Meet the “Dance of Dragons” Major Update!

Meet Dance of Dragons, War Thunder’s third 2024 major update that features brand-new vehicles, quality of life additions and plenty of bug fixes. Welcome the first domestic aircraft from Switzerland to the game through the addition of the player-made premium P-16 strike aircraft for Germany! Next up is China, who’s received the JF-17 squadron vehicle and Al-Khalid-I premium tank from Pakistan, plus the superb J-10A fighter jet. The USA now has the T1E1 with a 90 mm cannon, as well as the F-111F bomber and AV-8B (Night Attack) Harrier variant as a premium, plus the USS Tennessee battleship. The excellent Stormer AD has joined Great Britain as an SPAA, plus the Australian F-111C bomber, with the USSR getting the fast-firing Su-24M. Besides this, the CTWV RCV for Japan and CV9035NL for France are now obtainable squadron vehicles! Last but not least, France has now received their Coastal fleet tree now in closed testing, one interesting boat is the La Combattante that can fire SS.11 missiles!


Please feel free to leave your feedback on this Major update in the feedback thread here.[steamcommunity.com]

We’ve introduced a variety of interesting ground vehicles across several nations in this update. The US now has the T1E1 with an experimental 90 mm cannon, and Sweden now has the premium Finnish KV-1 m1942 with excellent armor! Moving onto Germany who now have the Puma with Spike missiles, to Great Britain who now have the Stinger and GAU-12 rotary-cannon capable Stormer AD for use against aircraft and tanks. Two new squadron vehicles, the CTWV RCV for Japan and Dutch CV9035NL for France are here, ready to be obtained through squadron points. Last but not least, we’ve updated the visual models of the M41A1, ZTZ99A, T-80U-E1 and Freccia, with the latter two receiving a new camouflage net and optics respectively.


Al-Khalid-I (pack)



For aircraft, there’s several additions spanning across multiple nations. Germany has received the P-16 from Switzerland, created by two War Thunder players as part of the revenue share program, with help from the Swiss Air Force Center in Dübendorf and the Swiss community. China has received the JF-17 squadron vehicle, a joint-development aircraft from Pakistan and China, plus the excellent modern J-10A fighter jet. Several top-ranking attack aircraft have joined three trees in the form of the F-111F and F-111C (from Australia) for the US and Great Britain and the almighty Su-24M for the USSR that has an insane rate of fire (seriously, check it out!). Lastly, Italy now has the Tornado IDS, Israel the F-16C Barak II and France the Dutch Sea Fury FB 51 and premium Sea Hawk Mk.50!


FAA P-16 (Pack)


In this update, French Coastal fleet closed testing has started. If you’d like to join, you can purchase the VLT-2 Pack or take part in the closed testing tasks. France now has an entire Coastal fleet line, with one interesting addition being the La Combattante that’s capable of firing SS.11 missiles! The full list of French boats can be seen below. The US now has the almighty USS Tennessee that has huge 356 mm cannons, Germany and USSR the SMS Derfflinger and Izmail battlecruisers, Japan the PT-802 and potent IJN Amagi, Great Britain the Australian HMAS Fremantle and Italy the MAS 441.




There’s no new location in Dance of Dragons, but we have updated several existing locations and missions. First off is a new [Domination #2] Eastern Europe mission that has the C cap point on the other side of the river and A and B slightly moved. In terms of location updates, 38th Parallel, Kuban, Iberian Castle, Second battle of El Alamein and Eastern Europe have had several changes in terms of the adjustment of rocks, lakes, houses and spawn shoot-throughs. 

Lastly, [Domination] Eastern Europe has had its bridges destroyed, blocking positions to the northern side of the river. This updated mission is for low Battle Ratings, below 4.0. Be sure to check out the full details in the changelog itself.


We’ve made some quality of life improvements to the game’s interface. The secondary weapons menu has now been moved to the bottom of the screen, which now means the changing of ordnance on an aircraft can be seen and is also updated instantly in real-time. Depending on the weight of the ordnance, you’ll see the aircraft move and get heavier when changing preset as well.



The period where new vehicles are counted as “new” has been increased from 14 to 28 days, meaning any new vehicle marked with a golden strip on them doesn’t block the research of the vehicle after it for much longer than before.

For the X-ray section of the interface, the addition of an X-ray part filter has been added. The X-ray part filter will only show certain parts, depending on what you select — great if you want to only focus on one module inside a vehicle and see it in more detail, all while hiding others you don’t want to see.




Radio distortion from ground crews has been subtly reduced, making their voices more clearer. Our sound engineers have also implemented muffled sound effects when a cockpit canopy is opened at high speeds, as flying with the cockpit open previously gave a hearing advantage.

We’ve added some cool customization options to several areas of the game. Firstly, all modern South African ground vehicles have been given a dark green camouflage as an additional Golden Eagle unlock, ensuring those vehicles have a relevant camo option on forest maps. Italian ground vehicles have also been given a post-war camouflage, and the “Tricolor late camouflage pattern” for post-war Italian ground vehicles has been fixed.



One new addition is the coloring of camouflage nets. Camouflage nets for the Vextra 105 and T-80U-E1 will now match the color of the camouflage selected on these vehicles. Over time, vehicles that have camouflage nets will receive proper coloring based on the camouflage selected too.


And finally, the texture of drop-tanks now correctly changes and corresponds to the selected camouflage that you’ve selected for your aircraft.



