“TIGEEERRRR!” You hear your gunner scream. You swing your head forward and see not the square silhouette of the dreaded Tiger, but the slopes of a… Panther? Still pretty bad news, but thank God it’s not a Tiger. Your shining new M26 Pershing, fresh from a General Motors factory in the United States, is a fine piece of American engineering, but your experience tells you not to underestimate your opponent.
The enemy doesn’t know you’re there. “Gunner, smoke, fire!”. The “Panther”, confused, tries to back away from the smoke, but you order your gunner to follow up with a 90mm shot, certain it will penetrate even the Panther’s thick front slope.
From behind the smoke, you notice a heart-sinking sight: The huge 90mm shell your gunner fired bounced off. As far as you know, the Germans only have one other tank with both sloping armor and a full turret. Just your bad luck, that’s no Panther, nor a mere Tiger, but a King Tiger! As impossibly rare in Western Europe as it is hideously deadly. You tell your gunner to fire again! And again! And again, through the smoke, against the enemy that can’t see you, and thankfully can’t shoot back for it.
Finally, you see an explosion and a turret fly. Sloped plates, but much bigger than a Panther turret. Relieved at the end of such an epic, gut-wrenching duel, your tank presses forward… Only to get blown up by an artillery barrage. You shoulda’ used those wrenches instead of scrimping at red HP! Oh well, back to the garage. Welcome to Armored Heroes!
Armored Heroes is a fairly simple World War 2 tank sidescroller with an emphasis on aiming arcing shots and evading attacks from above through the use of smoke shells. You can move forward and backward, aim your gun up or down, and using the terrain, you can either hide your tank from enemy shots or force the enemy to aim at a bad angle, causing their shot to bounce.
That being said, we’re not gonna lie here, Smoke shells make the game incredibly easy as long as you use them fast. Though they might put a dent in your Accuracy score at the end of a level if there are enough planes in the air forcing you to pop smoke on the floor.
Most of your brain power will be used trying to figure out how to squeeze as much profit from a kill as possible since your tanks all draw from the same pool of ammo while enemies give the same reward for killing them no matter how big, menacing, tiny, or pathetic they are. Both are what we’re here to help you with!
COMBAT TIPS
It’s the Second World War, and you have a tank! What will you do with that tank? Drive all the way to Berlin and blow other tanks to bits of course! For a simple side-scrolling shooter, there are quite a few things to keep in mind when driving and shooting with your tank.
From worrying about planes and artillery to making use of the terrain and taking advantage of smoke rounds, there’s a lot you can do to make your life easier and turn the enemy tank crews into astronauts with their burning turrets as spacecraft. You can even smash into other tanks if you’re too much of a cheapskate to shoot the target one last time. Here are some notes on general tank combat.
Finally Got The Big Tank? Watch For Planes!
One weakness the big boys have when compared to the starter tanks: Being big fat heavy tanks in an era before MBTs, they’re quite slow. This is no problem against other tanks, but this quickly becomes bad news once you see a plane flying overhead! Bomb damage is based on how far away you are from the point of impact, and tanks like Tigers, Pershings, and JS-2s will usually take a lot more damage from them than a Chaffee, Panzer III, or BT-7 running at full tilt away from the bomb.
They also have it rough against artillery, since their big hitboxes might cause them to take damage from two shells at once. While they can take it at full HP without upgrades, it’ll still be a blow to your Wrench stockpile. As a heavy tank, you’ll have to use Smoke Shells to avoid them. Fire them at the ground and hide before the plane makes its drop!
Hull Down!
Fighting hull down is a real-life tank combat tactic where you basically take cover using your tank: You roll up a hill or incline, with your gun pointing down just above the hill or incline’s top so the enemy only sees your gun and not the rest of your hull.
It’s very useful in this game since you will often find small hills you can take cover with. This is especially important early in the game when all you have is your light starter tank since the usual smoke and charge tactic is a tad more expensive when used with a light tank rather than a heavy tank.
Eyes In The Air, Gun Down, Smoke Loaded
Just like in real life, the biggest threat to your tank isn’t other tanks: It’s the Luftwaffe! In most maps, your tank is under threat from aircraft. Planes will occasionally fly in and drop a bomb on your tank, and the damage it causes is based on the distance between the explosion and your tank, with a direct hit often killing even the heaviest of tanks.
