War Footing uses a combat system meant to reflect higher-level combat - that is formation-on-formation, not individual-on-individual. I wanted the player to have the experience of managing a large army, but without losing the nuance of what it means to field a smaller force of Challenger 2 tanks against more, but inferior, T-72s. This is one of the great things that moving from a tabletop game to a digital game has unlocked - I can do both!
Combat now happens in phases.
The air phase
First, air defense fires at any fixed-wing aircraft participating in a battle. Air defense has modifiers for quality, geographic coverage, and more.
Then, any air-to-air combat takes place. Planes can be multirole, but squadrons on ground attack missions suffer a significant penalty when attacked by enemy fighters. Ensure you have escorts if you think the enemy has fighters.
Next, air-to-ground combat takes place. Air-to-ground aircraft that have taken fire have a penalty to their ground attack missions.
Ground combat
Following the fixed-wing phase, ground combat begins.
First is the initial soft attack. Both sides use their soft attacks on infantry targets.
Following this is vehicle combat - both infantry and vehicles use their hard attack values against enemy vehicles.
This one is actually fairly complex: Each vehicle type per unit (for example, M1A1s and Leopard 2A4s in the same unit) will choose a specific vehicle type and enemy unit to target. Hard attack values are compared against enemy armor to approximate a "penetration" metric. This makes it so that weapons with very high attack like a Javelin or an Abrams' main gun are much more likely to kill a vehicle than an AT4 or an M60 Patton. Similarly, heavily armored vehicles are more likely to survive even when they are targeted.
Helicopters are treated as vehicles to account for their more localized battlefield role. They strike before the main vehicle combat, but are vulnerable both to enemy air defense and MANPADS.
Finally, there is a "final push" with another round of soft attacks taking place.
Getting the balance right
This combat system has taken a lot of fine-tuning to get the right balance of decisive action and attrition. Early versions had units getting wiped out too quickly and invasions lasting only one turn. Now, the lethality has been calibrated correctly to make invasions last many turns so the player has the chance to adapt & reinforce rather than instantly win or lose.
Filed under: War Footing · dev blog · 26 May 2026