Armor, Penetration, and How This Changes All Vehicles

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.

• Adjusted3-7Light 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