You have two ways to deal with this: Keep your gun pointed down and your smoke shells loaded to hide from planes once they appear, or try to get the Wolverine tank destroyer instead of the Pershing: While the Pershing has the biggest gun of the American tank set, the Wolverine is the fastest tank in the set and its gun is big enough to remain cost-efficient. Armor also doesn’t matter as much as one would think if you use your smoke shells effectively against planes and tanks.
Ramming Speed!
Even with your puniest little starter tank, ramming enemies is a viable way to finish them off, though certainly not a good way to start a fight and far more viable using heavy tanks with armor upgrades. Ramming attacks damage both you and your enemy, though the damage you suffer by ramming the enemy is dependent on the target’s HP: The less the target’s HP, the less damage you take by ramming them.
This lets you save on ammo, especially for heavier machines like the Pershing or JS-2, since you’ll often find that the last shell it takes to kill your target for good might be a tad overkill. If you had smoked your opponent beforehand, which you should always do, ramming should be easy to pull off as a finishing move.
THE QUADRUPLE S: SLOW, SMOKE, SPEED, SMASH
Once the game lets you use Smoke Shells, the game gets much easier even with the adorably pathetic starter tanks available to you: It allows you to play in such a way that you are very safe against enemy attack, taking at most one hit from your target if you mess this up and no hits at all when done perfectly.
All this, while not being nearly as hard on the wallet as the admittedly even simpler solution, splurging on AP shells. Drive slowly until you spot the enemy, smoke them, close in, then smash them to pieces up close while they’re still smoked.
Using this sequence of moves, you can pretty much take down all enemy tanks provided you don’t get surprised by planes or artillery, and quick thinking will let this protect you from planes at least. If artillery in particular is a problem you may want to take step 3 more carefully. And note that you will be doing all these steps in the span of a few seconds!
SLOW: Take It Slowly, Driver!
Ideally, you should move across the map fairly slowly and carefully, or at least be really alert and ready to stop on a dime: You can spot enemy tanks at the very edge of the screen, and usually, the tank has to be in full view before it attacks. Moving slowly and carefully also gives you time to react to sudden surprises such as artillery, air attacks, and rolling barrel bombs.
That being said, an enemy tank that is visible at the edge of the screen but isn’t close enough to get aggressive with you is invulnerable until it starts moving. Seeing them before they’re in aggro range lets you open up safely and early with the next move:
SMOKE: Gunner, Load Smoke, Fire!
Once you see the enemy tank at the edge of your screen, fire a smoke shot either directly at the enemy tank or anywhere in between you and that tank. This makes it so the enemy tank can’t see you once you get in aggro range, so it can’t shoot you but you can shoot it back.
This is important since enemy tanks tend to be very quick draws on flat terrain, and you’ll almost never get the first shot in unless you smoke preemptively. Once the target’s vision is obscured, it’s time to close in for the kill.
SPEED: Close In, Full Speed!
Once you’ve smoked your target, tell your driver to put his foot on the gas and close in! While the smoke is obscuring your target’s vision, they won’t shoot at you even if you get in their face, but you can. Going up close to a smoke-blinded target will ensure you hit all your shots, saving you ammo and money.
This is especially useful if you’re driving a heavy tank like the Pershing since you can bring your giant gun to bear with minimal effort and no brainpower required without being made vulnerable by your slower reload speed compared to rapid-fire money wasters like the Chaffee. Also, the heavy armor of thicker tanks makes mistakes like letting the enemy fire before you throw smoke at them more forgiving.
SMASH: Gunner! Open Fire!
The final step, of course, is to load up your basic HE ammo and blow your target to hell! While the smoke blinds the enemy tank, hammer the enemy with close-range shots to ensure you waste as little ammo as possible, and if you can keep a habit of shooting smoke directly at enemy tanks rather than aiming at the ground between you and them, to maintain your accuracy rating.
The enemy tank will be unable to fight back, and if you’re both in the smoke cloud, not even air support can save the poor guy from your point-blank beatdown. You can even finish them off with a ramming attack to scrimp on that last shot if their HP is low!
