Sources
A site funded by affiliate commission has an obvious incentive to make the products sound bigger than they are. The only useful answer to that is to show where each number came from, so you can check it without taking our word for anything.
What we used
Every figure on this site was checked on 18 September 2026 against one of the sources below. Where two disagreed, we kept the more conservative number and said on the page that we had.
- Wikipedia: Enlisted — developer, publisher, release date, platforms, the AI squad mechanic and squad size range, Battle Rating I–V, and the absence of naval vessels.
- Wikipedia: War Thunder — developer, platforms, the three battle modes, and the era range including the note that only ships predate the First World War.
- War Thunder official wiki: matchmaking — Battle Rating mechanics.
- War Thunder official forum — the four-player squad limit and the eight-player squadron-event exception.
- Gaijin development blog, 31 May 2023 — the announcement that top Battle Rating ground Realistic Battles would hold more players, without a figure. This is the source for our saying we do not know that number.
- Enlisted player-count figures (10 v 10 standard, up to 25 a side in custom battles with AI off) come from the game's own community discussions rather than a developer publication. We flag them as the least firmly sourced numbers on the site.
How we rank sources
In order of preference: the developer's own documentation and development blog; the official game wikis; Wikipedia, for uncontroversial facts such as release dates and platforms; and the official forums, for mechanics the developer has not documented centrally. Community discussion is the weakest of these and we say so at the point of use.
We do not use AI-generated summaries, content farms, or other affiliate sites as sources. A figure that circulates only among affiliate sites is not evidence of anything except that it is easy to copy.
What we still cannot tell you
Collected from both guides, so you can see the gaps in one place:
- How long a match lasts in either game.
- How many players either game has.
- The player count in top Battle Rating War Thunder ground battles.
- Current naval-specific match sizes in War Thunder.
- What proportion of either game's content is free.
- Any cheating, detection or matchmaking-fairness rate.
- Which of the two games is better. There is no measurement for that, and a site paid per registration is the last place you should look for one.
Found something wrong?
Write to info@cresthub.online and quote the sentence. If we can check it against a primary source, we will, and the page will be updated with a new review date. If we cannot establish it either way, we take the claim out rather than leave it standing.