World of Tanks – Strongholds

Wargaming recently launched a new, free mode for their tank battleground game. It’s called Stronghold and is designed as a stepping stone to help small-to-medium clans take that next step into becoming serious contenders for eSports or the Global Map battles.

The Stronghold

If you’re a Clan Commander, you can create a stronghold through a new button in your normal interface . This gives you an overhead view of a base with four roads, or “zones” leading out of it. You can build two buildings per road and everything in the stronghold mode requires its own in-game currency, called Industrial Resource (IR).

Once a building has gathered enough resources, you can use them to provide a buff to your clan. Buffs come in range of flavours – you could choose an XP boost, extra resources from Strongholds skirmish battles or special objectives like doing x damage to another player in a random battle. However, only one buff can be active at a time so you need to decide what’s best for the clan.

Clan Battles

Of course, World of Tanks is all about the ground battles. Stronghold mode has three different types of battle: skirmishes, attacking a stronghold or defending your own stronghold. As a clan, you’re expected to rally the defences. Once you upgrade your command centre beyond to level 5 or above, you’re open to invasion by other clans for a fixed hour every day, as set by your clan commander. The commander can also choose one day of the week for Ceasefire, where no one can attack your base. Perhaps most of the clan wants to spend Wednesday evenings with their families. Strongholds are serious business but you’re allowed to have a life.

The clan can also take a single holiday of up to 14 days, during which no other clans can attack them. Once set, you can’t take another holiday for 90 days, so use it wisely.

There’s a clan calendar, so each member can see when the commander has scheduled attacks on other strongholds and when other clans are scheduled to fight against you. It’s all very civilised and declared in advance.

The stronghold battles themselves are maxed out at 15 players per side and are slightly different to normal fights. In these, the attacking clan declares which of your zones they wish to attack. As they advance, they will take out your outermost building and claim all its resources, before proceeding to the next and finally, the command centre itself. Obviously, your job is to stop them. If they destroy a building in the fight then your clan will need to get busy and earn the resources to build it back up. Each zone can only be attacked once during your allotted hour, so you have until the next day to sort things out.

Aside from the stronghold attacks, there are also three levels of skirmish battles. Any clan can enter Strongholds mode provided they can field a team of seven players for the Medium (i.e. lowest) division on stronghold skirmish. These are capped at tier 6 and the winning team can earn up to 100 IR. The Champion division is 8-10 players capped at tier 8 for up to 150 IR and the Absolute division is 12 – 15 players, up to tier 10 for 400 IR.

Earning Resources

Industrial Resource is earned through both skirmish and stronghold battles. From the menu, each clan member assigns themselves to a building in the stronghold. When they fight, the IR they earn in battle goes directly to that building. As clan commander, you’re can decide where you want resources to be earned, telling your team to assign themselves accordingly.

You don’t, however, have direct control over your team. If some maverick chooses to attach to a different building, there’s nothing you can do about it. Ultimately though, if your clan is aiming for the big leagues, you need to be able to manage your people. Wargaming are considering allowing clan commanders to change assignments at the request of players, but it’s not been decided. If need be, the commander can move IR between buildings, though this takes time.

Losing teams in Stronghold can still earn IR, though it’s not guaranteed. Should you get steamrolled, you’re unlikely to get anything. However, IR is assigned by damage done so if your team put up a good fight, they could earn themselves up to 20% of the total IR available per battle.

Stronghold looks like a useful meta-game to help clans pull together. It’s entirely free and out now for World of Tanks on PC.