In the War Thunder Roadmap for Spring-Summer 2024, we promised to talk about new effects for damaging ground vehicle crews as well as healing them. We also mentioned that these changes will be based on player voting. We’ll being going through our proposals today and would like you to take the survey — let’s jump in!
Additional effects on vehicles when armor is penetrated
Most of us have experienced situations where penetrating lightly armored IFVs and APCs with large empty areas causes the shell and its fragments not to destroy or disable any crew or modules. This could also happen to tanks that are penetrated by shells with a narrow damage zone as well. When this happens, the shell and its fragments pass close to crew members and modules and sometimes even hits them, but is usually not enough to cause sufficient damage to stop the enemy from being able to fire back, at least for a short time. We understand that this can be frustrating for the player who fired the shot, as from their point of view they did everything right. The enemy vehicle was hit, perhaps even close to vital modules, but they were subsequently unlucky. We’re proposing three ways to solve this problem and plan to implement them in parallel. Let’s take a look at them.
The first way is to introduce a more detailed damage model to specific vehicles. There’ll be new types of modules, ranging from electronic modules for air defense vehicles, machine gun ammunition, electrical equipment, as well as detailing and correcting guidance modules such as the drives. This is labor intensive and painstaking work however, as it cannot be implemented for all ground vehicles in the game at once — each vehicle would require separate manual work. In particular as part of this task, we’re currently separating and detailing the elevation and traverse drives of the M1 and Leopard 2 series tanks with the addition of a hydraulic drive supply tank, where disabling this part will also disable the guidance drive.
The second way is to introduce new logic for damaging crew members and modules, which will reduce the likelihood of the situations we’ve described above, as hits will be effective even in these cases. Here’s how it’ll work. Any hit to a crew member causes a stun effect. When stunned, the camera will shake and sparks will be shown on your screen for a short period of time, about 1-2 seconds. Dealing damage to the gunner (or commander in vehicles with duplicate controls) causes a few seconds of concussion. It also causes the camera to shake, a ringing effect in your ears, and a temporary drift with a variable vector (a change in direction) is added to the gun aiming, which you’ll need to compensate for manually. In this case the initial aiming point when armor is penetrated moves away at the moment of receiving damage (taking into account the favor killer mechanics) to a random distance and direction within approximately 1/4 of the screen.
The third way is additional sources of fire in the fighting compartment, where damage to internal modules in this area may cause them to start an internal fire. Several things can burn and smolder inside a vehicle: crew clothing, wiring, machine gun ammo, plus rubbish and oil on the floor. In this case the fire can go out on its own, unlike an engine or fuel tank fire, and the damage it causes will be less than the damage caused by an engine or fuel fire.
