of tanks in historical battles, but it will allow the developers to implement the battle in higher quality

- this historical rebalance shouldn’t take long, because few new tanks are coming, so there will be time to do that

- captured tanks will not come anytime soon, because devs need to make new HD models for them and there’s a queue for that even now already

- list of historical battles’ tanks is still being worked on

- premium T-54 wasn’t modelled yet, “it’s still early”