M3 Hunter or M3 Striker? I like Hunter because it's a great mount for most turrets, particularly my Shaft, and I'm curious about what it will be like when hull characteristics are introduced. Striker is also pretty great to me, though.

Smoky's M2 alteration is supposed to give you improved burst damage and long range performance, and not necessarily to make it compete with Thunder in all situations. The critical hit is very important to take into account because it provides a flat 924 damage at any distance, which is almost half of a light hull's health. In my view, this is a main selling point of the alteration. Like quite a few alterations, the Precision Targeting System is intended for a specific use. By using it, you handicap yourself somewhat in normal combat in exchange for very powerful critical hits that can let you scrap people from across the map. In this respect, it seems to be fine.

Hornet-Striker format was added because the developers evidently had fun with it and wanted to introduce it to the game. Striker is a fairly skill-demanding weapon, so the gameplay is interesting. The developers are against making Wasp-Fire a format because there are very few tactics involved and it's essentially mindless killing and death, bordering on power leveling in their view. They don't want to make it any more popular than it already is.

Out of your list, I'd say that the first option is the best for long range, since Ricochet and Twins are usually going to have trouble hitting you at further distances. Railgun, Thunder, and Smoky are all hitscan and hard to avoid. Smoky isn't a huge threat at a distance, but it can hurt if a critical hit is scored. I realize that you don't want Shaft protection, but I usually run with Griffon T-A (Rail/Thunder/Shaft) protection for long-range combat. Shafts can really ruin your day and are a larger threat at long distances than Smoky or Vulcan, so take that into consideration. If you feel like you can deal with them easily enough, then feel free to use Smoky or Vulcan protection instead. Depends on the map. On small maps, Twins is the most dangerous, no question. On slightly larger ones, Smoky is slightly better.

If you ask me, Shaft is now better than ever before. Being able to one-shot a medium hull in a fully charged shot is great, and it hasn't lost much, if any effectiveness against light hulls. The only nerf it received was damage dropoff on the arcade shots, but I don't see that as much of a downside. If you're fighting with arcade shots at a distance where the dropoff is significant, you're probably doing something wrong. Magnum can fit into a long-range-support role like Shaft, but it can be a lot more frustrating to use. Both are in a pretty good spot right now, so either would be fine. You'll probably want to try Magnum on an alt before making a decision.

gib crystals pl0x

Up to you. Normal Smoky is better in terms of damage because no damage dropoff on crits is pretty great, but you're not going to be missing out on much if you prefer to fight at close quarters. The extra impact force given by Assault Ammunition is hilarious, so if you want to knock Wasps and Hornets senseless, it's a good choice. It's probably not worth 50k crystals, however, so I would recommend waiting for a sale to cut the price a bit.

Upload it to VirusTotal.com, post a link to the report here. The website can scan your file with a lot of different antivirus programs. I think the client has sometimes been picked up as a virus by some software, let's check.

That was the case, whether they intended it or not, when Vulcan and Hammer were introduced about 2 years ago, but the developers seem to have noticed the backlash. Striker was introduced in a weaker state than the current version and was buffed after release. I'm guessing/hoping that they will use the latter philosophy for Magnum to avoid the exact complaint that you're expressing here. Better to build up than tear down.

We don't get any extra discounts compared with normal players; I used to have a % discount on M2 Freeze because I had several M2s, but I just checked, and it's gone. I think you are talking about "Helper" paint, which used to come with a 18% protection to everything and is now issued with a Spectrum module with similar protection. It's true that it offers a bit of a gameplay advantage, but it is only available to the Helpers of the Month and for that month only, unless the person does such a good job that they get it the next month too. I think it is supposed to be a reward for helpers that do an extra good job, encouraging the others to perform well too. Ethics aside, the 18% universal protection isn't too bad in battle. It's a lot less than any of the current modules M2 and up, and I would personally be a lot more annoyed to see lots of Prodigi modules than a Spectrum. I think the Spectrum modules given to eSports winners have higher protections than that. The specific, normal paints that helpers get (for example, my Reporter paint) just look cool and don't get any special protections.

