Why do we have armor?

RickEdwards, on Aug 23 2021 - 16:15, said:   Talking about ignorance and then saying all this is quite ironic.   First off, let me say that some gold ammo is basically necessary for this game. Those are the gold rounds in tanks below tier 10. There is simply no logical reason for a tank that never has to fight up tiers to have a round with more penetration; it makes the game completely unbalanceable. Without gold ammo at tier 10, tier 10 could at least be balanced quite well and fairly easily. As such, I will be talking about gold ammo at tier 10.   Gold ammo being situational is actually complete BS. It's just mathematically wrong. The amount of penetration increase you get with gold HEAT ammo is so massive that it completely counteracts any disadvantages it gets when attacking space/sloped armor. The chance to penetrate will either be the same (when they're both 0%), or greater than their respective normal AP/APCR ammo.   When talking about velocity, I assume you're talking of APCR. APCR also gets greatly increased penetration in addition to that shell velocity.   Next we have the "20-30 mm extra" you claim. I assume you were referring to lower tiers, but at tier 10 you generally get more like 40-60 mm, and this is actually a ridiculous amount when you consider how armor and shell penetration actually interact: usually if a normal round can't penetrate an area of a tank, it still has a fairly small chance to high roll its pen value and pen. The game is designed (if you ignore gold ammo), for the most part, to have many areas of a tanks that will be rarely penned by normal ammo. For an example, we'll look at, IDK a Maus turret face and we'll shoot one of the weaker gold ammo at it, the Kranvagn's HEAT. Maus turret straight on with APCR has about a 44% chance to penetrate at most; if we switch to HEAT, it has about a 77% chance to penetrate. You go from not penetrating very often to usually penetrating, and this is with a "weak" gold round. Now let's look at a strong one: the WZ 111 5A. AP: 42% chance; HEAT: about a 97% chance. You go from usually not penning to a basically guaranteed penetration.   Now of course the Maus turret is generally angled so it has more effective armor, but even angled the HEAT will still have a greater chance of penetration. You can even look at something with spaced armor, like an S. conq's upper hull and you will still see the HEAT having a better chance at every angle. They are simply an objectively, mathematically better round in every situation, whether they are HEAT or APCR. Although they have some place in lower tiers when people are forced to fight up 2 tiers, they have absolutely no place at tier 10.