In the last episode of Developer Diaries, we talked about different types of ammunition
and how they interact with the armor in our game.
Today, we will look at how different armor types and protection systems work in Armored
Warfare.
Armor in Armored Warfare is all about protecting your vehicle and taking as little damage as
possible from the threats that are out there.
One of the things we wanted to represent is that armor has gotten very advanced over the
time that armored vehicles have been in use.
So, while it originally started out as just thick steel plate, it has since evolved into
many different types of technology, including multiple layers of armor, often referred to
as composite armor; different types of compositions of the material itself, to give greater defense
against ever evolving types of ammunition; there's also different layers of armor now,
where they've discovered that adding these different layers actually helped diffuse the
penetration of the shells coming its way.
So armor is all about the defense of the vehicle, and protecting the crew and the technology
inside that vehicle to keep it operational in the match.
Generally armor is all about deflecting the shot, so, it's a situation where if the shot
gets through the armor, then it's not going to typically be able to reduce the damage
that shot does, that the projectile can do to it.
But, if it's able to deflect that projectile, then it'll keep the vehicle from taking any
damage at all, keeping the crew inside safe, keeping the engine safe.
So it's really sort of an all or nothing situation in most cases with armor.
So, in Armored Warfare, only hits to the main body of the vehicle, which is the hull and
the turret, will actually cause a reduction in the vehicle's hit points.
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.
So in addition to that, the angle of the armor plays a major role in how effectively thick
it's going to be against any certain type of projectile.
So what that means is that a player who understands the particular configuration of their vehicle,
can use that armor and angle it appropriately to be able to stop damage or deflect it entirely.
Effective armor thickness means the combination of the armor, the thickness of the armor (the
nominal thickness, meaning the distance from point to point), the armor composition, so
what the armor is made of, and how the armor is angled, so once the armor is angled past
a certain slope, the idea is that the line of sight distance between point to point will
increase, and so the effective thickness is a combination of all of those.
One of the interesting things about modern armor is that it has evolved to a point where
it has very different effects depending on what type of ammunition is fired against it,
and we wanted to represent that in the game.
So we have implemented this system where the designers are able to identify what the different
materials are in compositions of vehicle's armor itself, and then they can assign different
coefficients to how effective that type of armor is against different types of ammunition.
So the armor composition values are used to simulate the different compositions of armor
(of modern vehicle armor), there's a lot of different varieties of modern armor, there's
things like composite armor, there's aluminum, there's different kinds of steel.
So the idea with these multipliers was to allow us to more accurately simulate the way
that specific ammunition will interact with specific types of armor.
For example, certain types of composite armor are going to be more effective at reducing
the penetration of a shaped charge than they will a kinetic penetrator.
By having these multipliers it allows us to more accurately model the strengths and weakness
of specific vehicles that have very specific types of armor.
So spaced armor is all about adding layers to armor.
Depending on the different types of ammunition being fired at it, spaced armor can have different
levels of effectiveness.
Even against any types of ammo, it's at least going to have some type of impact.
The idea is that the more layers you have that the shell has to get through, the more
unlikely it is to penetrate them all.
There's a few different types of protections, and players will be able to add them to vehicles
as they upgrade them over time.
For example, players can add cage armor to many of their vehicles: cage armor is very
effective at mitigating the chance of high explosive shells getting through, and also
shaped charges.
Cage armor is able to interfere with the fuse of the detonator on those types of projectiles,
and has a pretty good chance of actually making them ineffective completely when they hit.
Applique armor is actually the simplest of all the armor types that are available as
upgrade packages on the vehicles.
Applique just simply adds some additional thickness to the existing armor, although
it does have one additional benefit, which is that it does cause a second penetration
check, so in our hit resolution formula, there's a check each time a penetrator or the stream
from a shaped charge hits a different layer of armor, and so by having two layers of armor,
you're doing two penetration checks, so even though the sum of the armor from both the
applique armor and the base armor may be a certain thickness, having to do two checks
may actually make it fail, whereas it would have succeeded if it were just a single check.
That's one small advantage of it, and that's sort of to simulate what happens in real life
with this kind of applique armor, where it'll sometimes deform or destroy a projectile when
it hits the second layer of armor.
Explosive Reactive Armor does still add some of the additional benefit of a little bit
of thickness to the armor just like spaced armor or applique armor does, but it's specifically
made to defeat shaped charges.
The way that we're treating that is that any shaped charge which hits ERA armor will have
a pretty high chance of just being completely destroyed by the ERA.
In some cases, such as older ERA, and newer modern ammunition, there is still a chance
that it's going to make it through, but even then, there's still the base armor thickness
that still has to be penetrated after hitting the ERA.
In addition to that, ERA is detonated each time that it's hit, so once the ERA on a vehicle
is hit once during a match, it will no longer provide protection on that part of the vehicle.
Another shaped charge that hits the same location won't get any of the benefits that were provided
in the previous hit.
Smoke Grenades in Armored Warfare will provide instantaneous cover to anybody who's able
to shoot them off in time before they get hit by an enemy.
Now, the idea is that they're directional, so if there's a player in front of you, and
you pop those smoke grenades off, you're going to actually be able to completely disappear
from them immediately, and you'll be gone; they can't see you, and you can maneuver or
do whatever you need to do to get to cover.
They last about ten seconds, that's still something that we're kind of working with.
Now, if there's somebody who's off to the side of you, and can still see you, even though
the smoke grenades are firing off in front, then they're not going to do much for you.
They are situational, but they'll be extremely useful in getting out of bad situations.
So, Hard Kill Active Protection System is something that fires at an incoming Anti-Tank
Guided Missile, and just shoots it out of the sky so that it never hits you.
A Soft Kill system, which we don't actually have implemented at this time, but we are
planning to implement in the future, uses electrical countermeasures to interfere with
the guidance system of an Anti-Tank Guided Missile to throw it off course or prevent
someone from being able to target it properly.
The difference between active and passive protection systems is the active ones actually
fire into the incoming projectile and detonate it early before it gets to the tank.
The passive ones interfere with the guidance of the incoming missile, so that it's less
likely to hit.
Armored Warfare focuses on a lot of the modern vehicles, modern ammunition, modern armor,
and I think that one of the things that makes this game really interesting is that we've
gone to lengths to try to get all of these new mechanics into the game in interesting
and unique ways.
A lot of this stuff really changes the core gameplay: things like Explosive Reactive Armor,
Smoke Grenades; they add a dynamic element that makes it much more interesting for players
when they're actually in combat trying to figure out how to utilize these different
elements.
So I think that, that, along with the awesome modern vehicles, I mean, things like the M1A1
and the T-90 are great examples of some of our top tier vehicles, that are really awesome
and unique vehicles to play.
We hope that this two part video make the basics of penetration and defense clear to
you and we will be looking forward to seeing you on the battlefields of Armored Warfare!