waw nob stanzhang stole my first Thanks for the summary, Maf. The livestreams were very informative to be sure, but they took a while to look through and the Russian one was quite inaccessible to non-Russian speakers. I'm sure that this took a while, so thanks for the effort. :)

If two sides of your tank are blocked, you'll have problems if you need to run from an approaching enemy. In my experience, one piece of hard cover is enough for transient sniping. It's fine to enter sniping mode in advance if you anticipate that enemies will be approaching soon. If you need to give teammates covering fire, it's best to prepare a shot first so any enemies that expose themselves can be swiftly dealt with. Same goes for blocking off an area. Really, you should be using your judgement. You ideally shouldn't be in scope mode 24/7, but you shouldn't abstain from charging up whenever possible either.

Here's a separate post for other matters. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I can't think of a way where someone could simultaneously hate the splash damage AND the alteration. The alteration basically reverses the update, so if you hate the update, you'd like it, and vice versa. I get that players could hate that they would have to pay up to 50k to get rid of it the splash damage, but unless that's what you're talking about, I don't understand. I did my best to stay neutral in the article. I talked about the possible benefits of the splash damage and its very noticeable downsides, and that the alteration could be helpful if you're really bothered by the self damage and are willing to pay 50k. I've revised the last paragraph of that section to remove any possible interpretation of bias, if that helps. No, they are written by separate French and Hindi reporters. They're just linked here for convenience.

Everyone, take a chill pill. Sheesh. Take a break, drink some water, play some piano, listen to music, eat a sandwich or something. I'm gathering that a lot of you guys are angered by the Vulcan changes, and think that Savage is misrepresenting them as being beneficial or positive as opposed to being negative. Some of you think that he is doing this on purpose to whitewash and glorify the developers. From there, things have spiraled out of control into a mess of yelling and arguments. That's not helping anyone. I'd like to address a few points. Savage wrote his section of the article based on his own experiences and his own testing. You don't have to agree. His own experiences may not and apparently do not match with your own, but they are still his. I don't use Vulcan very much these days, so I can't say much about how the changes have affected it. What I do remember from my days of using it for the few months after its release was that the reduction of weak damage from 50% to 25% really hurt its ranged performance for me. If somebody were to value the damage of Vulcan more than its gyroscopic effect or auto-aim angles, then they might like the update. It seems like everyone here disagrees with that view, but again, you don't have to. People use turrets in their own ways and like different things about them. And that's fine. Reporters are not literally the mouthpiece of your deity of choice. Our articles are not supposed to be a religious text that you are supposed to follow...well, religiously. When writing, I try to keep the analysis neutral, but I also offer my own opinions. It's perfectly fine to disagree with the views written in an article as long as you keep it civil. This goes for disagreeing with other people too. I absolutely hate eating squid and other cephalopods, but I'm not going to accuse people who love calamari of being idiots or shills for the squid industry. Reporters are not literally shills for the developers. I think of myself as a player first and foremost. When I hear of a new update, I don't think "hmm, how can I spin this so the players will swallow it." Instead, I think "hmm, how will this affect the game?", and then base my article around the changes. If I offer opinions, I try to keep them separate. I don't set out to convince the readers of anything- that's for you to decide. I know that there are some of you thinking "THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT SHILLS FOR THE DEVELOPERS WOULD SAY!", but if I was a shill for the developers, I'd be doing a pretty poor job. I don't agree or like every single decision that is made by Alternativa, but I try to keep things neutral so that you can make your own conclusions. Before some of you go and say "WELL MAYBE YOU'RE SHILLING MORE CAREFULLY TO GIVE THE ILLUSION OF NEUTRALITY", think about it. Nothing I say would ever convince you otherwise, so why are you here? Savage is admonished for hiding posts that he shouldn't have. I'm not a reporter admin, so this isn't official, but it's clear to me that Savage has been too liberal with the Hide function. I've reminded him that in the future, he should only use it for housekeeping, obvious rule breaks, and nothing else. Other forms of unprofessional behavior should be avoided as well. Realize that you're in a vitriolic argument about a weapon in an online tank game. None of this is real, so there is no point in having any significant degree of real life anger over this issue. Take it into perspective. Hopefully that settles everything, and we can drop the stick and move on from this drama. I think we can all agree that there are better uses of our time.

