Greetings, Soldiers!

Today we’re going to provide you with a brief insight into our damage model. We’re glad that most of you are satisfied with our current TTK (shoutout to Admiral4000 and his buddies), and at the same time we hope that showing you the inner workings of our system will be an interesting read.

Final player damage in World War 3 is a sum of a couple elements:

Bullet caliber – each one inflicts a certain amount of base damage

Barrel length – long barrel is more efficient on longer distance, while short barrel is geared towards CQC.

Distance from target – the further the target, the lesser the damage

Helmet/Armor class – heavier/better material = less damage

Shot placement – based on hitboxes and their multipliers

Bullet type – armour piercing (AP), hollow point (HP) and full metal jacket (FMJ) bullets have different damage multipliers as well

In this article we’ll analyse perhaps the most frequently used assault rifle caliber – the NATO 5.56mm cartridge. It’s what the M4, M416 and one of your favourites – the SA80 is chambered in.

The base damage of the 5.56mm caliber is 31, which means that killing an unarmoured (or lightly armoured) enemy takes 4 shots (3×31 = 93, + 1 shot to finish ’em off).

We can control the damage of any caliber by using a simple, table based tool – just like this one:

As you can see the damage curve goes down at 9000 Unreal Units (basically centimeters), or 90 metres from the shooter. You can check the damage curves out yourself in the customisation menu – once you choose your barrel, you immediately know at what range it’s most efficient.

What this particular curve shows you is that there’s no damage falloff until the 90 metre mark. After this mark the damage decreases to finally reach 26 at the 105 metres mark.

The performance of a long barrel is more consistent, meaning that the falloff is less steep – it goes from 29 at 0 to 90 metres down to 28 at 105 metres, making it a better choice for long range combat.

Short barrels work the other way around – they provide you with increased damage sub 90 metres (in this case: 33), but the falloff after the 90 metres mark is the steepest of all – it falls to 23.

Quite simple so far, right? It would be, if you always scored a clear hit to the guts followed by a proper splatter of blood.

This, however, is not the case because now the armours, helmets and hitboxes come into play.

At this point we’ve got 3 classes of helmets and 4 classes of armours. The general idea is that the heavier a piece of armour is, the more protection it provides. To give you an example – the lightest, HDPE armour won’t do much good against a powerful rifle cartridge, but it will slightly decrease the damage inflicted by a 9mm pistol round. You can always check the performance of a particular armour plate or helmet in the customisation menu.

We’ve performed detailed calculations for every armour and helmet class to make sure proper balance is achieved and retained. Our calculations take into consideration the caliber, bullet type, distance… Literally all the stuff needed to properly design a convincing, well-balanced damage model which – in times of need – is easy to rework or improve.

What you can see on this screenshot below is how we handle hitboxes and collisions. The armour protects most of the torso, so shooting the centre of mass (as one usually does on a real battlefield) requires you to take the armour into consideration.

Here you can take a look at how we control the damage modifier for different parts of the body. These are the current values, which we’ve decided upon after lots of testing and in-house discussion.

Using these multipliers it’s easy to count that if the base damage of a 5.56mm bullet is 31, then a headshot to an unprotected head will inflict 93 damage, while a shot to the arm will result in ~21 points of damage. That’s precisely what the game does, when your character gets shot. This info is readily available to you on the killscreen each time you get fragged. The last, decisive hit is marked in red.

3×21 (shots to the left arm) = 63, 1 shot to the armour plate = 26 (the plate deflected 5 points of damage), 1 shot to an unprotected part of the body = 11. 63+26+11 = 100, meaning you just got fragged.

The last thing we’d like to mention today is the bullet type. At this point there’s three of them, each available as additional ammo within the customization menu. You’re free to take one magazine of this ammo onto the battlefield anytime.

FMJ: full metal jacket bullets are the standard ammo used in WW3. They retain the base damage of a particular caliber, while penetrating the armour at 20% efficiency.

AP: armour piercing bullets retain the base damage while their armour penetration value is increased to 40%

HP: hollow point ammo penetrates the armour at only 10% efficiency, but does increase the base damage by 20%, which in the case of the 5.56mm bullet would mean it’ll do not 31 but around 37 damage to and unprotected area of the body, effectively decreasing the amount of bullets needed to kill from 4 to 3.

Carefully timing your shots, proper aiming and the right choice of weapon, barrel and ammo should provide you with a satisfying kill no matter the situation.

We hope you enjoyed this brief look behind the curtain of our damage model, thank you for staying by our side – good times are coming for World War 3, so we please stay with us in the future!

Just before you go: There’s still the Humble sale going, and there’s a couple of days left to grab a copy of World War 3 with a 33% discount! If you want, you can buy our game here: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/world-war-3

See you in the next Weekly Report!