See, I think it would be much cooler cinematically if they could never get through the armor but enough lucky shots could take out all the weapons, shields, crew compartments, and leaving it a floating defenseless shell. Or score a few good hits on the reactor itself and watch it go critical with full armor up (which should be harder to do)
Yup, and all of that is exactly why I agreed with your suggestion about changing how crits work! It would work better than the current system for game balance, and would be more satisfying from a fluff perspective.
Awesome, now we just need to convince cliffski
I dont want crits to be this potentially devastating, but Im too tired to form a coherent arguement against it right now. Also I might have misunderstood this whole page entirely. I’ll take another run at this tomorrow.
Well, we’re talking about specific crits, which are the ones that are for a chance to hit to count when you could not otherwise penetrate armor (laser fighters vs cruisers with 10+ armor.) If those crits were to affect systems instead of armor it would actually be less devastating because it would only damage a subsystem instead of bringing the armor down to a place where the fighter lasers just destroy a cruiser.
Hmm, at first I wondered if this is always true. It depends on how the ship’s armor absorption compares to the hit points of its other modules. Checking over a few of my designs, it looks like letting criticals through to the internal components would indeed be better for almost all of them.
One older design comes somewhat close: a super armor tank that has 57 average armor. I’m not exactly sure what it’s total armor absorption is because the average armor value displayed doesn’t seem to take the stacking penalty into account, but I think it’s either 859 or 970 damage points. It would take either 738 or 834 points of critical hit damage for fighters to break that tank, after which the ship would die pretty fast, since it would begin taking damage 50 times more DPS from the fighters than when it’s armor was working.
The other modules of that ship give it 1150 hp. If the 730+ damage went through the armor to them, they’d be severely damaged, but many (most?) would still be functioning, and since the armor would not have be harmed, it would continue to reduce the damage the ship receives to the 2% from critical hits. The only question I can’t judge is how well the internal modules would be functioning while they are damaged. Is having a damaged module over a longer time better than having an undamaged one for a shorter time?
This thread’s random rambling and back-and-forth arguing seems to be moving towards constructive conclusions 
Having thought about this all a bit more, I think the whole “lucky shot” principle might be a good one. Rather than something being a critical hit, doing bonus damage or having guaranteed penetration, there is instead a small chance that the weapon shot struck a key component rather than the armour protecting it. In this case the damage is applied directly to a random module (except armour plating of course). However, no hull damage should be applied. A heavily armoured cruiser could never be destroyed outright by peashooters no matter how many times they fired at it, but could be crippled completely.
Module health would need a good bit of balancing for this, turrets would logically have a fairly enormous amount of health (common sense would say turrets couldn’t really be damaged by light fire, but good gameplay says it should be possible), while scanner systems, shield generators, power generators etc. wouldn’t have much at all. It would open the door for more modules like the reinforced power generator II and reinforced crew module, with module durability suddenly being a far more significant concern. And new tactical options, like having beam only cruisers/frigates, while sending in fast fighters to knock out enemy shields from inside. Perhaps new orders too, being able to target specific modules would probably be a bit harsh, but perhaps the ability to target weapons or subsystems specifically.
Edit: Just saw from another thread that module hp and hull hp are one and the same. That half-shoots down my idea :P, though assuming armour hp counts, a ship could still be turned into a burning, useless hulk without being destroyed.
Gotcha. Only thing I’ll say then is bear in mind module HP represents = hull HP.
FWIW, and I know I’m veering dangerously back towards arguing about realism here, weapons typically are actually quite delicate, high-precision pieces of equipment. The turrets might be largely clad in armor, but obviously somewhere there’s going to be the business end of a weapon poking out. Melting even a small part of the end of a gun barrel, say, or the opening of a missile tube, or a targeting sensor, etc. would pose a serious problem for the weapon in question.
But of course, the real question is, how should it work in the game? And I agree that weapons would need to be subject to lucky hits just like any other non-armor module in this scheme. Maybe they’d need more health, maybe not - that’s a fine-tuning balancing question that would have to be addressed through planning and playtesting.
Yeah, it would work fine, as long as there’s some armor somewhere on the ship to hold the internal wreck together!
Actually, it might be good if the proposed system turned out to be a net disadvantage to that super-tank. That would be another tradeoff for making a ship that’s almost impenetrable by standard ship-to-ship weapons. At the very least, we’d go from the current state of affairs where lightly-armed strafing fighters are a serious menace to the large bulk of mainstream cruiser designs to where they were only an inordinate threat to more unusual niche designs. :-/ I don’t see it being a big deal, though.
Hmm, out of curiosity, I just did some math to see how long it would take to do 730 damage via fighter crit. Assuming I have this right, it would take a minimum of 2.5 minutes of sustained attack by a full squad of 16 fighters:
730 / 5 (avg. fighter laser dmg., between pulse and regular) = 146 crits needed
146 * 50 = 7300 shots fired at 2% crit rate
7300 / 3 shots per second, approx = 2433 seconds
2433 / 16 fighters per squad = 152 seconds, or 2.53 minutes.