Neither helpful nor funny. The situation is pretty weird, but I can't think of any reason for making up or exaggerating such a story.

yes

Reminds me of what the developers did to supplies in TX. I thought that it worked out pretty well in that game, hopefully things go relatively smoothly here. In TX, I don't necessarily have to worry about destroying a drugger in a hard-fought 1v1 confrontation and then facing their freshly respawned and drug-addled tank a few seconds later. It makes using supplies have more consequence, since the long and persistent cooldown punishes you for poor choices a lot more than simply waiting until your next respawn. I like it because there's less drug use overall, and if you wait and play your cards right, you can pummel other players when their supplies are all on cooldown for some sweet revenge. The removal of smart cooldowns means that you can also 234 in an instant if all your supplies are ready. Fun to do every once in a while. I look forwards to seeing how this goes. If you hate it, it should only be active for 2 days assuming it remains an experiment, which seems bearable to me.

Players commonly complain about Twins requiring little skill for great performance. The developers thought that if Twins had self damage, players would have to think twice before attacking instead of literally holding down the spacebar 24/7. It's still really powerful, you just have to stay at least 4 meters or so away from your opponent to avoid hurting yourself. It's not supposed to be as good as or better than the dedicated close range weapons (Hammer, Isida, Firebird, Freeze) at point blank range.

