To start dealing real damage in War Robots: Frontiers, you need to get through enemy armor first. In this Development Spotlight, allow us to show you how Robots keep their systems running and their Pilots alive.
Unlike many other shooters, your HP pool in War Robots: Frontiers is composed of two entirely different stats. There's Durability (which represents the "health" of your Robot) and Armor (which takes damage first, protecting the Durability). When the Armor is breached, all damage goes directly to Durability. When there is no Durability left, your Robot is destroyed. As a general rule, to take a Robot down you just need to keep shooting at it—but it's not all that simple.
Each Robot part has its own Armor. After a short shootout you can find your Robot missing protection on its torso but still having a fully-armored chassis and shoulders. This adds a whole new dimension to gameplay. Robots can have different vulnerable spots at different stages of the match, and it's up to players to exploit them. You can easily spot a vulnerable part by the tangle of red-hot wire showing through the damaged plates. Go for it and your enemy won't last long!
Armor is distributed unevenly between the Robot parts, with larger sections taking the lion’s share. The torso will usually be the most protected segment of your build, the shoulders will be the most vulnerable, and the chassis will be somewhere in between. Aiming for the shoulders, however, is much more difficult than shooting straight at the torso or even the legs. They present a much smaller target and hitting the left shoulder doesn't help you break armor on the right. Sniping the shoulders is a high-risk, high-reward kind of deal. Besides, it can be a good idea to just turn your damaged shoulder away from the enemy fire and seek repair. Carefully positioning your Robot on the battlefield is no less important than having good aim.
Armor doesn't make your Robot immune to harm. It always lets through a portion of incoming damage and that portion grows as the armor plates take hit after hit. In the current version of the game, all weapons deal the same amount of damage to Armor and Durability. The Armor simply stands in a projectile’s way and takes damage first. In future updates, we plan on adding different damage mechanics to different guns. Some will excel at peeling off the shell of a foe, while others are a prime choice for sniping exposed parts.
There is one weapon mechanic already in the game that indirectly affects the target's armor. Explosive weapons such as Orkans deal splash damage and often hit several parts of the Robot at the same time. Rocket salvos become especially dangerous when armor is already missing on one part since there is a good chance that splash damage will affect it even when there weren't any direct hits.
One final thing to understand about a Robot's defensive stats is that Durability is much easier to restore than Armor. When a Robot avoids getting hit for a while, it starts automatically replenishing its Durability. Repairing Armor on the other hand requires special appliances like the Repair Module or the Repair Drone ability on the Tyr torso. Most of the time, your Robot's survival on the battlefield will depend on Armor much more than on Durability.
Join our Discord and tell us how this two-layer system works for you! Do you want to see more armor mechanics or would you prefer to keep it as it is now? In the next Development Spotlight, we will answer your burning questions!
