Jul 10, 2018

In Development: Battalion Activities in Season 1

Armored Warfare - Silentstalker

Commanders!

A few months back, we’ve unveiled our general plans to introduce Battalion-based modes and other activities. Today, we’d like to tell you more about what’s coming in the second part of the Black Sea Incursion season.

Organized player teams – in the case of Armored Warfare, the Battalions – are an integral and important part of the community and a place where you and your pals can meet up for a match or two or to just chat. A battalion is more than just a group of players – it’s a community of its own, tied together by the bonds of friendship that sometimes even overlap into real life.

At the same time, there are a lot of different kinds of battalions. Some crave for the thrill of being the best on the server in PvP and are ready to support that claim by winning any challenges we throw at them. Other battalions specialize in PvE and there is not a single achievement that is beyond their reach. We do recognize that fact, which is why we are in fact not only working on a Battalion versus Battalion mode, but also on a hardcore Battalion-based PvE mode, both with their own sets of amazing rewards.

This enormous undertaking will be arriving to Armored Warfare in several upcoming updates. The first part of it will consist of two features:

Battalion Contracts
Special Operations Heroic Mode

Simply put, the Battalion Contracts are special missions your whole Battalion can participate in. They are active for the entire Battalion and all its members contribute to their completion.

There are two types of these Battalion Contract missions introduced in Update 0.26:

Resource-based missions
Skill-based missions

In Resource-based missions, the Battalion members accumulate a certain resource under specific conditions (mostly Experience) – for example, to earn 120.000 points of Experience in general, or to earn 90.000 points of Experience from damage dealing and kills only. These missions can be completed in any mode. It’s worth noting that the participating players can also spend Reputation (previously called Global Reputation) to complete the objective.

The Skill-based missions are, on the other hand, a bit different. In them, a platoon of Battalion members driving Tier 9 or Tier 10 vehicles must achieve a certain skill-based feat on behalf of the entire Battalion. Such a feat includes for example completing a Special Operation on Heroic difficulty (more on that below) , but most are tied to the PvP and Global Operations modes, for example by having your Battalion’s platoon kill 10 enemies in a single PvP mode battle with all the members of the platoon surviving. These missions are far more difficult than the Resource-based ones and are much better rewarded.

A third type of missions tied to an upcoming Battalion versus Battalion mode is also in development to be introduced in the future.

The Battalion Contracts will be available using the same principles as the Contract Missions – in a campaign with its missions refreshing periodically. Completing each mission yields rewards only for the players involved in its completion but acquiring a certain number of medals unlocks a major battalion-wide reward. But before we get to that, let us talk a bit about the new Heroic difficulty for the Special Operations mode.

Those of you who play MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft are, without any doubt, familiar with the concept of “Heroic Dungeons” – special, much harder versions of the normal dungeons available in the game that yield better rewards but require a lot of coordination.

The Special Operations Heroic difficulty level is, in its essence, the same thing but for the Black Sea Incursion Special Operation. It will be available for Tier 9 and Tier 10 vehicles only and will be considerably more difficult than even the existing hardcore difficulty. Only battalion members will be allowed to participate in this difficulty mode.

No additional story elements will be added to it (you do not need to finish this difficulty level to follow the Special Operations storyline) but the challenge will be ramped up, for example, by:

Turning previously optional objectives into main ones
Giving players less time to complete each task or the mission itself
Making the enemies tougher, more numerous and placing them so that the players will have it more difficult to engage them
Introducing new types of enemies that require special tactics to beat them

One thing that will make it, however, easier is the addition of special Special Consumables (an improved version of the existing ones) of three types:

Special Oil will add 15% bonus to acceleration and turret traverse and 10% bonus to maximum speed
Special Energy Drink will add 7% to crew statistics
Special Field Kit will allow you to respawn 3 times with 100% health

These consumables cannot be bought – they are obtained for completing the abovementioned Battalion Missions.

