[DEVBLOG#246] Meet the Badger!

Hey everyone! Thanks a lot for the hundreds of name suggestions we have received for the brand new Infantry Fighting Vehicle coming to Tier 3.

Among the dozens of 'Chadleys' which I honestly would've picked, but they were a bit on the nose, I have decided to go with the Badger.

It sounds... not the same as Bradley, but the vehicle itself fits the name of the Badger. It's fast, it's vicious, it packs a punch, attacks very rapidly and can generally turn to ash if shot by a designated tank.

I have therefore prepared some cool infographics!

Badger has a really cool cannon. It's not long-ranged or anything like it, but it fires bursts of 5 shots with low spread radius and 1.9 tile detonation radius. Explosions deal only 22 damage (compared to 55 of normal tanks), and have 0 armor piercing (compared to 20% of armor piercing on tanks) - but this makes them excellent when facing enemy infantry. A badger fires 5 shot bursts in quick succession, but they can also be made to fire single shots which are way more precise - only 0.9 spread compared to 2.9 of the burst shot.

It feels very... aggressive, when I playtested it. It's fast and it covers a small area in small detonations. I can imagine two badgers being able to easily deal with most tribal raids.

It's not very well armored in general, but the sides and the front are protected by 100 HP of thick armor plating which should absorb most small arms fire. However, if that is stripped off by enemy gunfire, the Badger really needs to stay mobile, as due to low sharp armor even small arms fire might stand a chance at piercing it and wounding the crew.

It is only capable of carrying 2 passengers on top of a driver and a gunner, as we want to still make LAV useful, despite LAV not having any offensive capabilities due to only having a smoke grenade launcher.

We have recently found a way to attach verbs to vehicles (which is coming to VVE base mod if any of you want to make your own vehicles with verbs). What that means is that both the Badger and Marshal tank will now be able to utilise the pop smoke ability - it blankets a large area around them in blindsmoke, which prevents enemy turrets from locking on, and makes it so that most fired projectiles have a chance to miss.

Due to how the mod is coded right now, this does not affect vehicles. For now it's an advantage for you - your badger can still fire accurately, despite the smoke. When enemies start using vehicles though, it will mean that they will still be able to target you accurately.

And of course, you can find and restore the badger to learn how to construct them. In fact, it shares the research project with the LAV, which means restoring either of them will allow you to craft both of them!

As mentioned before, vehicle wrecks spawn by the side of the roads, so next time you're adventuring through the ancient highways, take a moment to admire and possibly reconstruct all the cool new vehicles!