LOGISTICAL THOUGHTS
Combat and blowing things up is all well and good, but most of your thoughts will be out of the field, particularly your supply management: You’ve got two kinds of supplies to keep an eye on and 3 currencies: Wrenches for Repairs, Ammo for sending tanks to the scrapyard, and you have Silver Wolves as a basic currency, Lightbulbs for tank upgrades, and Coins for premium currency.
The game has a few odd quirks when it comes to earning Silver Wolves and Lightbulbs in particular: Ammo costs the same per shot as all tanks draw from the same ammo pool, but this also means they deal different damage.
Mixed with the fact killing a lil’ baby Panzer II (A tank barely a step better than an Italian machinegun tankette, armed with a minuscule 20mm autocannon) gives you the same reward as knocking out the infinitely more ominous King Tiger (A giant monstrosity with a nasty 88mm Beer Party Blaster and such immensely heavy armor that its main foe was the rapidly imploding German economy and fuel supply), this means better damage per shot is immediately better. Here are some notes to elaborate on this, along with some tips for grinding more easily.
Gun First, Then Armor, and Engine
The best defense is a quick smoke shell to the enemy’s face. This makes DPS (firing speed, as opposed to general damage-per-second like in other games) your first priority for upgrades, if only because you can’t upgrade damage per hit except by buying a bigger tank with a bigger gun. The faster your gun can reload, the faster you can follow up your smoke shot with HE shots to finish the enemy off before the smoke clears.
Afterward, you have a choice between Armor and Engine upgrades. Both Armor and Engine are good defensive stats with different advantages: Armor is generally better for fighting enemy tanks and surviving artillery since it allows you to safely tank a shot or two in case you move in a bit too fast and the enemy tank fires before you can smoke them.
Upgrading the engine makes it easier to evade planes without using smoke shells, as the damage a plane makes is based on the bomb’s distance to your tank: If your tank is fast enough, you can cut a whopping 300 damage to 150 damage, or even no damage if you manage to zoom down a hill at top speed. Speed also helps you position your tank in between shells during artillery attacks to avoid excessive damage.
Early Levels for Easy Lightbulbs
The Lightbulbs you need to upgrade your tanks are rewarded based on your shot accuracy percentage. The reward doesn’t go up even if you’re in missions where you have tons of strong enemy tanks to shoot, thus giving you more opportunities to miss.
Going hand in hand with our tip to skip all other tanks in favor of the final tank available for its huge gun, you can use the aforementioned tank to easily farm Lightbulbs by bullying early levels: Early missions typically only have very few fairly weak tanks, and being able to one-shot enemies while shrugging off hits means you can simply roll toward that Panzer II or III plinking you with its peashooter, blow it up at point-blank range, do the same for the next 5 tanks, and now you get paid for a 100% accuracy rating.
Note that you get fewer Silver Wolves-per-mission for this, though it’s also an ammo-efficient way to make Silver Wolves since you’re firing fewer shells for the same reward per kill.
Pick A Campaign, And Save For The Tank With The Biggest Gun
While you’re in your M24 Chaffee, your first goal is to get enough Silver Wolves and Coins (Golden Eagles except they don’t want to pick a fight with Gaijin’s War Thunder!) to nab yourself either a Pershing, a JS-2, a King Tiger, or at least a Wolverine, KV-1 or Panther if you prefer safety from bombs instead of raw unadulterated gun girth and tank dueling ability.
Ironically, those big heavy real-life logistical headaches are highly cost-effective in Armored Heroes thanks to how ammo prices and kill rewards work: A kill pays 1 Silver Wolf (2 if you watch an ad at the end of a map) whether or not the kill was a big fat King Tiger or a teeny tiny Panzer II, and all your tanks use the same ammo pool.
A bigger gun means efficient grinding since you’ll pay less for replacing lost ammo when compared to upgrading to the midtier tanks or staying with the starters forever. They’ll pay for themselves relatively quickly, allowing you to buy the rest of the tanks and their Silver Wolf paint jobs too!
Earning Speed or Ammo Efficiency?