Naturally, Heroic Special Operations will be very well rewarded (ten times the Hardcore Special Operations reward once per 7 days), as will be the Battalion Missions as a whole. The Battalion Activity feature includes four levels of rewards:

Rewards for completing Resource-based missions
Rewards for completing Skill-based missions
Rewards for completing a Heroic Special Operation
Battalion-wide reward for completing the whole campaign

An additional extra reward of the campaign will consist of Tier 9 special tanks. Upon the start of a Battalion Contract, the Battalion leader will get to choose from one of the following vehicles that will be awarded for 30 days to all the Battalion players who participate in the completion of the campaign:

M8 Thunderbolt
T-90MS
Challenger 2

More of these vehicles (such as the Armata or the Abrams SEP v3) will be available in the future.

These tanks do not have a Premium status, but they do have better characteristics than their progression counterparts as well as unique camouflage. But what makes them truly interesting is the ability to rebalance them using tech kits.

A tech kit is an alternative tank setting for the abovementioned vehicles that has to be unlocked by collecting 10 pieces that drop from Battalion Missions (the first kit will be available automatically by default). When unlocked, a tech kit can be installed to provide both bonuses and penalties, effectively changing the way the vehicle plays. Examples include:

Armor tech kit (bonus to hitpoints and armor thickness, penalties to mobility and spotting)
Damage tech kit (bonus to rate of fire, penalties to hitpoints and spotting range)
Mobility tech kit (bonus to mobility and accuracy on the move, penalties to armor and hitpoints)

That way, the most skilled Battalion players can configure their reward vehicles to become unstoppable killing machines on any battlefield!

But that’s not all – not by a longshot. The next stage of Battalion Activities will include a true Battalion versus Battalion mode.

Stay tuned and see you on the battlefield!

Jul 9, 2018

In Development: Leopard 2 Revolution

Armored Warfare - Silentstalker

Commanders!

As you know, Armored Warfare essentially has two types of Premium vehicles – the ones that are available in the Web Shop (typically with unique paintjobs) and those that are available within the client for Gold. The latter category now has a specific purpose – to allow you to obtain a Premium vehicle that’s similar in gameplay to an existing progression one but obtains more Credits than by using a simple battle-hardening mechanism.

This is exactly the case of the upcoming Leopard 2 Revolution Tier 8 Premium Main Battle Tank that is going to appear in the second part of the Black Sea Incursion season to complement the analogical progression vehicle – Leopard 2 Evolution.

Simply put, Leopard 2 Revolution is an upgraded version of Leopard 2 Evolution by Rheinmetall that inherited the original IBD Deisenroth program with the Evolution itself being, as its name suggests, a modernization kit for the older Leopard 2A4. The most important upgrade is its armor – the Revolution is protected by a more advanced version of the AMAP-B armor kit. The exact protection levels are not public, but it is claimed that the upgraded Leopard 2A4s are – in protection – equal to the Leopard 2A5 or 2A6 variant.

Another “signature” feature of the Revolution is the fact that the vehicle still uses the older L/44 variant of the Rheinmetall 120mm smoothbore cannon, although its fire control system was, in some versions, upgraded to fire modern German programmable rounds. The “some versions” part is critical here for a reason: the Revolution is not a single vehicle. In reality, it’s a collection of upgrades added to the basic Leopard 2A4-based demonstrator in time (for example, the early Revolution model did not have an APS). The Revolution program ran for roughly a decade before being replaced by a variant with a L/55 smoothbore, which is, however, not referred to as “Revolution”, but as a “MBT Technologieträger” – the gun upgrade is as far as the Revolution kit goes.

In Armored Warfare, the Leopard 2 Revolution will be a mid-to-late upgrade stage from roughly 2014 with the following changes compared to the Evolution.

The original PERI R17 commander’s periscope was replaced by a more advanced system called SEOSS featuring panoramic sights as well as a thermal imager
A remote-controlled Qimek machine gun station was added to the vehicle
The vehicle’s slat armor is now covered with fabric

There are other smaller details as well (like new headlights). The most important upgrades, however, concern protection. The vehicle is not only equipped with a more advanced armor model, but also with two additional systems:

ROSY smoke grenade launchers
Rheinmetall Situation Awareness System

The first system consists of four small smoke grenade launchers, one per each corner of the turret so that they cover the entire vehicle, which are tied to a laser warning system. Whenever the vehicle is threatened by a guided missile, the launchers are fired automatically – this system effectively works as a soft-kill APS, disrupting the missile ability to hit the tank.

