My only problem with armor is that with the crit% the way it is, I don’t have to even bother to bring the anti-armor weapon! I have no problem with armor being vaped by the anti-armor weapon, since that’s kinda the point. If I have to bring lots and lots of anti-armor weapons to defeat an armored fleet, then I have less slots available to balance my fleet in other ways and the game rapidly devolves into pure rock-paper-scissors.
If I need 4 papers to counter 5 rocks, that leaves very little room to counter scissors. But if I need just 2 papers to counter 5 rocks, now the game is more about balance, deployment strategy, orders given and so on. Can I get my paper to your rock before your scissors cut my paper?
There are three cruiser weapons below 30 penetration. Cruiser laser, Cruiser defense, Quantum blaster. What exactly are you giving up?
Everything else could be considered anti armor. Missiles are 40 and higher, plasma goes into the 50’s, nonpulse beams go into the 70’s. Armor penetration is the name of the game for the vast majority of cruiser weapons.
What we’re asking for is for AP weapons not to completely and instantly negate the scissors-armor to cruiser laser paper.
Back when several of us were designing space combat systems for traveller, it became obvious that some systems had armor as a sort of “global” ablative.
Armor value is XX, then after a discrete attack of value n, the armor value is XX-n. Eventually armor is compromised.
In reality, the ships are large enough, and the hits small enough that more 1cm diameter beam laser holes don’t actually change the armor all that much except in the off chance a beam hits the same hole twice.
IMO, the critical % for non-penetrating weapons should be the very rare chance that the shot hits a previous hole or crater in the armor. Armor in general should not be reduced by weak fire, period.
If you shoot a 9mm at a tank all day long, you don’t weaken the tank’s armor. If you fire a weapon incapable of penetrating the armor, but close to being able to penetrate it, you DO weaken the armor somewhat (you crater the surface, and cause spalling inside).
What do do in game?
Some ideas in no particular order:
have the critical hit chance a function of how close the weapon’s penetration is to the armor strength. If the armor is 15, and the weapon can only penetrate 14, it’s still making a decent hole—if it happened to hit another spot weakened by a previous shot, it does penetrate—critical hit.
Have armor not be reduced, or reduced FAR more slowly than currently. The ship hulls have a length and width associated with them, the armor really gets reduced as a function of the surface area of the ship. To reduce a ship from 15 to 14, you’d need to reduce the entire surface to 14 on average—with a bunch of hits by beams measured in square cm, and some missile hits making perhaps bigger craters.
Beams might never reduce armor, or most beams anyway. Another new weapon mod, fusion beams, etc actually hurt armor, lasers, etc do not.
Missiles might be the really nasty armor reducers since nukes, or KE, they can make big craters (crater volume goes like the cube of the velocity, or something, right?)
related to #2, make a ballpark surface area (SA) calc (no need to be perfect) for each hull. Multiply the armor value by this to get the armor hitpoints. Every time the SA is reduced by the original value (unmodified by armor), the armor value drops by 1. Ship has SA in some arbitrary units of “100” and an armor of 20. The hitpoints are 2000, and every time the ship takes 100 armor damage, the armor value drops by 1. Adjust the SA units to balance things.
Along similar lines, we could say that a “crit” does HULL damage but does nothing to the armor.
That is, hordes of fighters shooting you will be doing damage to the guts of your ship during critical hits (i.e., they shoot through a window or other small gap in your armor) but it’s not actually stripping your armor off and thereby causing your imminent sudden demise at the hands of a bunch of Ion Cannons.
In related news, I’d like to see a frigate repair module, or even a remote repair module (that mounts a “repair beam” that shoots friendly ships).
I subscribe to the belief that the crit % should be removed in favor of a more gradual % system of resistance. For example, a shield with 24 resist will bounce weapons with 20 shield pierce 70% of the time, and weapons with 30 shield pierce 30% of the time. Once you have the gradual system in, you can add things like stacking shield resists, like armor, and high resist/low hp shield systems. Also, armor too should have resist and hp as separate catagories, so you can have a low resist, high HP armor, or the reverse.
I would go so far as to say any ‘penetrating’ hit probably should be doing some degree of hull damage.
Having an absorb mechanic is what makes armor too much like a shield, really. I’m buying armor purely for the resistance, it’s too outrageously priced to ever be used as an absorb.
And while I’m on the subject - It’s pretty infuriating to have enemy ships dropping teams of your ships below threshold by driving up to them and exploding.
OK, yeah, I really like the solution “crits vs armor don’t damage armor, but hull”. That’s perfect.
Actually, and additional consideration: as your armor is destroyed, it ablates a lot more slowly than currently. So at e.g. 80% armor you still have 95% of the AP. You could also slowly increase the crit chance as armor was destroyed (higher chance of hitting a spot with no armor).
actually i don’t get it.
critical hits which can’t even penetrate the armor should do damage to the hull directly which the armor is supposed to protect?
how is this going to improve the value of armor? isn’t armor simply supposed to absorb damage? why would i need intact armor when my hull is damaged? i can’t repair my hull…
“sir, the ship is about to explode because the reactor got a critical hit, but our armor plates still look like on the first day. amazing.”
It’s a critical hit, we’re using the assumption that the hit is one that managed to bypass armor, like a missile sailing in through a window or something.
A mere 20 damage here and there from a cruiser laser (that can be repaired) is nothing compared to the pain train that’s coming when that armor drops below 15 armor threshold. The longer the armor stays above threshold, the better.
We have a hull with slots and weapon hardpoints.
Putting armor in one slot makes some % of the slots armored (weapon hardpoints never get armored).
Adding another slot of armor makes some additional slots armored, with diminishing returns.
