Actually it's probably more accurate to say "WTF !?! I don't get what DIDN'T happen just then!"

Watching the reactions of the community of avid fans that play our game can be an interesting excercise in perceptions. People come from all kinds of different places, from every facet of experience and from many different gaming backgrounds to find themselves here in Battleground Europe's world.

A great many of our players do not have this kind of "grognardy" background and instead only have the background of other games to guide them, in many cases this guides them badly because of the completely different way those games handled the "shooter" aspect of combat, paricularly with regard to vehicular combat, like tanks or aircraft for example. So after reading various topics from our player forums, many of them covering areas of concern over how weapons, ammunition and vehicles work in the game ... I thought I'd go over some of the basic principles that seperates Battleground Europe's weapons simulation from other "combat games" ... and what our most avid fans think, makes it a better WAR based combat game rather than just another shooter.

A lot of players expect to see a simplified range of results that frustrates them when they don't occur. In Battleground Europe you can't just hit a tank so many times and then expect, when you reach the required number, that it will blow up. No vehicle in the game has hit points. They are all modeled after the vehicles ability to resist damage based on it's armour value and the important components inside or on the vehicle that you can damage to disable or destroy it's combat ability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzpUVtVUBTI

The weapon you use, against a tank for example ... will never hurt that tank if it is unable to do it in a single shot. If the shell bounces off the tank it won't do any better the second time you bounce another shell off the tank. Even when that weapon can damage or kill the tank in a single shot from where you are firing at it, if the range changes or the angle of impact changes, your success/failure to damage or destroy the tank changes also. A round that can penetrate 100mm of armour at 500 meters range hitting the tank at a direct angle of 90 degrees to the armour plate (what we call a zero angle shot) might only pentrate 87mm of armour plate at an impact angle of 30 degrees from that previous 0 degree shot at the same range of 500 meters. If the tank has 90mm of armour where you strike it with your shot, in the first example you can penetrate it but in the second example, the same gun firing the same ammunition will not penetrate. We call this "angle of obliquety". Thus you can see where you *might* think from your first shot, that the second example should work for you, when it oviously doesn't. While no one at CRS will tell you that our models are absolutely the same as real life, they are more realistic than you may have come across in other games based on a hit point system, and within the constraints of a simplified model, are as realistic as we can make them. The model is only simplified from real life because the millions of varibles real life presents us cannot all be incorporated in a code based computer game, and still run on your computer. It's a technology restriction more than anything else, so we have to abstract a number of these variables.

Now, even after you penetrate the armour of a tank, results are still not guarrenteed as many might think or feel should be the case. Some ammunition fired by anti-tank guns is solid shot, which must hit a vital component inside the tank to damage or destroy it, and some anti-tank rounds are APHE (Armour Piercing High Explosive) which will explode inside the tank after they penetrate it, and cause damage to or destroy internal components that the round itself may not have directly impacted. This is particularly important with tank crews because a solid shot AP round must hit the crew itself after penetration, or cause interior spalling of the armour to hit the crew (not always reliable) where a round that is APHE can miss the crew, blow up inside the tank, and injure or kill crew members from subsequent shrapnel events when the round explodes.

A tank only ever brews up into flames if you hit it's fuel tank, and then not in every case, as in reality there is only a percentage chance that a fuel tank hit will cause a blazing inferno to erupt. The tank will only ever blow up, sending the turret hurling through the air, if you hit it's ammunition storage. This works the same with aircraft too, fuel tank hits are the only way to set a plane on fire, and ammunition hits are the only way to "blow them up". Of course with aircraft, things like wings and tails can be removed from sufficient damage inflicted to them, without fire or ammunition blow-ups, just like a tank can lose it's tracks or main gun from damage inflicted directly to them. Fuel tanks and ammunition storage are not located in the same place in all tanks and aircraft, where they are to be hit is based on where they were in the real vehicles.

Guns all fire their own, in most cases, unique ammuntion. The two Shermans in game, for example; the M4a2(75) fires 75mm APHE from an M3 type main gun at around 2060 feet per second muzzle velocity. The later M4a3(76) fires 76.2mm solid shot AP from an M7 type gun (actually the M1a2 development of the M7) at around 2600 feet per second. They perform quite differently against armour as a result of these differances. The PaK.40L46 ATG firing a 75mm APHE round has more muzzle velocity than the PaK.40L43 gun on the PzKw.IVg tank manages to produce. The StuK.40L48 gun on the StuG.IIIg, firing the same ammunition as the PzKw.IVg tank, has slightly higher muzzle velocity than the PzKw.IVg tank does. The PaK.40 ATG in this example has a longer shell casing and more gunpowder creating it's higher velocity, which is not the case with the StuG.IIIg and PzKw.IVg variation which comes from the longer barrel of the StuG.IIIg (L48 vs. L43) where both those AFV's are firing the same 75mm shell.

So what you need to gain experience in, and learn, is how the ammunition in your chosen weapon behaves and how the vehicles you are attempting to damage or destroy are configured to resist you damaging or destroying them. This applies to every vehicle, weapon, and ammuntion type in the game. A 20mm round fired from an Hispano 20mm aircraft cannon has a different weight, muzzle velocity and explosive content to the 20 mm round fired from an Mg151 20mm aircraft cannon, so their ballistic performance is not the same and they will affect target aircraft in a not exactly identical manner. In most cases the differances are not great, but they can vary a lot because we designed the game to produce as many WTF moments as it can to better reflect real life  (although it's still an abstracted model compared directly to real life) ... so while you might see little differance between a gun, it's ammunition or the targets consequential outcome in one instance, in another instance . .. using the same gun, ammunition and target; the result may differ due to other criteria at play in that situation. Things like differance in range, striking angle, and a small degree of chance even; for example muzzle velocities of ammunition and angles of impact from identical gun solutions can vary a little like they do in real life. A 2600 feet per second round might leave the barrel at 2540 feet per second, and strike the target a degree or two different than the very next shot from the same shot solution might do. Maybe the next round is going 2630 feet per second and strikes the target at 1 or 2 degrees better angle. This presents you with, in those cases where you are approaching the limits of your weapons chances of success, a critical consideration in your results analysis. There is variation that imparts to these events and consequences a less "computer" feel even though we run it on computers. We try to make it feel more "organic" which is how real life results tend to resolve themselves. It's at the limits of your weapons abilities that you should see the most variation in results, and real life result/consequence patterns do tend to reflect this aspect of the game.

Yes, it's a very complicated ballistics and damage consequences model. It is more work to learn than a "shoot this and that happens" game model but it's one of the many things that make Battleground Europe the hugely addicting game it is, and where a lot of the tension, excitment and sheer combat WOW! moments come from.