Game Mechanics: Kinetic & HEAT Damage

One of the most often misunderstood game mechanics of Wargame: Airland Battle are the damage effects of kinetic and HEAT weapons. In this post I'll try to clear up the differences between the two, and provide the approximate formulas so you will be able to easily, and quickly do the calculations yourself, or at least know the general advantages of each type of weapon.

ATTRIBUTES

Before we begin lets go over some of the unit attributes we'll need to be able to calculate the damage.

KE/HEAT: This tells you which behavior the weapon follows, and thus which formula to use.

AP POWER: The armor piercing capability of the weapon.

ARMOR: The toughness of the front/side/back/top of the armor.

RANGE-GROUND: The max range of the weapon against ground targets.

STRENGTH: The amount of damage the vehicle has left before it will be destroyed. Stored as a floating point number (decimal), but displayed as a whole number.

KINETIC WEAPONS

Kinetic weapons, denoted in the game with the [KE] attribute, are the game's way of modeling kinetic energy penetrators. These weapons fire a long skinny rod of heavy metal that penetrates the enemy vehicle using kinetic energy which are related to the mass and velocity of the round fired. Once the rod penetrates the armor, the heat and pressure from penetration and small flakes of the metal called sprall are sprayed inside the vehicle destroying everything inside.

The formula for kinetic damage looks like this,

((AP POWER - ARMOR) / 2) + 1

The bad thing about kinetic weapons is that the AP POWER must exceed the targets ARMOR to do any damage at all. However the good part about kinetic weapons is that for every 175m closer to the enemy vehicle you are from the RANGE-GROUND (max range), the AP POWER goes up by one. So a kinetic weapon with an AP POWER of 15 at a max range of 2100m will have an AP POWER of 27 at 0m. This scaling of AP POWER combined with the scaling of chance to hit make kinetic weapons very powerful at closer ranges.

Lets go over some examples of a M1IP vs T72 at different ranges to illustrate this scaling. Note that chance to hit eventually scales to almost 100% at point blank range, but I won't be covering those mechanics in this post.

Here are the stats of the M1IP and T72 in the order of AP POWER/ARMOR/RANGE-GROUND. M1IP - 15/17/2100m
T72 - 13/11/1925m

Example #1 M1IP vs T72 @1925m:

At this range the M1IP has an AP of 16 instead of 15, because it is 175m closer than it's max range, while the T72 is at max range so nothing gets added to it's AP.

The damage done to the T72 by the M1IP would be ((16 - 11) / 2) + 1 = 3.5

The damage done to the M1IP by the T72 would be nothing because it's AP POWER of 13 at this range does not exceed the ARMOR of 17.

Example #2 M1IP vs T72 @ 350m:

At this range the M1IP has an AP of 25 instead of 15, and the T72 has an AP of 22 instead of 13.

The damage done to the T72 by the M1IP would be ((25 - 11) / 2) + 1 = 8

The damage done to the M1IP by the T72 would be ((22 - 17) / 2) + 1 = 3.5

So if you are the M1IP you want to keep the T72s at long distance where you have the advantage, and if you are the T72 you want to deploy smoke and get up really close to where you have a better chance. NOTE: The T72 has almost half the accuracy of the M1IP, so another reason it 's better to get up close is because chance to hit scales down to almost 100% at closer ranges.

HEAT WEAPONS

HEAT weapons, denoted in the game with the [HEAT] attribute, are the game's way of modeling high explosive anti-tank weapons. These weapons use a shaped charge to create a hypersonic stream of molten metal to penetrate the armor, and then do horrible things to whatever is inside.

HEAT weapons use the same formula for damage as kinetic weapons, but with a few important differences.
1) - AP POWER does NOT scale with range, and always stays the same.
2) - They do a minimum of 1 point of damage, even if the AP POWER does not exceed the ARMOR.
3) - When their AP POWER is 11 or more greater than the ARMOR, the AP POWER greater than 11 does full damage instead of being divided by 2.

So the formulas are,

If the AP POWER is less than the ARMOR then the damage is 1.

If AP POWER is more than 11 greater than ARMOR the formula is,

AP POWER - ARMOR - 10 + 6

otherwise the formula is,

((AP POWER - ARMOR) / 2) + 1

Lets go over some examples.

Example #1 Light Riflemen hitting a T80U:
AP POWER is less than ARMOR, but the damage is still 1

Example #2 Konkurs hitting a M1IP:
((20 - 17) / 2) + 1 = 2.5

Example #3 Konkurs hitting a M2 Bradley:
20 - 2 - 10 + 6 = 14 (INSTANT KILL since damage of 14 is greater than the Bradley's strength of 10)

CONCLUSION

So what have we learned from this? Even weak kinetic weapons can be devastating at close range, and even the weakest HEAT weapon can still do a little damage to the mighty T80U.

Also worth mentioning is the special cases of ARMOR 0 and 1. These armor values are considered unarmored, so receive a 4 times damage modifier to what you get above. This really illustrates how important armor 2 is, and also how important top armor 2+ can be against artillery and cluster bombs.

Now that you've done all that complicated math, let me show you the cheat sheet! Someone has been nice enough to make a damage spreadsheet so you'll never have to do the math again!