The second system is a set of cameras installed on the turret (one in each corner under the ROSY launchers) that allows the crew to see everything that’s happening outside of their vehicle from the inside. The tank does not, however, feature the L/55 gun (as was stated above) and is powered by the same engine (1500hp MTU MB873 Ka501 diesel).

The Revolution upgrade actually managed to score one customer in Indonesia. In 2014, an Indonesian Leopard 2A4 variant with more advanced Revolution armor in AMAP-B was introduced to the public at the Eurosatory expo. While the Eurosatory prototype was equipped with a lot of additional equipment such as ROSY smoke grenade launchers and extra mine protection, the finalized version for Indonesia only has some of that extra kit, including:

Air conditioning
Electric turret drive replacing the old hydraulic one
Improved gun recoil brakes (enabling the gun to the newest high-pressure ammunition)

Indonesia ordered 61 of these machines from Germany with the first vehicles arriving in August 2016 – in Indonesian service, this variant is known as Leopard 2RI. Delivery of the vehicles was completed in March 2017.

We hope that you will enjoy this vehicle and will see you on the battlefield!

Jul 9, 2018

Developer Diary: How the 0.25 crashes were fixed

Armored Warfare - Silentstalker

Commanders!

One of the most common questions you ask us on Discord as well as on the forums are what are we doing about the critical issues that seriously interfere with gameplay – such as game crashes. After the introduction of Update 0.25, we received a considerable number of reports about such problems, which led to a large investigation and to the solutions introduced in the recently applied hofixes. In today’s article, we’d like to tell you more about these issues as well as the process that led to their correction.

Of Crashes in General

Crashes are, generally speaking, one of the most serious issues a game can have, making their correction absolutely vital. The problem with crashes is, however, that they can happen for vastly different reasons and to identify their reason, one must collect a large amount of data because these crashes do not generally happen on the developer side and do not appear during our internal tests (if they did, we wouldn’t have released the affected update). This data is collected via the automated crash report system, the prompts for which appear upon a crash – it’s extremely important and essential to finding the solution for such issues.

The information gathered using this system falls into several different categories, each of which is being handled by a different team. But let’s talk about some specific examples a bit.

Relative number of crashes on 32bit systems

Relative number of crashes on 64bit systems

These graphs show how the amount of the Russian client crashes changed between the two major updates – the Caribbean Crisis and the Black Sea Incursion, depending on the type of player operating system. Note how the amount of crashes for 32bit systems decreased with the introduction of the Black Sea Incursion update while the amount of crashes for 64bit systems increased. The colors represent each specific update.

Let us digress a bit and talk about the 32bit systems first.

Optimizing the game for 32bit systems might not seem like a big deal for the western markets, but the further east you go, the more relevant it becomes due to the overall level of hardware. The problem with 32bit systems is, however, that their memory is limited to 2 GB. In other words, if the game tries to gobble up more than two gigabytes, it will crash. In reality, the crash will actually happen a lot sooner due to memory fragmentation – even at 1.5 to 1.6 GB, there isn’t a free bit of memory left for the game to use.

A vast majority of 32bit system crashes is tied to the lack of memory and to improve the situation, we are working hard on optimizing the client by reducing its memory needs and the fragmentation effect. In any case, we really recommend upgrading to a 64bit system because 32bit systems are inherently less stable with large applications such as Armored Warfare due to the abovementioned restrictions and hardware developers are gradually stopping supporting 32bit systems in general – Nvidia, for example, already announced that it would stop updating 32bit system drivers.

But let us return to the graphs above. You can see that the last hotfix reduced the number of crashes significantly. We are still continuing to monitor the situation to make sure the number of crashes does not overstep the acceptable limits.

Fixing the Crashes

To find out more about the crashes that haunted the game in Update 0.25, we have to reach out to the two developers who are best suited to provide us with some answers – the leader of the game client team Aleksei Petranovsky and the lead game mechanics programmer Marat Radchenko.

Let’s take a model situation where a player suffers from a crash in battle and the game sends out a crash report. Naturally, such a player would want to return to the battle as soon as possible and fires up the game again without offering additional details in the crash report comment section. That’s fine. The most important part is to actually allow the report to be sent by pressing the “Send” button in the crash report window.