Patch #439, released on the 10th of February, has brought several exciting new features and changes to the game. The most noticeable of them are the changes to Twins and the addition of two new Alterations for everyone's favorite plasma weapons, Twins and Ricochet, but several less noticeable ones have been implemented too. Let's take a look at them and see what this means for the gameplay. New Alterations Prior to this update, Twins and Ricochet were the only turrets that had a single Alteration, as the other established turrets had received a second set in December, barring the recently introduced Striker. Likely because they are both plasma weapons, the Plasma Core Accelerators and Minus-Field Stabilization M1 Alterations that belong to Twins and Ricochet, respectively, have identical effects on their turrets. The developers were initially planning on continuing this trend by giving both of them splash damage Alterations, but in an interesting turn of events they decided to give Twins splash damage by default and an Alteration to remove it- the opposite of what was done for Ricochet, i.e. no splash damage by default and an Alteration to grant it. Let's cover how each of these Alterations work. Twins: Stable Plasma (M1) "I should stop hurting myself." - Twins "It's a good thing that he's seeing a psychologist now. Self-harm is a real danger." - Ricochet "Hey, that's pate- what do you mean, 'plasma stabilization isn't the same as AP shells'? " - Thunder Unlike Ricochet's new Alteration, Stable Plasma is a M1 Alteration. It occupies the same slot as the earlier Plasma Core Accelerators, and as a result, you can't use both of them together. That's alright, however, since they are essentially opposites. PCA increases Twins' medium range effectiveness significantly while lessening its close range potential, and Stable Plasma optimizes it for close quarters combat, a role Twins used to have before the update. Pick one or another based on whether you want to rush your enemies or hang back and suppress them. Conceptually, this Alteration is similar to Armor-Piercing Ammo Alteration for Thunder, but I don't think that the downsides are as apparent. The self damage on Twins is currently quite significant if you choose to use it at point blank range. To be fair, your enemies will suffer more than you in that scenario since they take the full damage of the turret while you will only take the splash damage, but you will still whittle down your health at a noticeable pace. The splash damage can be useful against multiple targets only if they happen to be clustered within a measly 4 meters. For comparison, Thunder has a splash damage radius of 12 meters. Yeah, not especially useful. In my opinion, the only downside to Stable Plasma is the price (50k is pretty cheap compared to high rank equipment, but not insignificant) and the opportunity cost of losing out on Plasma Core Accelerators. If you use or previously used Twins as a close range brawler, find that the update hurt your effectiveness, and think that it's worth 50k or so to remove the splash damage, this Alteration is for you. If you enjoy the new splash damage or don't suffer from it very much, you'd best save your crystals or buy the Plasma Core Accelerators instead. I'd give this a good rating. Ricochet: Unstable Plasma (M2) "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!1!!!1" - Ricochet "Rico always was bouncing off the walls, but now he...just explodes." - Psychologist "First Striker, then Twins, now Rico. Why is everyone copying my splash damage? And now I hear Artillery's on the way. Jerks." -Thunder Ricochet has carved a niche as a very powerful weapon for indirect fire or close/medium range combat on single targets. This Alteration changes the turrets concept entirely, removing its indirect fire capability and hurting its close range usability in return for being able to hose down multiple targets. The splash damage added by Unstable Plasma has a radius of 7 meters, which is unimpressive compared to Thunder but better than Twins' default splash damage. This allows you to hit multiple targets in the central point of Polygon fairly well. While Ricochet lacks the single shot power of Thunder or Striker, it has better damage per second than both of them and as a result can down clustered targets pretty quickly provided that they stay clustered. The loss of the ricochet effect is a bummer if you use Ricochet on maps where it comes especially in handy, such as Silence or Esplanade, but you're not going to miss it as much on Sandbox or Combe. You'll need to stay out of close quarters unless you plan on self destructing, which makes Ricochet less viable on small maps like Noise or Island. Because this is a M2 Alteration, you can combine