That’s assuming every single shot fired hits the armor, which is never the case. Between misses and shield reflections, I think 2/3rds is about the best hit rate you can possibly hope for. As noted, I also used the average damage of the two fighter laser options, but most people are mounting the regular laser, which only does 4 damage. So, realistically, it would probably take more like 3.5 or 4 minutes to do 730 damage worth of crits. That’s quite a long time in game terms, and it wouldn’t even totally slag your ship, which you said has 1150 non-armor HP.
Of course, most regular cruisers would have substantially more non-armor HP than that - probably almost twice as much(?). So, most likely, it would take something like 8 minutes of continuous strafing for one squad of fighters to thoroughly trash a normal cruiser. That seems more than reasonable, maybe even too long!
No, it wouldn’t, because the super-tank is currently COMPLETELY USELESS.
When even a cruiser with no weapons, just engines, armor, and a small shield, falls 10s after its shields go down, you know armor is not a worthwhile investment.
I might make another entire thread about why armor is not very good right now. But I would like to point out one thing:
Crew Module III: 145 HP, 139 cost, 145 weight 2.00 power (almost nothing)
Ultraheavy armor: 126 absorbable, 261 cost, 160 weight, 0.00 power.
Ok, assuming that you can’t actually get enough armor on your ship to actually deflect a significant amount of damage, it is better to use a Crew Module III than Ultraheavy armor to absorb damage!!!
Armor costs too much, absorbs too little damage, and weighs too much for what it is supposed to do. Right now you do two things with armor; make your ships over 8.00 so fighter laser canons don’t shread you. Or stack tons of armor (40-50+) to try to make a tank. But the tank often gets wasted by a decent weapon layout by the enemy.
Armor doesn’t actually absorb enough damage right now IMO.
The ship I referred to was not quite this useless. If I remember correctly it has three cruiser lasers and a tractor beam. That said, I think I built it for 1.04 or thereabouts, so I would not be at all surprised if it is a lot less useful under the latest version.
This is actually an extremely good point. I wonder if we should have a fraction of the avg armor deduct from incoming damage like what happens in Babylon 5 wars. This would make having armor much more useful for survivability.
It’s somewhat of a separate discussion from the whole crit issue, but I think it would make sense to decouple armor resistance from armor HP. That way armor HP could be jacked way up to absorb a lot more damage than it currently does without necessarily conferring unreasonable amounts of resistance.
What’s rendering it completely useless at the moment? Are you referring to its performance vs. fighters or other capital ships? Because I agree that armor is a crummy investment against any weapons that can beat its resistance, actually.
I was thinking in terms of ships that are so heavily armored that they’re reflecting basically all incoming fire, but maybe that’s not really achievable right now. I haven’t tested armored super-tanks, myself, so I don’t know how they typically fare against non-fighter opponents.
Armor is a terrible investment even against weapons that CAN’T beat its resistance. I got a ship up to 77 AC and it still got utterly destroyed by lasers very quickly. You have to have something like 20+ AC vs the AP you’re facing to last, once you are being hit by capital ship weapons.
Well, it’s true that the bigger weapons, given their low rate of fire, won’t crit all that often. But when they do, they’ll do a fair bit of damage, lowering your resistance by much more than a fighter crit does. One or two lucky crits early in the fight, or just the cumulative effects of heavy bombardment from many enemy ships at once, could indeed melt your armor off pretty quickly, even if it does start with a high resistance.
I dunno, maybe armor tanking doesn’t need to be made any harder than it currently is. Personally, I think armor just needs to be reworked, specifically by decoupling its HP from the resistance it grants. That way armor could be made to absorb more hits without granting excessively high resistance values.
what this post says is exactly the reason I can’t get past Emerald Nebula. No matter how much armor I have, my cruisers get ripped to shreds because frigates just sneak up behind them! It’s like my guns can’t fire backwards! And if i have all weapons, well, the outcome is obvious… and if i have only fighters, I don’t have enough firepower! sure, they’re annoying, but they won’t do much!
Frigates should go down fast if you have the right weapons. Bulking up on heavy plasma isn’t going to kill frigates easily, but a few cruiser beam lasers should make mince meat out of them.
To defend fighters, you’ll want at least 10 average armor on your cruisers, half-decent shields (the fighters will usually be inside them if they are landing a hit), and a repair unit. To actually kill them, load up on a few anti-fighter missile launchers (they used to suck, but are much better now). Since frigates have smaller shields, it’s harder for the fighters to get inside them, so I find they are even better to use as the anti-fighter ships. Load a couple up with missile launchers and they’ll take out two fleets at a time.
A couple of fighter squads are also useful. Send them after the carriers and they should rip through them just like they rip through you.
The key to this game is balance: no single ship or weapon will beat everything. All hulls, all weapons, all speeds and ranges have their place. You need something to take down shields and something to take down armor. You need something to kill them fast if they get in your face, but also something that can hit them when they stand back and lob missiles. You need to defend yourself, either by having lots of shields and armor (which means you are mostly immobile) or by moving as fast as you can to avoid the slow, heavy weapons and get close enough to get under their minimum range.