AOE curve calclulations - An unexpected finding

Hey Everyone,

I've been fooling around with AOE damage calculations lately, and while the way AOE works in the game is pretty well documented understood I've run into a rather unexpected finding while doing some tests with cheatmod.

Now, as most of you will know, there are 6 base values that define the AOE of basically any weapon in-game: the near, mid and far AOE radii (r_n, r_m, r_f) and corresponding AOE damage values (DMG_n, DMG_m, DMG_f), respectively. These describe how much AOE damage is dealt to a target as a function of the distance between the point of impact and target, and a typical AOE-curve looks something like this:


So far so good.

However, there is another stat for the radius of the AOE circle that can be found in the attribute editor (from here on abbreviated as r_max), which can be equal or greater than r_f. In the first case, incorporation of this value doesn't have any effect on the resulting AOE curve. However, if r_max is greater than r_f (which it is for numerous ballistic projectiles), damage should evolve to the corresponding damage value at r_max (DMG_max).
Logically, one could assume that DMG_max should be zero, i.e. the AOE-curve linearly declines to 0 at this point (blue line), but since there seems no value for AOE_max to be defined in the attributes.xml it could as well remain at DMG_f (yellow line).


The way this is encoded in the game clearly has quite a drastic effect on how much AOE damage a unit deals on the outer edges of its AOE envelope, so the question is which case applies?

Unfortunately there isn't much info on this available, so I was left scratching my head for a bit until I decided to do some testing to find out.

Therefore, I used the IS-2 as an example for a unit with much greater r_max (5) than r_f (3) and made it fire near a sniper model at close to its maximum AOE and recording the damage done per shot via cheatmod.

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To cut a long story short, while I expected an AOE-curve according to 2. to apply (blue curve), initial test results strongly suggest an actual in-game AOE-curve consistent with scenario 3. (yellow curve). So instead of dropping linearly to zero, the AOE damage remains constant between r_f and r_max, which means I (and possibly others) may have greatly underestimated the AOE performance of certain units (especially that of the IS-2!).

Nice work.

why don't you simply make a mod and set all other range to 0 and see what happens?

Can you retry with a reliable attack ground unit like the Stug E?

I also assumed max distance damage was 0.

Nice work.

why don't you simply make a mod and set all other range to 0 and see what happens?

Well, that would probably be the most logical way to do it. I haven't played around with modding so far, but I might give it a try in the future. There's a lot of other stuff, e.g. variables affecting scatter calculation, that's a bit obscure to me and would probably way easier to understand using custom mods.

Can you retry with a reliable attack ground unit like the Stug E?

I also assumed max distance damage was 0.

Yeah I've actually done that already with the Command PzIV (equal results with the IS-2) and StugE. The latter is an example for a unit with equal r_f and r_max (4 m), though, so not much info can be gained here with respect to the damage drop off between r_f and r_max. However, it confirmed that dealing exactly 16 damage (= DMF_f) practically doesn't occur (as this would mean the model must stand exactly at 4 m from the impact). Out of 50 or so shots the closest hit to 16 damage I could see was ~16.2.

Well, that would probably be the most logical way to do it. I haven't played around with modding so far, but I might give it a try in the future. There's a lot of other stuff, e.g. variables affecting scatter calculation, that's a bit obscure to me and would probably way easier to understand using custom mods.
...

go here
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1576301995

I changed the brumbar to have near mid far aoe below 1. You have to produce one from T4 not make it appear from the spawn officer.