it with Minus-Field Stabilization for a medium to long range Ricochet. You lose out on the epic bouncing capability of MFS, which is responsible for a lot of interesting strategies, but at least you get multi-target damage to make up for the lower damage per second. Just don't try to stuff Ricochet into the faces of your targets as you may have done before. I guess a silver lining of the MFS is that you won't kill yourself as quickly from splash damage, but don't push it. Your choice of whether or not to buy and use this Alteration depends on whether or not you enjoy using the bouncing effect and whether you play on maps where splash damage would be more useful than its downsides. I don't think that I'd enjoy this very much because I love being able to flush enemies out of cover and evict intruders from tunnels thanks to the ricochet effect and being able to murder a good variety of turrets at close range with Ricochet's high damage per second, but your mileage may vary. I'd give this a good rating. Turret Changes The update has also seen some changes to a few turrets. Besides the addition of splash damage to Twins mentioned before, changes have been made to Ricochet and Vulcan. Vulcan When the original announcement came, many players assumed that Vulcan would receive beneficial changes, largely owing to the nature of the previous balance updates. Vulcan had been severely weakened by updates which had affected both its damage output and the time before self-damage begins. So it came as a slight shock to many that the first listed change to Vulcan was a debuff. The Gyroscope effect, which is the ability for the turret to remain "locked on" to a target even after it has suffered a heavy blow from another tank. This was halved, meaning Vulcan is now more sensitive to impact force from enemy shells. The second debuff to Vulcan was to the turret's auto-aim, both upwards and downwards. Vulcan is renowned for its annoying ability to hit tanks at extraordinary angles, and this debuff was implemented to make using a Vulcan more difficult, rather than its gameplay simply being to hold the spacebar, rotate the turret slightly and watch as the stream of bullets connects with an enemy. Both angles of auto-aim were reduced by 4 degrees, and there was talk that it would severely impair Vulcan's ability as a defender on maps such as Noise, as well as reducing its effectiveness in maps such as Polygon, since the downwards auto-aim was critical for its success. However, after repeated testing Vulcan appears to still perform most of its original roles successfully, though granted the user must now maneuver his or her hull more to allow the "lock-on" effect to continue. As you can see from the image, Vulcan's ability to "fasten" onto the target has been reduced. Aside from these debuffs, there was also a very important enhancement for Vulcan. Weak Damage is now increased from 25-50%. This means Vulcan performs much better at medium-long range, and this boost aids it in the Deathmatch format, allowing it to cut down approaching enemies before they get too close for comfort. Overall, I believe this update was beneficial for Vulcan, and the positives outweigh the negatives. Ricochet Ricochet has received two fairly minor changes. First off, the maximum number of bounces is now capped at 20 for all modifications. To be honest, that doesn't really mean a lot. Chances are, you're not going to be in many situations where the rounds will be able to bounce 20 times, and if you are, the maximum range will likely kick in and the rounds will disappear before 20 bounces will happen. I think this is more of a formality, or maybe a bug fix. I haven't heard about any situations where the rounds act ridiculous, but I suppose that with a long enough tunnel and the Minus-Field Stabilization alteration, things could get wonky. In any case, don't worry about that. The second change is that the radius of the projectiles has been doubled from 0.5 meters to 1.0 meters. As such, the hitbox is larger and it is easier for you to hit your opponents because less leading is required. It is worth noting that although the overall increase is 100%, the increase is numerically not very significant, so don't expect to hit anything at medium range without aiming properly. The two changes as a whole constitute a minor buff because there are no apparent downsides. Alright, that's about it for this article. Hopefully it helped you with interpreting and judging the changes and the new Alterations. Have you tried any of the two Alterations yourself? Do you have any thoughts about the changes? Discuss them below. Special thanks to new Reporter candidate @Savage for contributing the Vulcan section! Thanks for reading, and we''ll see you next time.

