Entry 7 of 7

Glossary of vehicle combat game terms

Quick answer35 terms used across this category, defined once and linked to each other. Individual titles rename many of them, so treat the definition as the concept and the game's own wording as the label.

How to use this glossary

Most of the confusion in a first week here is vocabulary rather than difficulty. A player told that they lost because they were “uptiered in an unspaded vehicle with no crew skills” has been given an accurate diagnosis in a language they do not speak. The entries below are ordered alphabetically and cross-referenced, and the two worked examples at the end put several of them together, because the terms are easier to hold when they are doing something.

The terms

Armour penetration: Whether a projectile passes through a plate depends on the plate's effective thickness along the shell's path, the shell type and the distance it has travelled. Penetration is therefore a calculation at the moment of impact, not a fixed property of a gun.
Assisted level: The most forgiving realism setting, where an instructor corrects inputs, aiming is stabilised and most enemies carry markers. Useful for learning vehicles, poor at teaching the skills the stricter levels need.
Battle rating: A number assigned to each vehicle that decides which vehicles it is matched with and against. Set by the developer from performance data and revised in updates, so a vehicle you own can move between brackets without changing.
Bracket: The span of battle ratings a single match draws from. Because the span has width, most matches contain vehicles rated above and below yours — see uptier.
Crew skills: Trainable proficiencies for the modelled crew operating a vehicle: reload speed, repair speed, targeting, endurance. They are bought with in-game currency and are usually tied to a crew slot rather than to a vehicle.
Downtier: A match in which your vehicle sits near the top of the bracket. Generally the easiest matches, and the best conditions in which to learn a newly bought vehicle.
Draw distance: How far away the game still renders objects. Critical in this category, because spotting a distant vehicle depends on it being drawn at all. Reducing it for performance trades away information you need — see desktop setup.
Energy: In air combat, the combination of speed and altitude available to an aircraft. Most fighter engagements are contests over energy: climbing spends speed to buy height, diving does the reverse, and turning hard spends both.
Flight model: The simulation governing how an aircraft behaves, derived from lift, drag, weight and engine output rather than from a list of statistics. It is why an aircraft is only better than another within part of its performance envelope.
Frame time: How long a single frame takes to draw. Consistency of frame time matters more than average frame rate for aiming and for holding an aircraft near its limits.
Grind: Playing repeatedly to accumulate research or currency. The word is descriptive rather than pejorative: the rate is a design lever, and it is what a premium account multiplies.
Hard currency: The premium in-game currency, normally bought with real money and spendable on a different set of things from earned currency. Exchange between the two, where it exists, usually runs one way.
HOTAS: Hands On Throttle And Stick: a joystick and separate throttle used together. Genuinely useful at the strictest realism level, of little benefit at the assisted level, and never required.
Instructor: Automatic input correction that keeps a vehicle inside its safe envelope — preventing stalls, smoothing turns, stabilising a gun. Removing it is the main thing the middle realism level does.
Latency: The delay between an input and its effect registering on the server. Distance to the server matters more than connection speed, which is why choosing the nearest server region generally beats choosing the busiest.
Line-up: The set of vehicles you bring to a single match. Matchmaking usually reads the highest-rated vehicle in it, so adding one advanced vehicle to a beginner line-up makes every match harder for the rest of it.
Marker: An on-screen tag identifying a vehicle at distance. How many markers appear, and at what range, is one of the main differences between realism levels.
Matchmaking: The system that assembles two teams from waiting players, using battle ratings rather than player skill in most titles in this category.
Modifications: Upgrades researched and bought for an individual vehicle — better ammunition, improved engine parts, sights. A vehicle before its modifications and the same vehicle after them can feel like different machines.
Overpressure: Damage caused by blast reaching a crew compartment without the plate being penetrated. It is why a large-calibre shell can disable a vehicle it did not pass through, and why hits that “did nothing” sometimes do a great deal.
Premium account: A time-limited multiplier on the research and currency a match pays. It runs on the calendar rather than on hours played, which is the detail most often overlooked before buying it.
Premium vehicle: A vehicle bought outright rather than researched, usually earning at a higher rate. Most useful below the rating a player has reached, because a premium vehicle played badly earns less than a familiar one played well.
Repair cost: The currency charged to return a destroyed vehicle to service. It rises with battle rating, and at higher ratings it can exceed what an average match earns — the main reason a session can end with less currency than it began.
Research points: Points earned by playing a vehicle, which accumulate towards the next vehicle in that branch. Branch-bound: playing an aircraft does not advance a tank.
Server region: The geographic cluster your match runs on. Australian players generally get more consistent results from the nearest region than from the most populated one.
Simulator level: The strictest realism setting: axis control, cockpit view, instruments to read and no markers. A distinct hobby rather than a harder version of the same game.
Soft currency: In-game money earned by playing, spent on buying unlocked vehicles, ammunition, modifications, crew skills and repairs.
Spading: Community shorthand for fully researching a vehicle's modifications. A “spaded” vehicle is the one the statistics describe; an unmodified one is not.
Spawn: Entering the match in one of your vehicles. Titles usually limit spawns by points or by the vehicles in your line-up, which makes a late spawn an economic decision as much as a tactical one.
Stall: The loss of lift that follows asking a wing for more than it can give. At the assisted level the instructor prevents it; at every level above, it is the most common cause of a beginner's crash.
Tech tree: The branching map of vehicles available to a nation, arranged by era and capability. You unlock later vehicles by playing earlier ones, so progression moves sideways through hardware rather than upwards through levels.
Third person view: An external camera behind the vehicle. Available at the assisted level, restricted or absent at the strictest, and one of the largest practical differences between them.
Ticket bleed: The steady drain of a team's reinforcement count while the other team holds objectives. It is why a team that is winning engagements can still lose, and why capturing ground matters more than a scoreboard suggests.
Uptier: A match in which your vehicle sits near the bottom of the bracket, facing vehicles rated above it. Unavoidable, survivable, and best met in a vehicle you know well.
Zoom optics: The magnified sight view used for gunnery. Higher magnification helps at range and narrows awareness of what is nearby, which is a trade rather than an upgrade.

Worked example: why that match went badly

A player buys a well-regarded vehicle, takes it straight into a match and is destroyed twice without effect. Nothing has gone wrong mechanically. Four terms explain it.

The vehicle is unspaded, so it is running stock ammunition and an unimproved engine — it is not yet the vehicle the reviews describe. It sits at the bottom of its bracket, so this is an uptier against better hardware. The crew is untrained, so it reloads and repairs slowly. And because the vehicle is highly rated, each loss charges a large repair cost, so the session is also losing currency.

The remedy is unglamorous and free: play the vehicle in a downtier until its modifications are researched, and spend earned currency on crew before buying anything else. The progression entry covers the economics in full.

Worked example: the hit that appeared to do nothing

A shell strikes an enemy tank squarely and the tank drives away. A second, apparently identical shot destroys it outright. This looks random and is not.

The first shell met the plate at an angle that raised its effective thickness beyond the shell's penetration at that range. The second arrived slightly flatter, passed through, and struck ammunition behind the plate. Had the gun been much larger, the first hit might still have disabled the vehicle through overpressure without penetrating at all. The variable is geometry, not chance, which is what modelling means in this category.