The entire history of armored warfare is marked by the struggle between offense and defense.
Tank developers were always trying to create vehicles that were as well protected as possible,
while building means with which to defeat the competition that was attempting to do
the same thing.
The first tanks were rather rudimentary - boses of iron and steel designed to fight enemy
infrantry rather than eachother, their guns firing simple explosive rounds or even solid
steel shots.
It was only two decades later, during the Spanish Civil War, when the importance of
‘tank versus tank’ combat was really demonstrated and the race to create the best weapon and
the best armor started in earnest.
Soon, new types of guns and ammunition were developed and the leviathans of old made way
for sleek war machines with sloped armor.
But at the end of the war, the armor was still mostly made of steel.
Even with the greatest conflict of human history over, the race never stopped and it continues
to this day.
Steel was replaced by aluminum and alloys and, soon after, composite armor was born
to defeat the latest types of shells and missiles.
We are going to find out exactly how this evolution is represented in Armored Warfare.
Armored Warfare features Armored Fighting Vehicles dating back to post-World War II,
up to the modern day vehicles, which you’ll see around the world today.
So it does feature vehicles from the Korean War era, the Cold War era, as well as more
recent conflicts that have happened in the last couple of decades.
One of the things that we really wanted to represent in Armored Warfare is the way that
technology has evolved in Armored Conflict.
So, there was this back and forth race to evolve ammunition that would be better at
penetrating different types of armor, and then armor evolved to defend against different
types of ammunition.
That back and forth has gone on, ever since Armored Fighting Vehicles were invented; and
then we want to reflect that in the game, so we have the different types of Ammunition
that have been invented represented, and available for the different vehicles you’ll be using.
So the three primary types of ammunition that are out there can be broken down into is:
Armor Penetrating Shells, or Kinetic Penetrators; Shaped Shells, also referred to quite often
as HEAT; and the High Explosive shells, which are often abbreviated as HE.
Each one of these different shells has a different strength and weakness, and we wanted to represent
that in-game.
So each one of these is going to be useful in a particular situation, and will be better
worth against different armor.
So, what ammunition a player chooses to use is going to be highly dependent on the situation.
Armor Penetrating Rounds, Kinetic Penetrators, these are basically just big metal arrows,
and the idea is that these things travel extremely quickly, and all their penetration potential
comes from the mass of the projectile and the velocity of the projectile.
So, for example, the Armor Piercing Shells have very high precision penetration factor
against almost all types of armor, but they’re not going to do the highest level of potential
damage.
HEAT shells on the other hand have very high penetration against most types of armor, but
there’s also way more countermeasures available against that type of shell, which we’ll
talk about further on.
Probably a good way to compare some of the broad categories of ammunition is if you think
about the high-precision sniper rifle round from the Barrett .50 Caliber: in that case
your shell is going to have a very high muzzle velocity, and it’s going to have very high,
precise precision at the point of impact.
That has the advantage of very short travel time, making it easier to hit a moving target,
and having very little that can defend against it, since it’s just a straight shot that
can penetrate.
High Explosive shells are really good at splash damage, dealing damage over a radius rather
than having to hit their targets directly.
But, they also suffer from the lowest armor penetration, so thick armor defense quite
well against High Explosive.
It’s the only type of ammo that can deal indirect hits to vehicles, so even if you
miss the target, the area of effect may be large enough to deal some damage, and it’s
also useful against targets that are very lightly armored.
If you can penetrate a target and get your ammunition inside their vehicle, it’ll create
an explosion inside their vehicle, and it deals devastating damage to the target.
00:04:26 – On the other hand you have probably something like a grenade launcher, which would
be a little bit like a High Explosive shell: you have slower travel time, you’re gonna
lob that shot over a distance, and then it’s going to explode at the point of impact.
So the disadvantage there is of course you have the slower shell velocities, it’s a
little bit harder to hit a moving target, but you have the advantage of that splash
at the end, at the point of impact, so it can actually hit at a wider radius something
that it didn’t quite hit directly.
So, shaped charge ammunition is a little bit different from AP: the idea is that the projectile
itself isn’t actually doing the penetration.
When it hits armor, or something on its path, it actually detonates, and creates a stream
of metal particles that it sends into the armor to do the penetration (in real life).
In Armored Warfare, the way that we simulate that is that the projectile doesn’t lose
any penetration potential with distance, so when it hits something, it has all of its
penetration potential.
So once it hits something, at that point, then, the stream is created, and we do a ray-trace
into the vehicle, and the further the distance that the stream has to travel to hit the base
armor, the more penetration potential it loses on the way.
So the idea is that, even though it doesn’t have as high a penetration potential as a
kinetic penetrator, it also has no loss of penetration at distance, and it’s very,
very damaging once it actually manages to get inside the vehicle.
So, compared to a normal AP round, the Shaped Charge rounds are going to deal a lot more
damage when they actually manage to penetrate.
In addition to that, most of the ATGMs that we have in the game, which are the guided
missiles, are using the Shaped Charge hit resolution model.
Anti-Tank Guided Missiles use a Shaped Charge, so they fall into the same category as High
Explosive Anti-Tank ammunition, at least typically.
The special thing with missiles is that you can manually guide them using your mouse,
so even after you’ve fired it, if your target is moving, or that sort of thing, you can
try to move your missile in order to follow the target, and hit them in a weak spot.
You can also do some trick shots with that, like trying to guide your missile around a
corner, or sending your missile up into the air and then back down to hit a very unarmored
part of the vehicle.
There are also things called Thermobaric Guided Missiles, which are very special rounds that
function like High Explosive rounds, you still guide them with your mouse, just like other
missiles, but they explode in an area of effect, similar to High Explosive rounds.
They require a little more skill than maybe that seems like, because they move a lot slower
than the regular projectiles do, so it takes a while for them to get to their target, and
they also are not going to be extremely maneuverable, so if an enemy vehicle manages to get into
cover or if they’re very quick, it’s going to be hard to hit them with that guided missile.
So that is a major disadvantage of using ATGMs: even though they are going to be extremely
powerful, you’re exposed the entire time that thing is in the air.
Now, you could try to drive and guide it at the same time, but I think that what most
players are going to find is that that’s almost impossible.
So in Armored Warfare, only hits to the main body of the vehicle, which is the hull and
the turret, will actually cause destruction in the vehicle’s hitpoints.
So, very thick armor can either deflect shells entirely, or in the case of explosions, can
reduce or almost completely mitigate the damage that you would take as a result of that hit.
As you can see, the commander of any vehicle in Armored Warfare has a fearsome arsenal
at his disposal, but there are ways to mitigate the impact of some shells with armor and additional
equipment.
We will talk about that in the next part of our Developer Diary.
Thank you for watching.
Stay tuned.