Guide

Your first twenty hours in World of Tanks or World of Warships

By Karen LeeDirector of publication, krasoven.onlinePublished 21 September 2026Last reviewed 21 September 2026

Both games are unusually unfriendly to beginners, not because they are hostile but because the things that kill you are invisible. This is what we would tell a friend on their first evening.

Before your first battle

• Do the tutorial, then do it again. It is short and it covers controls you will otherwise spend an hour discovering.
• Turn on the server-side reticle (tank game) or check your aim-assist settings (naval game). What the server thinks you are aiming at is what counts, and on any real connection that differs slightly from what your screen shows.
• Find your own key statistics. In the tank game, your view range. In the naval game, your surface detectability. Both are shown in the vehicle detail panel, and both govern almost every decision you will make.
• Decide about chat now. Both games have a blunt player base. Team chat can be muted in the settings, and a lot of long-term players keep it off.

Stay low for longer than you want to

The instinct is to climb tiers quickly because the higher vehicles look better. Resist it. Low and middle tiers have cheap repair bills, forgiving opponents, and exactly the same mechanics as the top of the tree. Every hour you spend learning armour angles or concealment at tier IV is an hour you do not spend losing credits at tier IX.

A reasonable target for your first twenty hours is to reach tier V or VI in one branch and understand why you win or lose. Not to reach tier X.

The five mistakes almost everyone makes

1. Driving into the open to get a better shot. Both games reward the player who shoots from a position the enemy cannot easily return fire into. The extra 200 metres of view is not worth it.
2. Showing your side. In the tank game, the side armour is thin. In the naval game, a full broadside invites a citadel hit. Angle.
3. Firing because the gun is loaded. Firing reveals you, and a wasted shell is thirty seconds of reload you do not have when it matters.
4. Following the crowd. If eleven of your team go one way, going with them means twelve vehicles competing for three firing positions.
5. Spending real money in week one. You do not yet know whether you will still be playing in a month, and the discounts come round again.

How to tell you are improving

Your kill count is a poor measure. Better signals, in rough order of usefulness:

• You survive longer, on average, than you did last week.
• You can name, before you fire, whether your shell will penetrate the plate you are aiming at.
• You know where the enemy probably is without being told.
• Your damage-per-battle is trending up even in games you lose.

A word on the community

Both games have long-established player bases and a low tolerance for mistakes in team chat. None of it is personal, most of it is not worth answering, and the mute button is not an admission of defeat. Clans are the opposite: joining even a casual one transforms the experience, and most will take a beginner who is willing to listen.

Published 21 September 2026 by Karen Lee. Menu names and setting locations change between updates. Where anything here differs from the operator's own published information, the operator's information prevails.