I wonder how the splash damage will work out for Twins. At the very least you won't be able to jam it right in an enemy's face without hurting yourself- I doubt that 4 meters of splash damage will be very significant for crowd control or missed shots. For reference, Thunder's splash damage radius is 12 meters. I wasn't expecting the projectile radius to be doubled. I think it's in a good spot right now, neither too small nor too big, and making it too large could reduce the skill necessary to use Twins/Ricochet effectively. We'll have to see. The Ricochet alteration ought to be fun on maps where the bouncing doesn't come in handy. I can imagine it being quite powerful on Polygon given that the radius is more than half of Thunder's.

Hi vecky, I'm not a developer and don't have any control over any technical glitches or bugs that you might encounter. On my computer, the Alternate camera behavior setting works fine from the first try. If you keep having this type of problem, you can try posting it in the Bugs & Glitches thread or submit a new topic in the Problems and Solutions forum.

A Guide to the Settings and Its Changes The long beleaguered Settings menu has recently undergone some similarly long-due renovation. This is definitely not the most interesting of changes, especially not compared to the addition of the Clan system in the same update, but it's important regardless. A few new features have been added along with the visual changes that can be quite handy. I'll also be reviewing each of the settings since a guide like that hasn't been done in a while. I'll also be reviewing each of the settings to help clarify information. The previous Settings menu was a rather ugly single page, cluttered with all the settings in the game, ranging from graphics options to email information. While it did minimize the number of clicks required to change a given setting, as said by the developers, it wouldn't leave much room for future additions. Also, a newbie could be easily overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of checkboxes. Game The settings menu is currently divided into multiple panels, or pages, if you will. Here's a screenshot of the first panel, which manages game settings. This panel manages settings that will affect your gameplay, not including graphics and controls. As you can see, the ubiquitous "show damage", "show chat", and "alternate camera behavior" buttons, among others, have been moved to here. The volume slider and option for background sound are present as well. I'll cover what each of these do. Show damage: This controls the display of the damage numbers that appear when you damage a tank, enemy or otherwise. They appear in ticks of roughly half a second and last for a second or so before disappearing; if you have a weapon that damages continuously, the numbers will stack/appear simultaneously to a noticeable degree. If you destroy a tank within one of those ticks, the final damage number is displayed in red. I generally recommend that you turn these on because they provide quite a bit of utility. If I shoot someone far away with my Shaft's arcade shot and notice that I'm only dealing 300 or so points of damage, I immediately know that they are either using Double Armor or a module with roughly 50% Shaft protection. This allows you to pick your fights and determine what tactics you should use. In addition, if you use Thunder, Striker, or Ricochet to damage an opponent out of your line of sight, you can see the damage numbers that result. This means that you can randomly shoot into corners to check for enemies or see the location of an enemy that you're trying to splash/hit with ricochets. It's very useful overall. Show drop zones: This controls the display of the 2D symbols marking the location of drop zones for supply boxes. Unlike before, these drop zones markers no longer become transparent over distance, so you can now see a gold box marker from across the map. I generally recommend that you turn these on because there is no real downside to doing so. I haven't noticed any extra lag from enabling this setting, and on unfamiliar maps, knowing where a repair kit is can be a lifesaver. Alternate camera behavior: This one is a little confusing since it isn't described anywhere in-game. According to the wiki, it causes the camera to follow your tank when you are inside tunnels. This isn't particularly descriptive either, so the concept will be illustrated with a few screenshots. First, here's a first-person view in the tunnels of Iran with the camera panned to look down on the tank. This is without Alternate camera behavior enabled. A little claustrophobic, but I can kind of see what's in front of me. The below screenshot me in the same spot with Alternate camera behavior enabled. Of course, there's no reason to have the camera panned up so high in a tunnel in the first place. Instead, one should pan it lower for optimal vision, a habit that should have formed by playing Tanki for a while. Anyways, this setting is generally not recommended since it can be disorienting if your camera is panned up high (common on Iran) and your tank suddenly drives underneath an overhang. The normal setting would at least provide some awareness while you tone down your camera angle. PM from friends only: Fairly self explanatory. This controls whether or not any random person can Private Message you in the server chat, or whether only players in your Friends list can PM you. I like to leave this on since I don't really have any reason not to, but if you're a famous player or simply get swamped by PMs from random people, turning this on could be helpful. In addition, if someone is harassing you in PM, turning this on temporarily can help solve the problem. Your harasser will have to either switch to attacking you with public messages, which can get them banned (alas, you can't report people for private messages), or they'll just have to stop. Good to know. If you don't have any problems of that nature, I would not recommend turning it on. Show chat: Self explanatory. This controls the display of the messages in the server chat and suppresses the display of the battle chat. I don't see much reason to use it, but if you are annoyed by the server chat for any reason, like people spamming "+"s for gold boxes, and there are too many people involved for ignoring all of them to be viable, then you can try this. However, your friends and other people won't be able to talk to you. In battles, while you can still access the battle