Executing "setDamage" on a building of type e.g. "Land_Church_01_V1_F" does not have any visible effect. The building will have the damage, but it won't be visibly damaged or even collapse when executing "setDamage 1".
This works on all other buildings though, even other types of churches.
1.) Aim at a building of type e.g. "Land_Church_01_V1_F"
2.) Execute <i>cursorTarget setDamage 1</i>
3.) Nothing happens
4.) Execute <i>hintSilent format ["%1", damage cursorTarget]</i>
-> damage of the building is 1.
Affected building classes:
(thanks to the comments)
The way enviromental destruction ArmA works is through building models. The most common building models you'll find are the standard model, the damaged model and the destroyed model. Once a building has taken enough damage the game will execute a script which will play an animation (usually sinking down into the ground, but in the case of cranes, it will fall over) and create a cloud of smoke, replacing the standard/damaged model with a destroyed one.
Unfortunately, in the case of churches, there's no destroyed model of the building, and therefore no script. This also goes for other buildings like Office Buildings, the Ghost Hotel and the Military Offices.
It would be nice to see those models and scripts implemented though, so I'll graciously offer you my upvote.
Voting for the same reason as denis above. Might be nice to change this to a feature request for those damaged models to be implemented.
This problem is the same for Military offices (as in Stratis airfield). There's a choice to be done between plenty of realistic models and a quota of models for scenery. And the problem is... FPS.