Vehicles are complex machines and with the release of the ‘Deploy! Drive! Destroy!’-update all vehicles in Heroes & Generals have been fitted with a completely new armor and damage system that do them justice.
Systems that builds upon the complexity of the many different vehicle designs in the game resulting in a deeper and richer experience but still maintaining ease and fun of gameplay.
Let us dive into a few details about the new armor and damage system.
ARMOR GROUPS FOR EVERYONE
Every vehicle model now has its own set of external armor protecting its components. The armor values are based upon real life properties, something our community has helped us a lot to research
From a practical point of view we have sorted the armor of vehicles into different groups such as front, back, sides, top, turret, mantlet and bottom. And a few variations such as the skirts on a Panzer IV.
An armor group can be made up of several pieces of armor each with their own individual thickness. Such as the hatch of a tank being less thick than the armor that surrounds it, but still part of the same group.
In practicality this means that if you aim at the hatch on a tank, and not the surrounding armor, your shot will have a much higher chance of penetrating the armor and do some serious damage to the tanks components..
And as a tanker you need to keep an eye on the damage your armor has taken making sure to position yourself to your advantage when picking a fight with an enemy.
Planes in Heroes & Generals work a little bit different in that they do not, from game mechanic point of view, have any external armor. Instead planes are made up of their components like wings and rudder which then has armor values.
PUTTING A DENT IN THE ARMOR
Before you can destroy a vehicle in Heroes & Generals, you need your weapon to punch a hole through its armor. Whether or not you succeed in doing so relies upon a number of factors such as choice of weapon, how far away you fire from, angle of impact, where the shot hits and more.
Should your attack manage to penetrate the armor of a vehicle, checks are then make to see if you hit components like the fuel tank, engine, gun ammunition, if you penetrate their armor and in the end how much damage you inflicting upon the vehicle.
One of the effects of the new armor system is that even if your attack does not penetrate armor, you will still wear it down to a certain extent effectively decreasing the thickness of the armor making it easier to penetrate if hit hard enough. In theory even the small weapons in the game could wear down vehicle armor, but using a pistol to do so would require a lot of patience.
Above you can see a wireframe rendition of the the armor (yellow) and components (red) of a Jumbo Sherman.
A VEHICLE IS MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
Heroes & Generals’ new damage system use the notion of vehicle components such as engine, wheels, transmission, ammunition, gun turret, wing, rudder and so on. Depending on the vehicle.
When you successfully hit a component you cause damage to the vehicle, but you also do damage to the component itself thereby affecting the vehicle’s performance in one way or another.
So for example destroying one of the tracks on a tank will make it harder to drive, taking out the engine on a vehicle will reduce speed, and putting enough bullets in the wing of a plane will make it fly like a brick.
In this way the new damage system add a lot more depth to the gameplay and opens up new tactics. For example you might not need a weapon that is strong enough to blow up a heavy tank – simply destroying the tracks hindering its progress on the battlefield could make all the difference.
IT REQUIRES SKILLS TO TAKE DOWN A TANK
For a vehicle to be destroyed in Heroes & Generals it has to accumulate more damage than it is able to endure. That amount of damage is tied directly to the vehicle’s armor and components making for example a heavy tank more resilient than a motorbike..
Basically all attacks on a vehicle damages the vehicle, However, the new damage system implemented in the ‘Deploy! Drive! Destroy!’-update means that some attacks are much more effective than others. A bullet hitting an engine will cause less overall damage than a bullet hitting the ammunition.
This also means that you can’t just aimlessly slap a couple of grenades on a tank and expect it to go boom. You need to damage a vehicle in just the right way if you want it to go down fast – that takes knowledge of its weak spots and skills, again leading to a deeper gameplay experience.
IT IS A WRECK
Wreckages are another small but cool change related to the implementation of the new armor and damage system in the Update 1.12.
When a vehicle is blown to bits a wreckage now remains behind. You can use this wreckage as cover for a short while. But keep an eye on the flames. When they start to grow the wreckage is about to disappear from the battlefield.
This way a wreckage can provide the short term cover you might need to escape the enemy’s barrage of bullets, but can’t be used to block off important roads or access points.
You can watch the Update Highlight on Armor & Damage below:
https://youtu.be/80vT4aMa4Yk