Tanks in War Footing serve as your primary heavy breakthrough and direct armor-negation force, offering heavy armor values and high hard attack at the cost of high industrial allocation and maintenance burdens. While players on the Steam forums frequently debate whether massing cheaper garrison battalions is more cost-effective, dedicated armored formations provide reliable protection against hostile armored assaults when properly supplied and supported.
This guide breaks down how armor and penetration function under the game's simulation, how tanks compare against mechanized alternatives, and practical approaches to integrating tanks into your defense plans.
How Tank Armor and Penetration Work
Combat resolution in War Footing executes sector-by-sector each turn across distinct combat phases. How tanks interact with incoming hostile forces depends on several core rules confirmed by developer updates and forum explanations:
- Hard Attack Serves as Penetration: According to official developer responses on the Steam forums, the hard attack statistic doubles as your armor penetration value. Unlike games with a binary pass/fail check, War Footing uses a soft penetration curve to calculate damage against armored targets.
- Target Prioritization: In developer update v0.8.5, tank targeting logic was updated so that tanks are more likely to target opposing enemy tanks during armored engagement phases rather than squishier support vehicles.
- Infantry Protection: Integrating armor into your lines reduces damage taken by foot soldiers. Dev updates v0.8.4 and v0.9.6 explicitly increased the casualty-reduction protection that tanks and armored vehicles offer to manpower during soft attack phases.
- Loss Impact on Readiness: Vehicle losses hit unit readiness significantly harder than basic infantry attrition. Furthermore, patch v0.9.8 decreased raw tank effectiveness against infantry while raising tank maintenance costs, making operational support logistics essential.
Tank Performance vs. Other Unit Types
Choosing whether to allocate scarce industrial capacity toward tanks depends on your scenario constraints and supply limits. Player testing reveals clear mechanical trade-offs across ground equipment:
| Unit / Vehicle Role | Primary Strengths | Major Weaknesses & Resource Costs |
|---|---|---|
| Main Battle Tanks (e.g., Challenger 2, Leopard, Type 96A) | High armor stat reduces taken damage to near zero; high hard attack penetrates opposing heavy armor. | High initial purchase or license cost; substantial maintenance footprint; vulnerable if air defense is neglected. |
| Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs / APCs) (e.g., M2 Bradley, M113) | Provide mechanization and moderate soft/hard attack support for infantry. | Widely observed by players to suffer unsustainable attrition rates; high per-unit replacement costs relative to durability. |
| Garrison / Foot Infantry | Low cost, low maintenance, fast mobilization; highly effective when equipped with ATGM kits (like Javelins). | Cannot project active armored thrusts; higher manpower casualty risks during heavy enemy offensives. |
| Attack Helicopters & CAS | Capable of inflicting heavy anti-tank damage without taking return fire in hard attack phases. | Require significant hangar bandwidth, investment, and pre-planning or reactive scrambles. |
The Tank vs. IFV Dilemma
A consistent finding across community testing is that fielding mechanized infantry units loaded with IFVs or APCs (such as M113s or Bradleys) often results in heavy economic strain. Community feedback highlights that IFVs suffer rapid losses during vehicle skirmishes, creating an expensive production bottleneck.
Tanks with high armor values—such as the heavily armored Challenger 2 or domestic Type 96 runs—sustain far fewer catastrophic losses during combat resolution. When vehicle budgets are limited, dedicating vehicle production capacity strictly to dedicated tank battalions or companies yields better durability than spreading resources into mechanized troop carriers.
Sourcing and Producing Armor
Balancing your national procurement contracts is critical, as you cannot afford to license and purchase everything at high tiers simultaneously:
- Domestic Licensing Over Direct Import: Because industrial capacity points are finite, purchasing individual foreign tanks off the international market depletes your national treasury rapidly. For scenarios demanding high vehicle numbers (such as Industrial Giant or Force Modernization), purchasing production licenses to manufacture tanks domestically saves substantial money over time.
- Avoiding the Super-Tank Trap: Top-tier Western armor like the Challenger 2 or M1 Abrams boasts unmatched armor values, but players note they act as severe maintenance hogs that can overwhelm your recovery assets. Mid-tier or surplus tanks—such as M60 Pattons, Chieftains, or Type 96 variants—often deliver enough hard attack to breach enemy lines without bankrupting your logistics branch.
- Template Mechanics: Players have observed that armored unit templates set vehicles to maximum caps rather than strict fixed requirements per soldier. While a unit can technically deploy with missing armored vehicles, an armored unit lacking actual tanks cannot execute its combat role effectively during armored clash phases.
Combining Tanks with Combined Arms
Deploying armored units alone will not guarantee sector defense. A complete defense layout requires complementary operational layers:
- Sufficient Logistics & Recovery: Ensure your logistics screen has enough dedicated recovery units and maintenance platoons assigned. Without forward maintenance support, damaged tanks degrade unit readiness and breakdown rates quickly outpace repairs.
- Air Defense Coverage: Uncontested enemy ground-attack aircraft melt armor rapidly. You must protect tank sectors either through pre-planned Combat Air Patrols (CAP), reactive fighter scrambles (which carry a 5% effectiveness penalty and 15% readiness cost), or integrated surface-to-air batteries.
- Forward Deployment Timing: Maneuvering units right on the border gives the enemy invasion budget leverage. Deploying formations one sector back until the invasion draws near preserves positioning and readiness while keeping defensive preparedness steady.
Frequently Asked Questions
What stat determines whether my tanks can penetrate enemy armor in War Footing?
Hard attack functions as your penetration value. According to developer confirmations, armor penetration uses a soft mathematical curve based on your formation's hard attack compared against the enemy's armor rating, rather than a flat pass/fail cutoff.
Why do my IFVs die faster than my tanks?
In the current combat balance, IFVs lack the high base armor values found on main battle tanks. Because vehicle-to-vehicle engagements carry high lethality, vehicles with low armor suffer disproportionate casualties. Most players find that building dedicated tank companies offers far more survivability per production credit than building IFV-heavy mechanized battalions.
Can I launch offensive counterattacks into enemy territory using tanks?
Under the current operational design, you cannot manually send units into enemy-occupied zones to launch offensive counterattacks. Operational combat occurs when the invading enemy forces engage your prepared sectors, meaning tanks operate within a defensive and reactive framework.