Such submitted reports are then aggregated into a bin that sorts them out and sends them to different teams. To understand how the sorting works, you must know the following:

The client calls various so-called “functions”
When collecting the reports, a list of these called functions is passed to the developers
Depending on this list, an ID that describes the issue at hand is generated. From this point onwards, all issues of this type (with similar function interactions at the point of the crash) receive this ID. When the developer the issue is assigned to goes through the reports submitted by players, he can identify them by using this ID. This allows him or her to identify the number of such issues that are currently happening.

This graph shows the most typical crashes that are happening for various reasons, sorted by their frequency of occurrence. Some of them are connected to each other (even though the reasons behind them are a bit different) and can be separated into several groups:

Group 1 consists of crash issues 1 and 3 (as per the graph designation). These were caused by old network code problems that subsequently led to a client crash. These issues were fixed in the most recent hotfix and were handled by the team that deals with battle mechanics and their backend. As a result, the number of crashes on the live server dropped by 30 percent.

Group 2 consists of crash issue 2 (as per the graph designation). This crash was caused by a situation where DirectX at some point “loses” its connection to the GPU, causing the client to shut down. This crash can have multiple reasons – problems with graphics card hardware, problems with drivers, GPU overheating or issues with the game’s rendering system. We can unfortunately only deal with the last point and even in that case, finding a solution to this particular type of crash based on crash reports only is very difficult since we need to find a way to replicate the problem on our end. Solving this issue is one of the highest priority tasks the client team currently has.

Group 3 consists of crash issues 4, 5 and 7 (as per the graph designation). These are the battle loading screen crashes. When loading a battle, the main game thread is busy loading up resources and uses and additional thread to update the screen, but certain parts of the game do not expect to be handled by a separate thread and crash. This issue was handled by the User Interface team and was fixed by the last hotfix.

Group 4 consists of crash issue 6 (as per the graph designation). Ironically, this crash is caused by a system that is used to monitor game crashes (this system is called Watch Dog). It monitors the running game processes and if they do not respond within a certain time frame, it artificially and intentionally causes a crash. These crashes are actually just a symptom of another issue, not the issue itself – they are necessary to relay the information about non-responsive components of the game so that we can analyze it. Such non-responsiveness can be caused by multiple reasons – processor overload, disk overload, insufficient memory or a game bug. These issues are also handled by the client team.

As you can see, your feedback and crash reports help us determine which crashes are the most numerous and assign them the highest priority. That does, however, not mean that we are not working on other issues as well – those run in parallel to the abovementioned crash fix works.

It’s very important to note that for those crashes that are rare, submitting a crash report is even more important – please help us by sending them, it makes the crash fixing process much faster. Relying on other players to send their crash reports and ignoring yours is actually something that can seriously hinder our operations – please, don’t be that guy. Every crash deserves to be reported and every report will be investigated and every bit of data is helpful.

You can, naturally, also report any issues to the amazing ladies and gentlemen from our Support Service who note them down and pass them to us in their periodical reports.

We’ll see you on the battlefield!

Jul 6, 2018

Branch of the Month – European Light Fire Support

Armored Warfare - Silentstalker

Commanders!

This month in our Branch of the Month series is dedicated to the European Fire Support Armored Fighting Vehicle and Tank Destroyer Branch branch, available in Zhang Feng’s vehicle pool.

The branch consists of mostly Czechoslovak and Polish vehicles with a few Chinese designs thrown in as well and can be divided into two historically distinctive parts – the pre-1989 designs and the post-1989 designs. Let’s talk about the Warsaw Pact era designs first.

When discussing the Warsaw Pact, the citizens of the “free world” usually imagine a monolithic Soviet Union military organization, united in its hatred of jeans, hamburgers and jazz music, that is ready to throw thousands of Russian tanks into the Fulda Gap and flood the entire Europe in a tide of steel and fire. The reality, as if often happens, was far more complex and the Warsaw Pact was far less homogenous than most people think. To understand why, we have to take a look at the European situation before and during the Second World War.

