Step 4 of 7 The seven-step path · Crest Space
The tutorial and your first hour
In most genres the tutorial is a formality you can skip without cost. In this one it is where several mechanics are explained that the interface never mentions again, which is why so many first sessions go badly for players who click past it.
The short version
Finish the tutorial before your first real match. Learn your control layout while nothing is shooting at you. Play the most assisted mode first. Pick one vehicle type and stay with it for the first few hours. Read the end-of-match screen instead of queueing straight back in.
Why the tutorial carries more weight here
A vehicle in one of these games has a lot of controls, and more importantly it has several systems that are invisible in the interface. Nothing on screen tells you that your shell loses penetrating power with distance, that your aircraft’s controls go heavy at speed, or that the angle a shot arrives at matters more than where it lands. These are the rules the game is actually running on, and the tutorial is usually the only place they are stated outright.
A player who skips it does eventually learn all of it, but by inference, over many lost matches, with no feedback explaining which of their assumptions was wrong. That is the difference between an unpleasant first evening and a reasonable one. The tutorial is also, for the title covered on this site, the final stage of getting set up — register, confirm the email address, install, launch the tutorial — so it is a natural place to stop and let the material settle rather than something standing between you and the game.
Sort out your controls first
Before anything else, open the control settings and look at them properly. This is dull and it pays for itself within the hour.
- Decide on your input device. Mouse and keyboard is the default and is entirely viable for every mode short of full simulator play. A joystick or a gamepad is a preference, not a requirement, and buying hardware before you know whether you like the genre is a poor order of operations.
- Find the handful of controls you will use constantly — throttle or accelerator, the primary and secondary weapons, the view control, and whatever the game uses for zoomed aiming. Everything else can wait.
- Move anything awkward to a key you can reach without looking. A control you have to hunt for is a control you will not use under pressure.
- Turn on any assistance the mode offers for now. Instructor modes, aim assistance and stabilisation exist so that you can learn the shape of the game before you learn its fine control. Switching them off later is easy; recovering from a discouraging first session is harder.
- Set your graphics to something comfortably steady based on what you worked out in step two, and leave it there for now.
What the tutorial usually covers
Tutorials differ by title, but in this genre they tend to work through the same ground. Knowing what to expect makes it easier to notice the parts worth paying attention to.
| What it teaches | Why it matters in a real match |
|---|---|
| Basic movement | Establishes how much momentum your vehicle carries. This is the thing least like other games and the first to catch people out. |
| Aiming and firing | Introduces travel time and the need to lead a moving target. Shells are not instantaneous and the interface does not compensate for you in less-assisted modes. |
| Damage and weak points | Explains that vehicles are not health bars — a hit destroys, disables or does nothing depending on where and how it lands. |
| Objectives | Shows what actually wins a match, which is rarely the same as accumulating kills. |
| The interface | Points at the indicators you will otherwise ignore for a fortnight: range, ammunition selection, damage state, team status. |
Your first few matches
Once the tutorial is done, the temptation is to queue straight into whatever the game puts in front of you. A slightly more structured first hour returns much more.
Stay in the most assisted mode. The point of the first few matches is to learn the maps and to recognise vehicles on sight. Neither is helped by the long dead time that comes with a one-life mode, and both transfer directly when you move on.
Play one vehicle type. The overlap between flying an aircraft and commanding a tank is almost nil. Learning both at once means being a beginner twice, simultaneously. Step five is about choosing which one to start with.
Stay near your team. Not as a tactic, but as a way of seeing what experienced players do. Most of what you need to learn about positioning is observable if you are in a position to observe it.
Expect to lose vehicles quickly at first, and treat each loss as information: what hit you, from where, and whether you could have seen it. The replay or kill-camera, where a title provides one, answers that question directly.
Reading the end-of-match screen
The results screen at the end of a match is where the progression system is explained, and most new players close it without reading. It generally shows what you earned toward researching your next vehicle, what you earned in the ordinary currency, and what was deducted — repairs, ammunition and consumables.
The deduction is the part worth understanding early. In many titles it is entirely possible to finish a match with a net loss, particularly in a higher-tier vehicle used poorly. That is not a fault in your play so much as a feature of the economy, and noticing it early explains a lot of the advice you will encounter later about not rushing up a tech tree.
What to watch out for
Rushing up the tech tree. Early vehicles are slower, simpler and far easier to understand. Advanced ones punish mistakes you have not yet learned to recognise, and they cost more to repair when they are lost.
Copying a build from a video without understanding it. Community guides go out of date quickly in this genre. If you do not know why a setup is recommended, you will not know when it stops being right.
Playing a long first session. The learning here is mostly pattern recognition, and it consolidates better across several shorter sessions than in one long one that ends in frustration.
Buying anything in the first hour. You are not yet in a position to judge what is worth money to you. Step six covers this properly.
If it is not clicking
Some people work through the tutorial, play a few matches and find the genre simply is not for them. That is a legitimate outcome and it is worth naming, because the alternative — grinding on in the hope that it improves — is how people end up resenting a game they could have set down.
The distinction worth drawing is between a bad fit and a bad start. A bad start looks like: stuttering performance, controls you never sorted out, or three matches against much more advanced opponents. Those are fixable, and the earlier pages of this guide address them. A bad fit looks like: understanding the systems perfectly well and finding them tedious. No amount of further reading changes that one.
Next
If it is clicking, the next decision is which of the genre’s three quite different games you want to learn first — air, ground or naval.