So this game has been out for what, 10 years? And I am wondering why the core mechanics are still completely broken. The game is supposed to “simulate” armour but does nothing of the sort. You can hit a light tank with a large calibre gun with over 12 megajoules of energy and not even pen (I have non-penned light tanks with the jagdtiger before). Any sort of armour that isn’t a completely flat plate completely screws up the penetration, and even then sometimes. If your shell just scrapes the side of the barrel, instead of ricocheting into the turret, most of the time it just completely disappears. If you shoot the 5mm horizontal armour in between the hull roof and the turret, or the overhang over the tracks, instead of the shell deflecting into the side armour, the game just thinks you have hit 1000mm thick armour and does nothing. If you hit overlapping plates, instead of high-energy shells deflecting into the weaker armour like it absolutely would in real life, it just doubles the armour so you have situations where you mouse over a turret with a pen indicator and it’s constantly flashing green and red like an off-colour police siren despite there being no visual difference on the turret face. And this is not even talking about the horrors of solid shot, APDS, HEAT and all the other nonsense rounds.
Not only does this “realistic” game not simulate the nuances of armour, like overmatching, plates cracking, different hardnesses of steel having different protection, spalling and brittleness profiles, it does not even get the basic mechanics of shells penetrating through homogeneous steel right.
Not in game as it would due to balance reasons. Would make anything with an auto cannon broken.
It seems you are expecting war thunder to do a whole 1:1 simulation of a round impacting armor. Would be interesting but the technology just isnt there yet for it to be used on such a massive scale.
Yeah, I wonder why Abrams players call for depleted uranium armor, when T-34 drivers hatch as armor pack would be much more effective:)
Jokes aside, I very much agree, that shots, which would split the tank in two, but doesn’t do anything, can be very frustrating.
What is also frustrating, is a lack of information, whether it is being worked on or not. No mention in patch notes or in roadmap. I hope and I assume they do work on it, but it doesn’t feel like it.
Personally, I would like to see some mechanic implemented for optics damage, I don’t think it currently affects drivers nor commanders view, but we have seen countless optics destroyed in our matches, that don’t matter, yet it very much would in real life.
Forget it, they will never solve it, since the Br depend on this horrible damage model, and they are too lazy to rebalance the tanks, even though it would be a change that would mostly solve the issue of 1944 tanks vs 1960 tanks.
There are well documented differences in the hardness and steel quality between WW2 German, US and Soviet tanks. None of this is implemented. All “rolled homogeneous armour” is the same.
I don’t care about a 1:1 simulation. I just want guns to be consistent so I stop dying due to RNG-like mechanics.
They wouldn’t be. And if they were? Just rebalance them. They have already stopped most SPAAs being able to break barrels instantly like they ought to be able to. Situations where you shoot a Pershing’s turret mantlet 5 times in a row with the long 88 and kill one crew member shouldn’t happen. Armour that is penned or almost penned should suffer degradation. Large-calibre guns should be more consistent in relation to their reload time.
Interesting that it was fixed before I started playing the game yet I’m still having trouble with it.
Ok it seems like beating the dead horse, but I will follow up with some examples, just to feed a conversation a bit.
It seems like modules often absorb the whole shot.
Like when you shoot thin mantlet with big gun, where coax machine gun sits and it just destroys the machine gun instead of going through, taking machine gun with it and exiting at the back of the turret. In real life, those are considered weakspots, but in game, its often the opposite, due to how modules interact with shells.
Although I suspect that sometimes its probably not the simulation model and its just damage recap window instead, that make it look weird…
Different steel hardnesses are only represented in a very limited fashion, and not particularly accurately. High hardness armor is just slightly stronger than RHA, when as far as I know it very well could be weaker depending on the type of round, thickness and angle.
Projectile overmatching is in game though. Larger caliber AP projectiles end up having lower slope effects against angled armor.
Yeah, ricochets are another chapter.
It often seems like shots that are only mildly redirected, seem to lose majority of its energy.
(although in this case, I doubt the dart would ricocheted at all)
Or sometimes shell is redirected almost 90°, yet it still manages to penetrate a lot of armor afterwards.
I guess a quality of network connection also plays a big part in cases like this, so it lands differently, than how one would expect it.
Okay. All cannon spaa to 10.0 because they can drill through all armor within seconds
You can only do so much to have good simulations while having it still be quick enough for a real time shooter.
I thought they gave the ww2 german tanks a nerf due to low quality armor. Maybe they removed it. I am not sure many people would be happy with nerfing all of the late war german tanks
This is the key to the disaster of the game, only with APHE bullets do you have the possibility of fighting properly, as soon as you use another type of bullet you depend on what the game decides, and if the game is decided that you do nothing, now You can do whatever you want, you won’t do anything. It even happens to the APHE in the form of absurd ricochets or that the bullet pierces but does not explode, causing ridiculous damage, but it is clear that it is light years away in effectiveness from all the other bullets.
The wonder of making a completely unbalanced game, how good gaijin’s devs are haha.
I do think mechanics like ricochet should absolutely be reworked, as there is stuff that outright isn’t mentioned in-game, and some of the ricochet angles are just nonsensical.
For example, a 75 mm APCBC round is simply incapable of ricocheting when hitting a 45 mm plate at 60°, because ricochet chances do go down as projectile caliber increases over the armor plate thickness, even though the game says it has a 0% chance to ricochet up to 48°, and 50% at 63°, so it would be expected that at 60° the ricochet chance would be somewhere in the 20%.
Additionally, stuff like uncapped rounds having increased ricochet chances just does not make much sense, specially in the case of American uncapped rounds, mostly APBC. These rounds explicitly performed better against angled armor, and it makes no sense for them to actually have worse performance than the equivalent APCBC rounds.