First, you have Poland. Between the two great wars of the 20th century, Poland repelled one Soviet invasion and succumbed only to the combined forces of the Soviets and the Nazis in 1939. The Polish had little reason to love the Russians, especially when they often behaved as bad as the Nazis during the period of their alliance. The relations with their southern neighbor, Czechoslovakia, were strained as well due to several territory disputes going back to the end of the First World War.

Some Polish heavy military industry existed before the war – Poland was making its own guns and infantry weapons but their armored vehicles were either very light or British design copies or, generally speaking, the industry was not of world class quality. The war didn’t help the situation in the slightest. Between the war damage, the looting and the deaths of the Polish elite, Poland was starting after the end of the war from scratch.

Czechoslovakia was another story. Inheriting most of the Austro-Hungarian industrial base after the First World War, it became an industrial powerhouse and a number one arms exporter in the world in the early 1930s. Škoda guns were sold all around the world with the famous Czechoslovak late 1930s light tanks used in many countries, including such exotic ones as Peru.

What Czechoslovakia shared with Poland was the mistrust in its neighbors. In the late 1930s, Germany was openly hostile, Austria and Hungary were its allies (as well as the enemies of old – by that time, Austria-Hungary was still fresh in everyone’s memory) and Poland started to bring up territorial claims once again. Czechoslovakia made a mistake of putting its fate into the hands of its alleged allies – France and Great Britain. Predictably, it was betrayed and sold to Adolf Hitler for “peace” that didn’t last anyway. The entire Czechoslovak industrial base fell to the hands of the Nazis who, ironically, used it to crush Poland, France and everyone else who stood in their way in mainland Europe.

At this point, we skip the events of the war by only noting the massive losses the Soviet Union took and the fact several Polish and Czechoslovak exile units fought as allies against the Nazis under its banner.

Let’s stop here for a moment, in 1945. Close your eyes and try to remember – what did you do five years ago? Perhaps you were at school, or working another job. Perhaps you are thinking of an old flame, a friend you haven’t seen a while, or a myriad of other things. The point is – you likely remember what you did, what you were like five years ago. And so it was for the liberated peoples of Europe in 1945. Sometimes, we look at the Second World War as the great divider – before it, we look at the old world the same way we look at medieval times. After all, the army was riding horses, flying biplanes and the women dressed funny. The world that came after it is more like our own with modern tanks on the battlefield, automatic rifles and jets in the sky. But for people back then, the events of 1939-1940 were very fresh and so was the mistrust. Such were the foundations the four decades of Soviet hegemony were built on.

The primary Soviet motivation behind establishing a series of buffer states governed by brutal communist regimes was, apart from tapping their resources, to prevent any more invasions. To that end, a unified command had to be established (seeing as the Americans had one of their own in the form of the NATO) – the Warsaw Pact was established in 1955 to address that fact.

Another aspect, the way the Soviets saw it, was an economic one as well as the one of efficiency. Even with a unified command structure, you can’t run an effective alliance-wide operation with each army having its own equipment of often inferior quality due to the lack of heavy industry tradition. And, finally, why let your satellite countries produce their own inferior equipment if you can sell them yours and tie them economically even closer to yourself? This way, you can also act as an arbiter in the case of a conflict between the countries in your sphere of influence (and plenty of those happened).

The gear solution was quite simple – equipment unification. Starting from the mid-1950s, Soviet arms and calibers became adopted by all the future Warsaw Pact members and it stayed that way until the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989-1991. To a degree, that is.

It is true that the core of the Warsaw Pact armies’ equipment was Soviet in origin (or locally license-produced) but there were many, many exceptions.

The three most important reasons for these exceptions (that is, the Soviets allowing the use of foreign equipment in the Warsaw Pact armies) were:

Political reasons (the lack of Soviet control over some of its satellites)
Equipment shortages
Soviet unwillingness to supply their allies with cutting edge equipment

Historically, the first reason was the shortages. After the end of the war, the Soviet Union was exhausted, both manpower-wise and equipment-wise. Power had to be consolidated, its own units refitted but there were only many resources to go around. While a portion of its military production was moved to the Ural Mountains in a colossal effort early in the war, a lot of it was lost and the war-torn Soviet Union simply didn’t have the incredible industrial might of the United States’ mainland to produce everything needed on short notice.

