With the next main branch patch (currently available on the tester's branch), major changes to how armor, penetration, and vehicle damage is handled are being implemented.
A lot of this has been a long time coming, and building out and balancing the training missions was the final straw that broke the camel's back for this. The way vehicles act when fighting each other should be as easy to intuit as possible. Various quirks in the ways that vehicles were balanced, and the mechanics they used, were getting in the way of that, and producing unexpected results.
Armor
Broadly speaking, the effect of armor has been dramatically increased. What was once a scale of 0-2, is now a scale of 0-10. It can go even higher if necessary, but all vehicles you'll find will operate on this 0-10 scale. To give some reference points:
- 0: Completely unarmored. Applies to all aircraft. Currently no vehicles fall under this categorization, but things like convoy trucks and SAM sites will occupy this category. Unarmored vehicles take full and unmitigated HE damage and AP shots never ricochet off. Explosions of any kind are extremely deadly to anything unarmored.
- 1-2: Lightly armored. All APCs fall under this. The armor serves mainly to provide some light protection against pure HE damage. All bullet based weapons will still penetrate 1 armor, though a 2 armor APC will provide some light protection against machineguns.
- 3-7: Light Armor (e.g. ZSU-57-2) Medium tanks. Aircraft cannons are only moderately effective, requiring AP to have a chance to damage, but it can still be done in a pinch if you have gun ammo to spare. Explosive damage is reduced. Cluster bombs or ATGMs are recommended. Most tank have a decent chance to penetrate medium tanks.
- 8-10: Heavy tanks. No aircraft gun can penetrate these tanks, requiring cluster bombs or ATGMs to destroy. Medium tank cannons will have some difficulty with this, about 50% penetration rate.
Damage and Penetration
The way damage is dealt has been retooled. Impact damage is now treated as AP (Armor Piercing) damage while splash damage is now treated as HE (High Explosive) damage. These two damage types interact with armor in different ways.
Armor Piercing
Armor piercing damage is binary. It either does full damage, or it does zero damage and the shot ricochets. If the penetration equals the armor value, then there is a 75% chance to penetrate, with the penetration reaching 100% if the difference between penetration and armor is 5 or higher. If the penetration is less than the armor, then it scales down to 0% penetration when the difference is 5 or higher.
Basically, the more penetration a shot has versus the armor, the greater the chance of it penetrating instead of ricocheting.
High Explosive
High explosive damage is simpler. If the explosion has a penetration value that is equal to or greater than the armor then it does 100% damage. This is mostly important against unarmored targets such as aircraft and trucks, which take the full damage from an explosion.
When an explosion encounters armor it uses a multiplier calculated from the difference between the armor and penetration. The most important thing to know is that tanks are very resistant to explosive damage, trucks are totally unprotected, and most APCs are lightly protected. Some example numbers:
- 0: 100%
- 1: 80%
- 2: 40%
- 5: 16%
- 9: 8%
Ricochets
Ricochets have been something I've been wanting to add to the game for a long time. When vehicles get hit by an armor piercing round that doesn't penetrate, it instead ricochets off the vehicle.
Many new visual effects have been added to the game for ricocheting cannon rounds, to make the difference a little clearer. Ricochets have a lot of sparks, and a smaller flash/explosion and smoke.
This also applies to the terrain. Bullets that hit the ground at a shallow angle will ricochet off the ground in a cool looking shower of bullets. HE rounds require a shallower angle to hit the ground to ricochet, and the likelihood of a ricochet happening on terrain depends on the material that it hits.
Vehicles Rebalanced
Finally, the vehicles have all seen big changes to their weapons, armor, and HP values. Rather than just describing how vehicles have been adjusted, I think it's easier to explain the motivations behind this and what the rebalance is meant to address:
- Vehicles were too similar to each other when it came to how the player treats them. I.e. you don't really think of a tank as any different from an APC or AAA.
- It's difficult to add new weapons with their own meaningful pros/cons when vehicles were so squishy that it didn't matter what you used against them.
- Vehicles were balanced on a different scale than the aircraft, leading to weird incongruities between how ground and air weapons worked.
- Tanks should be a much bigger threat to ground vehicles than they currently are. In certain situations, the player should feel like they have to intervene in order to save certain ground units to complete an objective.
- There's a queue of vehicles to be added, and it's difficult to differentiate vehicles when there was no granularity to the armor system, and so little variance in HP.
- The next map is going to be much larger, and the density of vehicles over an area will be going down. I wanted to make individual vehicle encounters more meaningful to compensate.
The new values, shown above, are all in response to these reasons.
The role of tanks on the battlefield, which is to smash APCs and other tank platoons, is now greatly emphasized, and from the player will require special consideration. In particular, I wanted a T-80 or M1 to be a big deal, and units you either want to support to allow them to do their work, or take out ASAP before they clean up a front line.
This also means tanks, in particular the top tier heavy hitters, will be much less common overall, and new vehicles, mostly softer targets, will be introduced to fill out the vehicle roster.
The rescaling of weapons to the new vehicle armor and HP values fixes a long-standing oddity with the game, where tank cannons and machineguns would barely scratch aircraft. Since they were designed to hit the relatively weak vehicles, they did very little damage in order to prevent vehicles from killing each other too quickly. While machineguns still aren't too dangerous (mostly due to their lower rate of fire and worse accuracy), a tank cannon hitting a plane will be an event.
Damage and Penetration Tester
One last thing! When developing the new damage and penetration mechanics, I made this little test program so I could quickly experiment with values and get an idea of how vehicles would perform against each other. The damage/penetration simulator can be download here.