Modding/Realism

Intro
This is a conceptual discussion about realism in the game, and how you might want to think about it with respect to creating mods and missions.

Morale & Health
For now (Feb 2018) morale is a new feature and it's not overly clear how it works or whether it has much effect at all. There is also no access to its settings via the resource data files.

Morale has been a significant missing feature of all MoW games. Units don't cower, refuse commands, flee, or rally. Contrast this to the older Close Combat series, a game in the same genre with a well developed morale system.

This lack of a morale system results in unrealistic battles where every unit fights to the death. Because units show no self-preservation--e.g. you can order a squad of conscripts to charge a wall of tanks--battles end with unrealistically high casualty rates.

So far so bad. But, until morale is better developed, consider using soldier "health" as a proxy for morale. Health can (and does) vary based on the quality level of the soldier type. That's not terribly realistic as a representation of physical health. But if you treat health as largely representing morale level, battles take on a more realistic flavor. Instead of considering each "dead" soldier as literally killed, simply consider them as psychologically 'out of the fight' due to taking more fire than they could handle.

When you set up missions or mods, differentiate seasoned troops from conscripts by health level. Better yet--rather than giving high morale troops vastly higher health--consider giving them (more) med kits. This way you can approximate the effects of morale, breakdown in unit cohesion, and even rallying. Seasoned troops who take too much fire become disorganized, hunker down for a while to collect themselves (apply a med kit), and then return to the fight after a period of being virtually "suppressed." Inexperienced troops taking fire with lower health values and no med kits will be killed in game terms. In real life they would still be alive, but they would have retreated, stopped shooting, stopped following orders, etc.

Hopefully the developers will improve the morale system to be more in line with games like Close Combat. (Obviously they will have to make morale a game option as casual players will complain bitterly if they can't order their militia units to swarm a platoon of Abrams tanks as they are used to doing). Until then, you have options as a modder and mission builder to use health as a stand-in for morale.

Vehicle Damage & Repair
The game allows damaged vehicles to be repaired unrealistically easily and quickly. A soldier will hop out of a tank under fire and repair a broken track in about a minute (assuming he survives).

What is more realistic is to treat this vehicle damage as more of a morale effect on the crew. When a vehicle sustains a significant hit but is still serviceable, it often takes the crew some time to recover their wits, air out the halon gas, treat minor injuries, and generally get back into fighting shape.

Consider "vehicle repair" in game to represent a stunned vehicle crew rallying to get back into the fight. The fact that "repair" is best done when not under fire or after limping a wheeled vehicle behind cover just makes the process that much more realistic. It is easier for a crew to re-organize and recover their wits when not under fire.

Again, it would be more realistic if vehicle repair during battle were not allowed and there were simply crew morale effects. But the net effect of the game's vehicle repair system could be considered as an abstract representation of crew morale & recovery.

Room for Improvement
There are several pretty straightforward areas for improvement from a realism standpoint as of today (Feb 2018).
 * Updated Armor & Penetration Values: The current assets have several placeholder-y values. These could be easily updated.
 * Differentiated ammunition speeds: Heavy weapons don't differentiate weapon speed by ammo type as they should. Again, this can be easily fixed.
 * HEAT & Special Armor: A modern game with armored vehicles should probably incorporate special (anti-HEAT warhead) armor. Vehicle protection levels are sufficiently different for HEAT vs. kinetic weapons that this is fairly important. This can probably only be accomplished by the game devs in code (with a 2nd set of armor level established vs. HEAT weapons).

The Realism Glossary
Here are some real world terms and concepts you should know if you are interested in 'milsim' realism.

RHA : Rolled Homogeneous Armor. A type of steel vehicle armor common bv WW2. It is the standard material that vehicle armor and weapon penetration are measured in. Both armor thickness and average weapon penetration depth are often expressed in mm of RHA.

RHAe : RHA equivalency. Vehicle armor materials and structures have become much more complex and diverse since WW2. In order to give a standardized measure of protection (or weapon effectiveness), RHAe is used. That way all armor can be expressed in terms of the thickness of RHA it is equivalent to.

Effective armor thickness : When armor is sloped or impacted at an angle other than the normal, the weapon must tunnel a longer path to pass through to the other side. This is the effective armor thickness rather than the minimal thickness at the normal. It used to be common to intentionally slope tank armor, in part so that weapons impacting from the most common angles were forced to tunnel through a greater thickness of armor.

HEAT : High Explosive Anti Tank. A common type of anti-tank munition that uses the chemical energy ("CE") of an explosion to penetrate armor, and was developed during WW2. Contrary to popular misconception, the process has nothing to do with high temperatures or melting the target. Rather, a shaped explosive charge is used to force a thin metal liner into an extremely high speed dart that does the work of penetrating armor (simulation video). Since the power of the dart comes from the explosion triggered at the moment of impact, the round itself need not travel at high speed to be effective. Thus it can be launched from light shoulder-mounted weapons, attached to slow-flying guided missiles, etc.

ERA : Explosive Reactive Armor. An increasingly common type of armor first used in the 1980's. It uses a small amount of explosive to force relatively thin sheet(s) of metal into the path of a weapon as it impacts the armor. Lightweight, it can be bolted over other armor to enhance the protection of lighter vehicles, or the weaker (non-front) facings of tanks. Initially developed as a defense against HEAT warheads, heavier versions have been developed (mostly by Russia) that are effective against traditional armor-piercing shells. There are other types of "reactive armor" that don't use explosives, but work by similar principles.

Chobham : One name for a class of composite armor first developed in the UK in the late 1960's. From there versions of it were shared and further developed by the US (the Abrams tank), other NATO countries, and eventually Israel (Merkava 4). Crude versions were obtained by the Soviet Union via espionage in the 1970's and incorporated into some of their tanks thereafter (e.g. the T-72B). It is more effective than RHA by weight, has good re-usability, but takes up a lot of space. Like ERA, it was originally designed to protect vs. HEAT, but has since become more multi-purpose.

Sabot : A nickname for the most common type of modern armor-piercing tank shell. It is a "kinetic energy" (KE) penetrator that consists of a long, thin rod of metal that bores its way through armor by virtue of high density and extremely high speed--around 1.5 km/s. Very effective, its primary drawback is that it can only be fired from large, heavy cannon found almost exclusively on tanks.

APFSDS : Armor-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot. see "Sabot".

ATGM : Anti-Tank Guided Missile. A guided rocket fired from a variety of platforms, almost always tipped with a HEAT warhead (although top-attack EFP warheads have come into vogue recently). They are slow-flying compared to guns, and are guided by a variety of methods, usually requiring the launcher to maintain line-of-sight until impact.