Add the default inefficiency and corruption of the central planning economic system and you’ll get a picture of how the Soviet military looked for the 40 years that followed – they had large numbers of solid weapon systems (especially the Soviet tanks were superior to the western ones until the arrival of the Leopard 2 and the Abrams MBTs) and a relatively small number of truly cutting edge stuff, but these were never available in very high numbers and a lot of projects were discontinued due to the lack of funding, especially in the waning days of the Soviet empire.

The Czechoslovak army is a good example of this. The original post-war idea was to re-arm it with the T-34 tanks and a large number of Soviet-built APCs, but there simply weren’t enough around. As a result, the Czechoslovaks made do between 1945 and 1952 with salvaged, refitted and upgraded German equipment (that was later sold off, that’s how a lot of Panzer IV’s and StuG’s found their way to Syria for example), old war-time T-34 models the exile armies were equipped with and, finally, the tanks that came from the western exile units (mostly Cromwell tanks with a few Shermans and Stuarts) until 1951 when a license production of the Soviet T-34/85 was finally started. The Czechoslovaks had a number of interesting post-war projects from the late 1940s (realistic projects, that is) but those were all cancelled from 1950 onwards for the sake of the abovementioned equipment unification.

Another such shortage example was the APC situation where, apart from a few American M3 half-tracks, nothing was available with the exception of some promising wartime APC research (a fully tracked APC on Vz.38 chassis) that was, once again, discarded. Instead, the Czechoslovaks produced a modified German wartime half-track with a Tatra engine under the name of OT-810. It was generally hated by its crews and received a suitable nickname: “Hitler’s Revenge”.

The Soviets themselves learned a lot from these early situations that happened to a degree all over the eastern bloc and, instead of forcing their APCs upon the allies, allowed them to produce their own. In the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, an agreement was reached eventually (after many delays) for a production of the OT-64 APC. The OT-64 was an excellent and modern vehicle for its time but the cooperation was a disaster. The whole story can be read in the following articles:

By the time the project ended, the Polish were angry at the Czechoslovaks for being looked down at and the Czechoslovaks were left with a feeling that the whole “joint project” was just a thinly veiled ruse to make them fund the Polish heavy vehicle industry.

Other reasons for the Soviets allowing local equipment to be used were political ones. These cases were largely individual. The Soviet-Yugoslavian split was a very good example – Yugoslavia under Tito, while generally belonging to the eastern bloc, was a proud country that generally disliked being interfered with, which led to a major political split between 1948 and 1955. One of the results was, amongst other things, the purchase of a large number of American vehicles by the Yugoslavs. That’s where the Yugoslav Shermans and Jacksons that were still used during the 1990s civil wars came from.

Another such cases were Romania and Albania that had their own splits with the Soviets (especially later on), leading to some purchases of Chinese equipment (since the Chinese were, in their eyes, the “real” communists at that time).

And, finally, there was the Soviet unwillingness to part with their cool toys. The reasons for that were naturally both political (you don’t give out your best stuff to someone who might turn on you or hand it over to the westerners) and economical (the best stuff was never available in sufficient numbers). This sparked, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of local equipment modernization programs that differed from the Soviet ones, leading to sometimes rather strange situations (there were, for example, around five different T-54M and T-55M tanks, each with its own set of upgrades). Some “bloc” upgrades such as the Czechoslovak T-55AM2 and its Bastion variant for East Germany, the T-55AM2B, were, however, highly successful and were sold to a number of foreign buyers.

It all fell apart for a time after 1989. After four decades of “glorious socialism” (characterized for the most part by poor living conditions and empty shops), the eastern bloc countries finally, for the first time, chose their own paths that led them away from Russia and towards the NATO and the European Union.

Their militaries were professionalized and most of the Soviet-era equipment was phased out or sold off, flooding the third world markets for years. The plants that produced tanks for decades closed down as their products were no longer needed. Some were privatized and became experts at maintaining and producing Russian arms upgrades such as the Polish PT-91 tanks and the Czech T-72M4CZ. Their products are also represented in Armored Warfare.