A point from the 2024 Roadmap has been implemented: custom tank sights! We’ve added a button called “Sight settings” to the Ground vehicle Battle Settings, where clicking this will open a new screen where you can customize to your heart’s content. Be it the sight itself, plus brand-new additions such as the rangefinder, turret rotation, sight field of view and shot readiness indicators to show in the sight — all features of modern tank sights. There’s a visual background that you can toggle, as well as see how it looks in thermal and at night. Full details in our blog here.



We’ve also refined helicopter damage models, with the addition of avionic systems, weapons control, night vision devices, countermeasure systems and radar equipment modules. For the AH-64s and Ka-52, new fully detailed damage models have been added. For all other helicopters, all systems are temporarily integrated into the damage model of a fuselage as a whole until a detailed damage model with separate modules responsible for their functionality are added. Overall this will mean less empty space in helicopters, and besides this, the damage model of tail tear offs on fuselage and tail impacts against the ground and other objects has been improved. We’ll be releasing fully-detailed dev blogs on these changes as well as all other Roadmap points soon.


Items marked with * will be added to the game in one of the upcoming updates.

That’s all for this post, but be sure to check out the full list of changes in the provided changelog, as there’s many bug fixes, improvements and additional vehicle changes not mentioned here.

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Please see the full changelog here.[wt.link]

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In this update we have made at least 63 changes or bugfixes due to player-submitted reports. Thank you for taking part in the project!

• A new [Domination #2] Eastern Europe mission has been added for battles at a Battle Rating of 4.0 and higher.

• 38th Parallel — a position in the grid square E7 (a ledge near the map border), where it was possible to shoot at the spawn point in grid square A6 has been blocked.
  
• Kuban — rocks in the B3 grid square where tanks could get stuck have been removed.
  
• Iberian Castle — used pines have been replaced with ones more suitable for the region (the size and shape of the tree crown has been changed).
  
• Second battle of El Alamein — the depth of the lakes near the spawn point of the right based team has been reduced so they can be crossed by a ground vehicle. A position on the junction between grid squares C5/C6/D5/D6 which allowed firing at the spawn point in squares A3/A4 has been blocked.
  
• Eastern Europe — a few houses have been removed near the spawn point in grid square F2 to make exiting easier. Some pits and piles of debris have been removed in grid squares F3/E3.
  
• [Domination] Eastern Europe — the bridges in the mission are now destroyed, thus blocking the positions on the northern side of the river. This mission is available in battles at a Battle Rating of 4.0 and lower.

• Following the Roadmap: A sight settings menu has been added. It can be accessed from the Ground vehicle Battle Settings menu by pressing the “Sight settings” button. In this new menu, you can select a reticle from the preset or custom ones, add and move some elements wherever you want. The following indicators can be added and some of them can be moved: the rangefinder, reload timer, turret position indicator and a frame showing the field of view at maximum zoom. The colors of all these elements can be changed taking into account the sight backlight state and the current channel (visible light, night vision, thermal vision). The selection of suitable colors is helped by the ability to switch backlight state, current channel and 4 maps in the background with different conditions, and as a result a different color palette. The menu also has ready-made sight presets that can be saved to a vehicle right away or edited if wanted.
  
• This is just the first version of this menu as we already have plans for further improvements to it. We would like to thank the authors on WT Live, as some of the preset sighting reticles are part of their work included in the game. We hope that they will continue to create awesome sights that everyone can download from WT Live and use in the game for their own pleasure.
  
• The Secondary weapons menu has been changed: The window with a list of weaponry presets has been made smaller and moved to the lower part of the screen. Camera settings have been changed. Now the aircraft can be seen when selecting different weapon presets and when making new ones. All changes are reflected on the aircraft in real time without it flickering.
  
• The ability to display radar altitude has been added to the aircraft HUD. Switching between the indicated altitudes is done via “Indicated altitude” parameter in the “Air Battle Settings” category. It is possible to choose just one of the altitude types — either barometric or radar, as well as both of them at the same time.
  
• Information about the calculated (maximum, with an accurate hit) damage to bases for bombing and the reward multiplier for this damage (the multiplier applies to SL, RP and mission points) has been added to the description of secondary weapons for aircraft.
  
• Bombs that have their mass specified in pounds now also have mass in kilograms displayed in the brackets after the mass in pounds.
  
• The ability to filter by module parts has been added to the X-ray view of ground and naval vehicles in the hangar.
  
• Rookie trophies in the in-game Item Shop are now grayed out and cannot be purchased if the player already has the vehicle in the trophy on their account.
  
• A discount indication has been added for pack vehicles. Now these vehicles will have an icon with the discount value when there is a sale in the store.
  
• A display of max thrust on shafts has been added to the x-ray tooltip for helicopter engines.

• Following the Roadmap: detailed damage models have been added to helicopters. It’s possible to disable avionic systems, weapons control, night vision devices, countermeasure systems and radar equipment. For all AH-64 helicopters and the Ka-52, new detailed damage model modules corresponding to various systems have been added (when hovering over a module with the cursor, the information on what the selected module is responsible for is displayed). For other helicopters, all systems are temporarily integrated into the damage model of the fuselage as a whole, until a detailed damage model with separate modules responsible for their functionality are added. The damage model of tail separation during strong impacts of the fuselage and tail impacts when hitting the ground or other objects has been improved.

• The effect of radio distortion for ground vehicle crews has been reduced, speech has become intelligible. The effects of radio interference for tank crew communications have been removed. The radio effect only remains when the commander communicates with external characters (artillery, aviation, etc.).
  
• Now, when flying an aircraft from cockpit view at high speeds, an open canopy/cockpit door will cause external sounds to be muffled by the wind and become indistinguishable.