One beautiful thing about Heavy Tanks like the Pershing is their ability to kill anything smaller than a Panzer IV in one shot. Since dead Tigers pay the same as dead Panzer IIs, this means grinding earlier levels, particularly anything with lots of lighter tanks in it, becomes a very cost-efficient way to make Silver Lions, though the smaller numbers of tanks in early levels also means you have to watch more ads.
The alternative is the complete opposite: Later levels typically carry 20-35 tanks as opposed to early missions only typically having 5 tanks each, though you’re spending more ammo and therefore more Silver Wolves per kill since some of them might be pretty fat targets like Tigers, or you might need to spend Smoke shells on planes.
Instead, you spend less time watching ads to get a big bulk reward, with a mere 10 or so runs with ads getting you a Pershing’s worth of Silver Wolves. Your preference mostly depends on whether you want money fast with as few ads as possible, or if you prefer taking it slow but spending less money per kill.
Damage per Shot Saves Money
A far more important and hidden stat than the DPS stat is a tank’s damage per shot. This is for two simple reasons: HE Ammo costs the same whether it’s shot from a JS-2’s massive 100mm Farm Collectivizatron 5000 or a BT-7’s dinky little 45mm popgun. This makes tanks with bigger guns like Pershing, Wolverines, and JS-2s much more cost-effective in the long run while farming since they don’t spend so much on ammo refills.
This makes the DPS stat in the garage rather misleading: As an example, the Chaffee with upgrades can surpass the Sherman and even match the Pershing in its raw DPS, but you’ll be spending more money killing tanks than if you used a Wolverine’s long 76mm Anti-Tank Surprise than the Chafee’s low velocity but faster firing short 75mm Just-Okay Launcher.
Treat the DPS Stat as a Fire Rate upgrade, since it doesn’t improve a tank’s damage per shot, only its maximum firing speed, which might be a detriment if you whiff a barrage of shots with your Chaffee! If you’re not familiar with tank specs before getting into the game, the only way to know which has a big high damage-per-shot gun is to give each tank a test, though you can always be very sure that the last, most expensive tank in a set has the biggest gun in the batch!
AMMO TYPES
You have 3 types of ammo. HE Rounds, Smoke Shots, and AP Rounds. Of these 3, you’ll use 2 if you want absolute monetary efficiency and safety, Smoke followed by a barrage of HE rounds. AP rounds on the other hand, are there if you have Silver Wolves to burn and just want to unwind in a most violent manner. Here are the ammo types in greater detail.
High Explosive
HE rounds are your bread and butter, able to kill lighter tanks in one or two shots, but they take about 5-8 or so shots to get through big cats like the Tiger and Panther if you’re using something like an M24 Chafee. Their biggest strength is their low cost: You get 10 shots for every Silver Wolf you spend.
This means even with the Chaffee, Panzer III, or BT-7, killing heavy tanks by spamming HE at them is still cost-effective since you’re spending maybe a bit over half a Silver Wolf (Maybe 3/4 of a Wolf if you start with a smoke shot) to get 2 Silver Wolves for every kill, provided you watch ads.
Remember, that’s with a light tank’s peashooter, and something like an M26 Pershing’s extremely long 90mm High-Velocity Declaration of Independence can make this even more cost-effective! With heavier tanks, HE can one-shot lighter tanks, leave medium tanks so badly crippled you can ram them with no risk, and kill even the most terrifying armored wonderwaffle death machines with 3-5 shots! Assuming you don’t mess up your aim of course.
Smoke Shell
The most powerful round in the game but for reasons other than damage, Smoke Rounds stop enemy tanks from shooting back at you as long as the burning white phosphorus smoke it contains obscures the line of sight between you and them. It even works on planes, as you can cancel bombing runs by hiding in a smoke cloud before the plane makes its drop! Artillery doesn’t care though, since they fire indiscriminately at you and the enemy.
At 3 shots for every Silver Wolf you pay, they’re very cost-efficient: Fire one at a tank, then beat them to death with HE rounds at close range while the smoke is out, and you’ve killed even a Panther or Tiger tank without breaking the bank and at little risk to yourself and with minimal aiming skill, even with a starter tank’s pathetically puny money launcher. Fire them quickly to stop the enemy, then blow them up however you wish.
