Gaijin Entertainment pushes the boundaries with the new 1.71 update to War Thunder, adding in Explosive Reactive Armour.

If you don’t want to watch the video, which does a very good and basic job of explaining E.R.A and Composite armour, the nutshell is “using explosions to disrupt HEAT shells” but soon enough you can test it yourself.

Adding in the new Tier 6 ground rank with tanks from the depths of the Cold War, we push the dates even further and add in new ways of dealing with enemies, along with autoloaders and the new armour packages. Though there are some new vehicles in lower tiers as well, along with new planes and upgraded models of some existing planes that have been in for years.

The biggest non-vehicle change has to come from the updated Battle Tasks system which no longer has a time limit, but does depend still upon participation to upgrade the store and get new and exciting items.

Two new maps have been added, the Japanese themed Emperor’s Garden and the Fulda Gap which is modelled after a quiet area in Germany where the Cold War could have gone hot. So, without making this a mile long post, to see the new vehicles and also all the back end fixes, head on over to the dev blog and get some reading done while you wait for the servers to come back up