chat by pressing Enter, you may miss out on important pointers from your teammates, since it's usually not worth it to interrupt battles by pressing Enter all the time. I would recommend keeping it on. Show notifications: This controls the display of the "xyz invites you to a battle" type notifications. With it on, you will be notified if someone invites you to a battle, accepts your invite, or declines your invite. I would recommend keeping it on unless you really need to be concentrated on a battle. Sound volume: This large slider allows you to control how loud the game sounds are. I don't touch this because I prefer to use the master volume control of my computer instead, but if you are having a Skype call or are playing music in the background, this could be useful. Background sound: This option controls whether or not you'll hear ambient noise in battle. On almost all maps, this is just the sounds of the wind, random Thunder/Railgun shots, and what might be a sort of rumbling helicopter noise. It's mostly pleasant white noise, but if you are playing a serious competitive game, the gunfire noises could be misleading or distracting, so turning it off could be a good idea. If you're not a tryhard competitive player and enjoy the sound, then I would recommend keeping it on. Let's head to the next panel, which manages the Graphics options that give some players joy, and for everyone else, lag. Graphics These are the settings that control how the game looks. You can turn them all off for maximum performance, turn them all on for maximum appearance, or use something in between. The above picture shows my personal settings. They're mostly a holdover from when I was using a rather low-end computer, and I haven't really changed them since getting a new one. From personal testing, my current computer (Intel i5 processor, integrated graphics, 8 GB of RAM) can handle medium-high graphics well, but my FPS tends to drop to high 40s-50s when shadows and lighting need to be rendered. If I turn all of the setting on, I get only 20 FPS. I prefer using the bare bones settings above and keep a consistent 60 FPS, but it depends vastly on your choice of computer. For all of these settings, choosing whether or not you want to enable them is personal choice, so I'll skip recommendations. I'll be covering the important ones. Show skybox: This allows you to see the skies of the various maps in the game. Otherwise, it will be replaced with a brilliant flat white. From what I can tell, if you turn this option off when playing with your browser, the skybox is replaced with a flat grey instead. I don't think the skybox contributes very much to lag because it's a simple box that surrounds the map with textures, but if your graphics card isn't very good and you need every reduction of lag you can, consider turning it on. Do note that the white sky is obscenely bright and quite taxing on your eyes, and it can be a disadvantage on night maps because the contrast is so great that you won't be able to spot hidden enemies as easily. Automatic graphics quality: If you don't feel like adjusting your own settings, you can let the game pick for you. It will select settings that it thinks are appropriate for your computer, but unfortunately it doesn't list what it picks. In any case, it seems to do a pretty good job, but don't expect to have perfect performance on graphically intensive maps. Dynamic shadows: This allows map objects and tanks to cast a shadow. Even turrets will cast a visible shadow with this enabled. Of course, this means that it's taxing on your graphics card. Dynamic lighting: This is also very demanding of graphics card. With this enabled, turret effects such as muzzle flash and impacts, in addition to destruction explosions, will generate light. Drop boxes will also glow with this enabled. It's definitely pretty, but I can't enable this without having FPS issues. Soft particles: These smooth out the interaction between turret effects/tanks and the environment by smoothing out intersecting edges. For example, if I shoot the corner of a wall, the edges of the explosion that contact the building will be smoothed out. If I drive a tank over bushes, the edges of the tank against the bushes will be smoothed out. This contributes to FPS lag, but maybe not quite as much as the above two options. Adaptive FPS: According to the wiki, this setting "allows you to avoid 'controls delay' (some people get delay after pressing a tank control button, for example, by pressing 'Up', it takes some seconds till the tank reacts and moves forward) Do not use it unless it is necessary." In practice, it tends to lower your FPS, so don't use it unless you have control delay issues and find that it helps overall. Mip-mapping: This allows the game to almost seamlessly substitute textures of varying detail depending on how close you are to the object in question. Overall, this means that objects seen from a distance will be less detailed and more out of focus than those close to you, which looks smooth and fairly nice. There's not much downside to using it if your computer can handle it, but targets at a distance will be harder to spot. This contributes to lag, to a lesser degree than dynamic lighting but still significant. Deep shadows: Deeply impressive, but probably the laggiest option here. The wiki says that it "adds volume to the picture, underlining the unevenness of the relief, corners between walls and any surface drops." Fog: Adds a layer of bluish fog to the map that increases with distance. It looks nice and adds a sense of depth, but it can obstruct your view of camouflaged targets. Antialiasing: Smooths the edges between rendered objects in a similar manner to Soft particles, but basically for everything, no physical intersection required. It makes everything look smoother, but you know the drill. Account If you've linked your account to an email (you should), you will see the above. In this case, the only button you see regarding email there will cause the Tanki system to send you an email allowing you to change your password and email. This means that even if a hacker gets into your account, they can't change your password or email address unless they find and hack your email as well. If you're a scrub and haven't linked your account, you will see the below screen. And no, I'm not a scrub. This is from an account I made while the test server was open. Fairly self explanatory. The other option available in both cases is the ability to link your account to