Armor Piercing
A highly damaging but cost-ineffective round, AP ammo is meant as a tool to get you unstuck from a mission and nab a Golden Eagle. Er, a Coin we mean. You can kill most tanks in one or two shots with it even with something as puny as a Chaffee, but it costs one whole Silver Wolf for a single shot:
Considering you only get paid 2 Wolves for every tank you kill if you watch ads, you’re basically throwing money at the enemy! They become massively overkill when loaded into something like a Pershing, so use them if you want to have some fun, especially since at that rate they are suddenly able to at least pay for themselves even against heavy tanks.
That being said, your own heavy tanks make them a bit pointless since such tanks can kill even other heavy tanks in 3-5 shots using HE rounds, and everything else in one shot. If you’re firing AP, you better not miss!
ENEMY TYPES
The best kind of enemy is one that’s on fire.
Armored Heroes is a simple game, with only a few enemy types, though each type may have some variety in them. The biggest threat of them all is artillery since there is little you can do but try to dodge, while everything else turns stupid the second you hide in a smoke cloud! here are the enemy types in the game.
Towed/Entrenched Guns
The simplest enemy in the game, Towed Guns and Entrenched Guns are stationary weapons, basically “tanks” that cannot move on their own. They appear often in early missions of any campaign, usually being a big threat compared to lower-tier enemy tanks since they typically have nastier guns but poor HP. Eventually, though, they’re supplanted by bigger tanks in most later missions.
Tanks
You’re not the only one commanding a tank! Enemy Tanks can come in all shapes and sizes based on real-life tanks, such as the tiny little Panzer II all the way to the vaunted square silhouette of the much dreaded Tiger, and even some wonderwaffle logistical headaches like the King Tiger!
Each tank performs differently too, with lighter tanks typically having faster but weaker guns and pathetic armor, and monsters like the Tiger can easily blow off a chunk of HP from even your equally terrifying M26 Pershing if you’re not careful. That being said, AI-wise, they’re all the same: They are invincible at the edge of the screen until they see and engage you, but will never go back to being invincible even if you drive backward far away from them.
They cannot shoot if there is smoke between them and your tank, and they will try to back off if you drive too close to them but seldom move fast enough to avoid getting rammed even if they’re in a Panzer II and you’re in a slow, thick Pershing or JS-2. Take advantage of their AI to kill them!
Aircraft
The second most annoying thing in the game behind artillery, Aircraft will occasionally swoop in at predetermined spots in maps and drop a huge bomb on your tank. They’re a pain especially since the game encourages you heavily to use fatter tanks, which don’t evade bombs so well, though armor upgrades quickly make them less of a problem.
There are only two sure-fire ways to avoid a bombing run: Fire a smoke round and hide in the smoke cloud before the plane drops its bomb, or save 20 Coins to buy one of the camos with a No Airstrike icon, which hides you from aircraft.
You can also try to run away from the bomb as fast as you can, but that’s very risky and you could find yourself avoiding the bomb only to run into a tank before you could smoke it! Aerial damage is also dependent on campaign progress: Later levels in a campaign often have planes that hit much harder than planes in early levels!
Rolling Barrels
These little things will probably kill you the first time they appear, but never again once you become aware of their existence. Occasionally, a red barrel or several will roll toward your tank, inflicting extreme damage on impact.
They have very low HP though, and even a Pershing will fire fast enough to get through several of them provided you upgrade its gun, and they drop Wrench boxes like any other ground enemy when killed. You’ll think they’re scary early on, but once you get used to them, they might as well be free repairs!
Artillery
The most annoying thing in the game but also something that can occasionally be helpful, enemy Artillery will often bombard your whole screen indiscriminately from off-map, with the shell’s landing spots marked out so you can dodge them.
Unlike bombs, smoke will not protect you from artillery, but each shell hurts a bit less than a bomb on a direct hit, and their area of effect is smaller and their damage falloff greater: You ideally want to look for a wide space between shells in the barrage and stick your tank in there.
Too narrow and you’ll either eat a direct shell hit or get damaged by 2 AOEs at once. The best part about artillery barrages? They can also hit enemy tanks, and unlike you, the AI isn’t smart enough to get out of the way!
And this ends our Armored Heroes beginner’s guide. We hope this helps you roll all over the enemy. If you have your own tips, share them in the comments below!