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.

Healing of wounded ground crew members

Due to numerous requests, we’re also considering the possibility of introducing healing for injured ground crew members. How do crew injuries currently affect gameplay? When calculating the repair time, active crew members that have been skilled are taken into account (knocked out crew are considered not skilled). The percentage of remaining health is linearly converted into a repair time multiplier in the range from 0.5 to 1. The average value is calculated for the entire crew in the vehicle.

For calculating reload time, only loaders are used. In their case, the percentage of health is converted into a reload time multiplier from 1 to 1.25. A loader who has taken maximum possible damage but is still conscious has a reload penalty with a parameter value of x1.25 from the normal reload time. If they’re knocked out, the penalty increases to 2x. If there’s several loaders, the average value for all of them is calculated. For conscious crew members, skilled crews are taken into account.

We want to go with the simplest and easiest-to-use implementation for the healing of wounded ground crew members: the automatic healing of the crew. If the crew does not receive any damage within a given time, their health is restored to the minimum level required to remove most of the penalty for the crew to perform their duties. If any damage is received during the healing process, it stops and the countdown to the start of the healing process starts from the beginning.

Take the survey!

We’ve created a survey with a few yes or no questions that you can take. Be sure to complete it and submit it to us!

TAKE THE SURVEY