From July 3 to July 31, 2018, the following vehicles will be available for lower price than usual:

OT-65A Tier 3 AFV – This is originally a Hungarian FÚG light armored fighting vehicle, adopted in the Czechoslovak military under the name of OT-65A following the Czechoslovak failure to produce a light AFV of their own. It wasn’t exactly the best light AFV in existence but the Czechoslovaks chose it due to the fact that the Soviet BRDM was not available for capacity reasons. This variant is armed with a light recoilless launcher. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 35%

OA-82 Jarmila II Tier 4 AFV – The Jarmila II actually historically preceded the OT-65A. It was a prototype AFV designed for the Czechoslovak army, or, more specifically, to meet its recon requirements. It was a good armored car with several variants available (the most notable of which was the one in the game with two 82mm recoilless guns) but there was one fatal flaw in the plan to produce it – the centrally planned economy system simply did not have the capacity to make it happen and the project was subsequently cancelled in 1959, leading to the adoption of the OT-65. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 35%

OT-64 COBRA Tier 5 AFV – This is a typical example of a post-1989 Soviet-era equipment upgrade, this time the Czechoslovak OT-64. It’s a purely Slovak upgrade by ZŤS Špeciál Trenčín. A modern COBRA turret was added to the vehicle, giving it the ability to fire guided missiles. The combination was offered commercially starting from 2001 but found no customers. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 35%

BVP Šakal Tier 6 AFV – Another example of a Soviet equipment upgrade, this time a deeper one, the Šakal (“Jackal”) was a heavily modified BMP-2 by one of the most prominent post-1989 Czech arms companies called Excalibur Army. The vehicle was completely overhauled to meet the requirements of a modern battlefield – at least on paper. In reality, it had its issues, including insufficient protection and overloading the old BMP suspension. It was shown to several potential customers but never received any orders. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 35%

KTO Rosomak Tier 7 AFV – The Rosomak is the current standard wheeled IFV of the Polish military. Originally designed by Patria, it was modified and locally license-produced in Poland. It has already seen combat in Afghanistan and fared quite well. Poland plans to obtain more of these vehicles in the future. In Armored Warfare, the Rosomak is special in the way that it does not have any guided missiles and has to rely on its cannon only. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 25%

ZBL-08 Tier 7 AFV – The ZBL-08 is to the Chinese military what the Rosomak is to Poland – a modern wheeled infantry fighting vehicle. It entered service only relatively recently (in 2008) and limited numbers are available. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 25%

KTO Rosomak M1 Tier 8 AFV – The M1 is an upgraded Rosomak for the use in Afghanistan. It features improved protection as well as the ability to fire Spike guided missiles. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 25%

ST1 Tier 8 TD – The ST1 is the second vehicle of the line’s mini-branch, following the ZBL-08 and is essentially a ZBL-08 hull with a 105mm gun turret. Not much is known about this export-oriented vehicle and it likely didn’t enter mass production. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 25%

WPB Anders Tier 9 LT – Unlike the rest of the branch, the Anders is a Light Tank. Named after a Polish war hero, the Anders platform (consisting of multiple vehicles from an IFV to a Light Tank) was developed to actually replace the old Soviet-era MBTs with something modern. It first appeared in 2010 but failed to attract the attention of the Polish military and the idea to replace the MBTs with a Light Tank was subsequently cancelled. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 20%

Wilk XC8 Tier 10 TD – The final vehicle of this branch is a combination of a Rosomak hull and a CMI (Cockerill) XC8 120mm gun turret, creating an extremely potent tank destroyer. Light and agile, it passed it trials with excellent results but whether it will ever see service in the Polish military remains unknown. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

Discount: 15%

The Zhang Feng branch is a multi-class one with three different types of vehicles being having their representatives in it. From Tier 3 to Tier 8, the line consists of Armored Fighting Vehicles. You can read more about those in a dedicated article.

The Tank Destroyers can be read about in a developer diary of their own and, finally, Light Tank tactics apply to the WPB Anders.

We’ll see you on the battlefield!

Jul 5, 2018

Developer Q&A - Session 19

Armored Warfare - Silentstalker

Commanders!

Welcome to the newest Q&A Session where developers are answering questions posed by players.

Are you planning to add more skirmish maps since most of the PvP battles on EU and NA are skirmishes?

Not at the moment but we’ll look into the question.

Before Update 0.19, the developers were talking about a “Survival” mode where players would fight endless waves of enemy AI opponents. What became of it?

