Damage Over Distance

7 min readApr 24, 2021

A comparison of damage over distance for the same submachine gun, the UMP45, in four different games.

CS = Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012)
WZ = Call of Duty: Warzone (2020)
R6 = Rainbow Six Siege (2014)
BF3 = Battlefield 3 (2011)

Damage Falloff

Damage Falloff is a mechanic that reduces the damage of attacks at long distances. It’s a common mechanic in all sorts of first-person and third-person shooter games, realistic or not. Damage falloff is pretty simple and in most cases, it’s true to real-life ballistics:

The further a projectile travels before hitting a target, the less damage the projectile will do.

All of the video games analyzed in this piece exaggerate how quickly bullet energy decays: games like Battlefield 5 (2018) have pistols and submachine guns that do significantly less damage after 25 meters, and for some reason, only marksman rifles and sniper rifles are effective at distances greater than 75 or 100 meters. It’s not realistic, but that isn’t the point: exaggerating damage falloff for different weapon types gives game developers more options for refining a game’s balance and level design. In practice, a variety of different damage falloffs creates specializations for different weapon types: shotguns and SMGs excel at short-range ambushes, light machine guns for suppressing snipers, rifles are great at forcing players into medium and long range encounters. Specialization makes room for different weapon types to be useful.

So let’s dive into how our selected games apply damage falloff.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Every Counter-Strike title including the newest, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012), use a model of exponential decline for applying damage falloff. This is a fairly realistic implementation, and it’s what you’d expect: as the projectiles travels further, the damage it deals is reduced.

WeaponDamage = BaseDamage * [RangeModifier ^ (Distance(u)/500u)]u = Hammer Editor Units 
500u = ~9.525 metersExample: a MAC-10 has a weapon damage of 29 and a range modifier of 0.80. At 0 units, it will deal the base 29 points of damage. At 128 units (2.44m), damage drops off to 27 (after rounding). At 512 units (9.75m), damage drops off to 23.

The higher the RangeModifier value, the less weapon damage falloff over distance. Shotguns (xm1014), pistols (usp_silencer) and submachine guns (mac10) have lower RangeModifier values than rifles, and their damage falloff is much more severe than rifles. Rifles and light machine guns are designed to outperform other weapons at long ranges.

The subtle damage falloff for rifles make them much more effective at long ranges than SMGs.

This implementation of damage falloff seems to work pretty well: Counter-Strike has been using it for around 20 years now.

If you’re interested, you can find a list of all the weapons values and more in this CSGO Weapon Spreadsheet.

Rainbow Six Siege

Rainbow Six Siege (2014) and many other games use a piecewise application of damage falloff. This means that damage falloff is only applied at specific ranges. From what I’ve seen, most shooters that use piecewise formulas apply damage falloff linearly.

"Simple Damage Equation" (excludes barrel attachment modifiers)WeaponDamage = BaseDamage − [RangeModifier ∗ ((Distance − FalloffStart)/(FalloffEnd − FalloffStart))]Example: a AK-74M has a base damage of 44 and a range modifier of 18. At 0 meters, it will deal the base 44 points of damage. At 30 meters, damage drops off to 34 (rounding down). At 35 or more meters, damage drops off to 26.

As shown in the chart above, the damage of both the AK-74M and AR-15.50 begins to decrease when a shot is further than 25 meters. An AK-74M’S damage continues to decrease until 35 meters while the AR-15.50 has a longer falloff at 40 meters. However, the AK-74M’s decrease in damage is more severe: ~41% damage reduction compared to the AR-15.50’s ~19% damage reduction. Also worth noting: all Siege’s bullet damage falloff is applied linearly.

Comparison of multiple weapon types in Siege. The SPAS-12 shotgun fires 8 pellets per shot. Damage values in the chart above represent only a single pellet. Another note: shotgun pellets disappear after 40 meters and do not deal damage.

In practice, Siege’s falloff implementation shares a lot of similarities to Counter-Strike: rifles outperform other weapons at long distances (over 18 meters) while Shotguns/SMGs are meant for close range (under 18 meters). Sure, the high-caliber D-50 pistol does greater damage than the other weapons, but the severity of its falloff, its large recoil, and its low rate of fire are large drawbacks.

Another thing to note is that the ranges for damage falloff in Siege all fall within the 4–40 meter range. While weapons do allow for greater ranges than 40 meters, the falloff range suggests that the core of the game’s weapon balance is built around close-to-medium range encounters.

For a more detailed look at Rainbow Six Siege’s damage calculations (including armor, bullet penetration, and weapon attachments), check out my wiki article on Damage Numbers.

Battlefield series

Battlefield 3 (2011) also uses a piecewise application of damage falloff that looks similar to Siege. Once again, damage falloff is applied linearly, but given the larger map sizes of the Battlefield series, damage falloff is stretched across greater distances. The ranges for damage falloff are within the 8–120 meter range: 3x the total range of Siege.

As a result of larger maps and ranges, BF3's weapons are more specialized. Close-range weapons like submachine guns greatly outperform automatic rifles under 25 meters in a way that you don’t see in CS:GO and Siege. If compare the UMP45 vs. AK-74M (SMG vs. Auto Rifle) from the chart above , the UMP45 capable of delivering more damage up 25 meters. The UMP45 also has less spread and recoil. However, at 40 meters, the UMP has lost 65% of it’s base damage dealing 12.5 damage vs. AK-74M’s 20 damage.

Battlefield 5 (2018) is a step-up in complexity: instead of applying damage falloff as a single linear interval, it has multiple intervals with different severity.

While the STEN looks like an exponential curve starting at 10 meters, it’s actually multiple linear reductions starting at 10, 20, 30, 50, 75, and 100 meters. The M1 Garand’s is also made up of multiple linear reductions at 25, 30, 50, 75, 100 meters, but its line graph is a bit more jagged: notice the sudden drops at 25 and 100 meters. To me, the M1 Garand’s graph makes me think that the designers found an urgent need to make the gun more powerful at close range to compete against submachine guns. Thus it’s not that the M1 Garand is worsened at medium range but rather that it needed and received a big bump for close ranges.

Call of Duty: Warzone

The Call of Duty series does away with the gradual, linear falloff and applies immediate, stepwise reductions to damage. It’s the least realistic implementation, but definitely the easiest to visualize and draw.

Instead of weapons gradually becoming less effective over distance, damage is reduced at different intervals (depending on the weapon, of course). The Striker 45 SMG has damage falloff first applied at 22.5 meters, and more severe falloff at 40 and 50 meters.

ZBor Gaming, https://zborgaming.com/modern-warfare-information/damage-range-comps/

For me, the stepwise implementation is a bit easier to keep track of and easier to design around: it eliminates that grey area of guessing whether or not guns are doing full damage or a reduced damage.

Comparisons

So there you have it: different games, different damage falloff implementations. While these graphs are fun to look at, they don’t convey the full picture. There are a lot of complex mechanics underlying weapon balance. Player armor and healing, bullet penetration of walls/objects, locational damage bonuses and penalties (headshots), weapon recoil/spread/rate of fire/handling/etc., hip-firing vs. aiming down sights, and more: these are just some of the major mechanics that just aren’t in the scope of this article.

And if we were to put together something that contained weapons from different games on the same chart, there would be a lot of ways to misinterpret the data.

But okay, sure. With that caveat: here’s a view of what damage falloff looks like when it’s applied to (almost) the same guns in different games.