Something War Thunder does to this effect is to tuck vehicles belonging to countries that don't have their own tech trees into the trees of countries they were allied with. For instance, the French Dewoitine D.520 fighter (ca. 1940) is a premium aircraft in the British tech tree, and the German tech tree contains a number of Italian fighters, such as the MC 202 Folgore. Meanwhile, over in World of Tanks, British tanks first made their appearance as Lend-Lease premiums in the Soviet tech tree, long before the UK had one of its own.

As such, a case could be made that there's both industry precedent and Wargaming precedent for including Italian ships like Littorio and Libeccio in the German tree in World of Warships, and the Dutch (for example) with the British. (It'd be a coin toss where to put the French Navy. I'd put them with Germany, since Fleet Admiral Darlan was such a prominent Vichy collaborator, but I suspect that would rustle more than a few French jimmies. :)

As a tangential aside to this, I've seen a fair amount of bitching from people who a) don't understand that there is no actual difference between open beta and release for a free-to-play online game and b) insist that World of Warships was "not ready" to be released because it only has full tech trees for the USN and IJN. Some of this might be hangover from the disappointment surrounding World of Warplanes, which rather hilariously dropped without the RAF in it, but... well, I can understand why they did it. Apart from its submarine forces (and submarines aren't in the game), the Kriegsmarine's actual contribution to WWII was negligible - the sinkings of the Bismarck, Tirpitz, and Graf Spee were extremely high-profile, but strategically they were just not that significant. The Soviet Navy was even less of a factor, except in coastal waters, and despite all those islands on the maps, World of Warships is pretty obviously not about littoral combat. :)

The only one of the three "omitted" tech trees I've seen most of the kvetching about that I think really could make a case for earlier inclusion is the Royal Navy, and I expect them to get more love as the game's lifetime goes on. But the simple fact of the matter is that when most laypeople think of warships in World War II, the first thing they think of is the US vs. Japan in the Pacific, and if development resource constraints meant that only two fully fleshed tech trees could be in place by the time the game had to go live, well... it had to be those two. Otherwise it would have been as ridiculous as World of Warplanes dropping with only the Luftwaffe and the Red Air Force - because let's face it, Soviet airpower wasn't what won the Eastern Front.

But, hey, Belarussian company. We're just lucky they only put four Soviet premiums in World of Warships before beta ended. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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