It’s not planned for the near future, but we are planning something a bit different but equally interesting – a special hardcore PvE mode for battalions as a part of battalion contracts. More on that later.

What are you plans for the standard PvE mode?

We haven’t forgotten about it, we are considering what direction to take with it.

Will you add a visual effect where vehicles eject empty shells after firing?

Not for the foreseeable future – such a feature would require a lot of resources to develop, more than it’s currently worth.

Will you add a different special hot air visual effect for summer and winter maps?

No.

Can you make shell impacts more visible? We’d like to see the hits better.

This is something we are focusing on in the last few updates as well as in the upcoming ones. We increased the penetration decal size and fixed a number of issues that caused these decals to not appear correctly. We are also running experiments with a new penetration decal system that are, thanks to their new animations, much more visible.

Have you thought of introducing a team battle mode (companies)?

Yes – it will be coming this year with brand new cool rewards.

How come the helicopters in the Special Operations mode cannot be shot down?

It’s a known bug that we are working on fixing.

Are you planning on adding voice commands for the Garage?

No.

Are you planning on adding VR goggles support to Armored Warfare?

No.

Are you planning to finish the T-80 branch by adding higher Tiers to it?

Not for the near future – right now, we are focusing on the Israelis and the French.

Will you introduce Leopard 2 Revolution?

Yes.

Will you introduce more vehicles with unguided missiles like the Soviet Gadyuka Terminator predecessor?

We are considering that question.

Will you add more missiles to the Kornet-EM AFV so that it becomes more viable in PvE?

We are looking into that but haven’t decided yet.

Are you planning to buff the turret armor of the Challenger 1 FALCON? It’s very thin.

This vehicle’s turret is unmanned (or, more specifically, low profile), which means that in the game it receives reduced damage. Adding more armor to it would make it imbalanced.

Are you planning on adding Battalion versus Battalion organized battle content?

Yes, it will be coming this year with cool rewards.

Is the in-game report system working? Can we use it to report players?

Yes, although it’s worth noting that a report doesn’t automatically equal to a punishment – for example, we have measures that make sure that make sure a whole battalion cannot just frivolously report the members of another rival battalion.

There are vehicles in the game that are based on older models of real-life tanks that got improved in the meanwhile. For example, the T-72B3 in the game is based on an older model whereas there’s a real life version that was unveiled after it was introduced to the game, which has better parameters. Will you follow such development and improve the vehicles accordingly?

Generally speaking, no. We may introduce improved versions of existing vehicles as separate models, though.

I had this idea – how about a booster queue? For example, add several boosters to it and they will activate in a sequence.

Sounds interesting. We’ll think about it.

Can you add a single button function (for example, tied to the Q key) of switching between weapons systems for those vehicles that have more than one? For example, press Q once to switch from autocannon to missiles, press Q the second time to switch back etc.

This also sounds interesting and logical. We’ll look into it.

Will you improve the game’s sound effects?

Yes, that’s something we are working on constantly. For example, in the near future, we are planning to improve the sounds of shells hitting your tank, amongst other things.

Will you add infantry to the game in one form or another? For example, infantry carriers such as IFVs would capture points faster etc.

For the next season, we are planning to overhaul the “class features” (such as the AFV target designation and so on) as a whole. That being said, we are working on a new feature especially for those AFVs that carry infantry in real life.

How are you choosing the vehicles that are added to the game?

First and foremost, we are selecting the vehicles based on the needs of the dealer they go to – especially when the dealer has some sort of “topic” (like the light vehicles for Oscar Faraday). It takes 3 to 6 months to create a full model and roughly 1-2 weeks to test the vehicle in the game.

Isn’t the Special Operations Hardcore mode for high tiers too difficult?

It’s true that upon their introduction, the Black Sea Incursions Hardcore missions were quite difficult with the average mission winrate being around 10 percent. Since the balance fixes that we introduced in the first major hotfix, it rose to 25 percent, which is quite okay in our eyes. The missions are supposed to be difficult and do require at least basic cooperation and teamplay. If you’re not playing in a platoon (which this difficulty is generally intended for), you should at least take a few seconds at the beginning of each battle to take or assign your roles.

That’s it for today! We’ll see you on the battlefield!