Hello everyone and welcome to our first developers update for Men of War: Assault Squad 2 – Cold War.
We have been collecting tons of feedback thanks to you and we are evaluating and discussing each of your wishes in our team. Our desire is to design this game the way you want it and for that we need as much constructive feedback from you as possible. Our team is listening to you and we already published two updates based on what you wanted us to change. In the next couple of weeks, we will continue to fine tune the gameplay and improve the game to move it further into a direction that our fans want it to have. We are also working on a more challenging AI that you face in singleplayer, as well as the responsiveness of your own troops.
New engine
As you probably know, this game runs on a new iteration of the Men of War: Assault Squad 2 engine. It supports 64-bit and has massive tweaks to its core to not only have better performance, but to allow a so far unseen boost in creativity of what content creators can do. The Cold War maps were so demanding on the old engine, that they would kill the fastest computers available for purchase with the view distance we have right now. The 32-bit engine would crash on loading or soon after, as big maps require too much data. Therefore, this platform is perfect for bigger ambitions and for any modder who wants to benefit from it, to make their dream creations come true. We have enabled Workshop, provided an updated map editor and plug-ins for 3d programs of the latest generation.
Armor system
Let’s explain in detail how the new armor system works. For that, let's first look into the magic behind the old armor system of AS2.
This is a line of what happens if a 50-57mm projectile hits a heavy tank in AS2. It gives the projectile a 20% chance to crush the hull on penetration. This is simply a rnd value that works like rolling a dice. Every time you penetrate a tank, it will roll a dice with 5 sides and only if one specific side is the result of the dice roll, the tank will break.
This can result in very strange situations, where a tank dies on the first shot, or after the tenth shot. It’s pure luck, no physics behind it. Statistically it would need several hundreds of tries to receive an average that reflects the 20%, as in every 5th shot kills the tank, otherwise it is pure coincidence. If you have a dice at hand, you can test it by throwing it for as long as you get a 6. This is how tank combat is decided in AS2.
In the old game, there were also hidden “healthbars” used for certain parts of vehicles and tanks, such as tracks. Cars in fact used healthbars, called "durability", as they would otherwise break on every rifle shot. However, this system was very poorly designed and almost impossible for us to balance properly. Even tank armor has some durability values, that makes it possible to penetrate a tank after multiple hits on the same part of the armor within a certain threshold.
The new damage system of Cold War gets rid of all this magic behind the scenes and uses full penetration physics (armor, shell penetration value, caliber, body angle etc.) and provides accurate results on what happens next. So instead of throwing a dice, the system detects if a shell penetrated the armor with all physics applied, then it will check the caliber size for base damage and adds additional damage based on the overmatching penetration. It makes a difference between a 50mm shell and a 120mm shell, it also makes a difference between penetrating an armor that has 100mm with 101mm or with 200mm. The more powerful a gun is, and the better hit you had on the enemy, the more damage you will do. Most importantly, if you do the same exact things, with the same physical interaction, you will have the same results. This system also allows use to control the fragility of certain vehicles to make them easier to destroy once penetrated.
This is perfect to balance tank combat and to create a competitive environment where it really matters where to hit a tank and it removes the crazy luck from the game, where you could hit a tank 3 times and do no damage, while the enemy shoots back, killing you on first shot. We want to reward smart gamers, who flank enemy tanks and even if they can’t destroy their enemy, they at least caused damage, if they landed a good shot. Before it was pure luck, whether a flanking maneuver succeeded or not. It was pure luck if your King Tiger exploded on the first hit, or after ten hits.
Admittedly, we have balanced the damage to be too weak on standard settings, when we were launching the game. It was a result of too long ranges that lead to penetrating almost every tank on any distance. We have fixed this and balanced it so that the average damage you do to a tank resembles the AS2 gameplay way more closely. Another huge benefit of the system is, that we can have the standard system for most players, but also allow realism buffs to have the “hardcore” setting, that is closer to reality and way more destructive for infantry combat, as well as for tank combat.
Therefore, if you are into the real deal, choose “hardcore” in game options and enjoy deadly tank and infantry combat. Make sure to try out the latest update!