Facebook for added security. You'll also be able to log in using Facebook. I don't use it myself, but if you do, then it's an option. Let's head to the last panel, which contains most of the fun stuff. Controls Some of the old settings have been moved here, but most of them are new. Let's cover the ones in the top half. Mouse controls: This allows you to control your tank's aiming and shooting with your mouse, instead of relying on the keyboard. Normally, I'd be on board with something like this, but personally I find that Tanki doesn't really suit mouse controls since there is a difference between the speed at which you can look and the speed at which your turret rotation can keep up. There's also no crosshair (something that you can find in Tanki X), which furthers the problem. Use whatever you prefer; I've been using keyboard controls since the beginning and find that they are the most reliable, but you can do some fun tricks with the ability to look around without turning your turret with right click, such as hiding your laser sight while sniping with Shaft and seeing what's behind you while you're backpedaling. I've heard that they're good with Striker too. Mouse look sensitivity: This slider controls how much your view moves when you move your mouse, similar to other games. Note that this doesn't affect your turret rotation speed. From playing around with it, high sensitivity seems to be preferable to low sensitivity, but whatever floats your boat is the best. Just don't push it all the way down (or to the left in this case); trying to play like that is literally torture. Mouse look vertical inversion: This controls how moving your mouse will affect the ability of mouse controls to adjust your camera angle. Normally, if you want to decrease your camera angle with mouse controls, you move your mouse away from you, and you can increase it by pushing your mouse towards you. This setting inverts it, which can be useful if you play other games with inverted settings or are naturally inclined to it. Mouse view vertical inversion for Shaft Sniping Mode: Shaft's sniping mode is similar to a traditional first person shooter, allowing you to aim on both axes. This inverts the aiming in a way similar to other FPS games: move your mouse down to shift your view up, and move your mouse up to shift your view down. Inverse turn controls while moving back: When driving backwards, pressing the Left button turns your tank towards the right and vice versa. This seems needlessly confusing to me, but if I remember correctly, actual cars behave this way. If you have driving experience and this seems more intuitive to you, do it. Otherwise, don't. Alright, now to the keyboard binds. You can now customize your controls in the settings instead of being forced to use the default left/right handed layouts. You can map almost any gameplay function to any key. Practically speaking, you'll want to keep most of these default, and some of them are non-negotiable, such as the Enter button to open chat. If you ever mess things up, there's a handy Restore default buttons feature. To rebind a key, first delete one of the default keys from the first or second column, or put your text cursor in the default blank column on the right. Then, simply press the key that you rebind it to. Don't type in the name of the key in cases like "Numpad5". Note that you need to activate NumLock if you want the game to recognize the numpad keys. Once you see your key of choice appear in the field, congratulations, you have rebinded a key. Woohoo. Remember that keys cannot perform two functions, so if you use a preexisting key as a target for rebinding, it will be removed from the location it was in previously. For example, if Zemult Sagittarii bounded Pause to the spacebar, spacebar will be removed from the Shoot field and he won't be able to attack...or even be useful, given that he'll be pausing every time he tries to shoot. fun fact: this is indistinguishable from his normal performance The possibilities for rebinds are endless, but the below two changes are the most useful. Keyboard ghosting: Keyboard ghosting is a perennial problem in gaming, and Tanki is no exception. The keyboard I use has ghosting issues with the arrow keys. I can't simultaneously hold down the Left and Up keys while holding down the spacebar, which made using Shaft very difficult. I worked around it by downloading a program called AutoHotKey and writing up a script to rebind part of my Numpad (which doesn't ghost) to the arrow keys for use as pseudo-arrow keys. This has worked just fine for me, but using the integrated controls manager is more convenient. If you want to use my solution without using external programs, turn your NumLock on and bind the movement keys to something similar to my setup. I'm still using an external script since I'm lazy and don't want to have to check if NumLock is on before I play Tanki, but the above is probably a better idea. Not dropping gold boxes by accident: Gold box supplies are super valuable. I think everyone knows that. Because of their scarcity, accidentally dropping a gold box can be infuriating, especially if you were reserving it for a Save the Gold event or a rank up party. The fact that they are by default bound to the 6 key, which is right next to the 5 key for mines, doesn't help. So, if you want add an extra layer of safety, try removing the default 6 key in the first column for the Gold Box supply and rebinding it to something like 8 or 0 instead. That's about it for this article. I hoped it helped you with understanding the new changes and refreshing your knowledge of the other settings. Do you have any tips for controls that I've missed here? Any comments or suggestions? Feel free to post them here. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.

What about -800 damage?

I and a lot of other players have experienced stuttering and low FPS post-update. Hopefully a fix will come soon.

I'm not too happy about the Smoky nerf, but at least the changes are minor. I guess there will be fewer downsides to using Assault Ammunition. Ricochet changes should be a net buff. The maximum damage range will be increased by an extra 10 meters or so, and having two extra rounds before running dry will come in handy. The auto-aim angles are now worse than Twins but still better than Smoky, and that shouldn't affect gameplay by too much. I'm looking forwards to seeing how the clan system goes. Hopefully the release goes smoothly and the full system can be implemented soon.