Diminishing returns should be designed such that it’s possible to have full armor coverage BEFORE you spend all non-weapon slots on armor (e.g. you get engines, reactor, crew and an armor shell – maybe for a decoy ship).
This will force you to think about 2 things – a) what modules do you DEFINITELY want to get armor protection (reactor: if reactor hp is depleted ship explodes; crew modules: if they get destroyed ship becomes completely inactive). b) how much armor do I have to add for that and what functionality do I have to sacrifice? (since you’ll occupy more slots with armor).
That will allow to drop the crit % to very low levels or get rid of it altogether – because even the weakest weapons will be able to damage the unprotected modules.
It’s even possible to have some modules only function when NOT armored – targeting systems perhaps? Then, a more advanced/expensive targeting module should also have more HP to justify extra cost/weight.
On an unrelated note, I wish there were “engine” hardpoints where only engines could be assigned. It annoys me to no end when ppl pick a 4-engine hull and put 1 puny engine there (or no engines at all). That would actually solve the no-engines problem – if a hull has engine hardpoints (let’s say they are triangular), they cannot be empty. The battle station hulls simply will have no triangular slots.
Armor resistance 15 being hit by a weapon with 14 armor penetration does 0 damage, except on a crit.
After enough crits, the 15 resist armor becomes 14 resist and now ALL fire from that weapon does FULL damage and the armor melts away fast.
Under “proposal A”, it would work like this:
Armor resistance 15 being hit by a weapon with 14 armor penetration does 0 damage, except on a crit.
Crit damage goes straight to the hull, dealing internal damage but leaving the armor unaffected. So no matter how many crits you take, your 15 resist armor is still fully resisting the 14 damage weapon and thus most of the shots are still doing 0 damage, even after a large number of crits.
Under “proposal B”, it would work like this:
Armor resistance 15 being hit by a weapon with 14 armor penetration does 0 damage, except on a crit.
Crit damage goes to the armor, but the original resistance is remembered and factored into future crit chances. So rather than the armor going from 15 resist to 14 resist and instantly ceasing to block any damage, it would instead just become easier to land crits on. For example, a 20 resist armor that’s been taken down to 10 resist acts like 20 resist armor with a +50% chance to crit, because half of the armor is gone. So it will still completely block a 14 penetration shot half the time.
Either way you’re increasing the usefulness of the armor. If anything Proposal A might be too powerful, since you could equip like 100 resistance worth of armor and the only way anything would damage you is with occasional crits to your hull.
I’m a huge, huge fan of proposal B. It makes more logical sense than the current version, and provides a necessary buff to make armor an interesting choice again.
I suspect proposal B (with crit chance proportional to amount of armor lost) would have the same problem as current armor - after the first crit, you are rapidly fucked up the ass.
Proposal C:
Crits hit hitpoints, not armor. Shots that do hit armor slowly increase crit chance (but not to 100% - 1/2 of armor gone may mean a crit chance of 25% or so) and the actual armor value slowly falls as it’s destroyed (1/2 of armor gone may mean armor resistance of 75%).
The problem with B is that if you have a bunch of low-AP weapons and one high-AP weapon, the high-AP weapon will very quickly render the armor ineffective enough (through increased crit chance) that the low-AP weapons will do the rest of the work in no time. As a result, you will only ever need one high-AP weapon.
The problem with A is that it makes armor almost identical to shields, reducing things to a relatively simple rock-paper-scissors.
Give armor a % mitigation value. Say, the heaviest cruiser armor mitigates 50% of the damage (this will be averaged across whatever armor types you equip, so if you equip a 50% and a 30%, you’ll have 40% mitigation shipwide).
Whenever your ship takes damage, either via crit or via something surpassing the resistance value of the armor, that damage goes to the hull, minus whatever your mitigation value is. So if a shot penetrates armor and does 20 damage with 50% mitigation, you take 8 damage to your hull.
When the hull takes damage, that damage is distributed randomly, including amongst armor plates. So armor acts more like just another module rather than a damage sponge that gets hit first.
So any damage that gets through your armor would be distributed across all module slots. In this way, your armor stays “functional” (mitigating a percentage as well as blocking shots under its resistance value) for a lot longer, rather than being blown away first and being useless from then on out.
It would also make those “armor repair” modules a lot more useful. It would also make armor somewhat useful for The Tribe, who could at least get benefit from the mitigation value, even if the armor modules themselves got damaged a lot easier.
Whatever the solution is, armor needs to effectively NOT be reduced due to combat, IMO.
Armor is the thickness of the hull, and the only way to reduce it over any large are is to ablate it off the hull. Most weapons would be trying to punch holes—small compared to the ship—in the armor, which only reduces armor on the off chance another shot hits the same hole.
High Guard, for all its problems had a decent paradigm. Small weapons like lasers and small missiles would “scrub off the hull,” meaning that they’d attack sensors, turrets, and other stuff “sticking up.” Large weapons were required to punch actual holes and wreck the inside (assuming the target had decent armor).
It would be really cool to see weapons modules outside of the hull (then armored versions can exist as upgrade with additional cost and weight as a trade off). Standard turrets, then might get destroyed by fighters, etc—a reason for the close-in fighter attacks that damages ships without wiping them out with pin pricks.
It’s possible we could retain some degree of armor degradation as an intermediate compromise. Proposal… Q?
Take the example from the first post: 7 module craft, 126 armor absorb, 18 armor. A frigate beam weapon does 26 damage.
If we instead convert armor damage to a percentile bypass, 26 damage is roughly 20% of 126. So after (reactively?) eating the beam, the armor lets 20% of all shots through. This includes other penetration capable hits and crits, so it’s possible (although unlikely) that the cruiser could maintain 80% coverage for the rest of it’s lifespan if all penetration capable weapons repeatedly hit the same ‘hole’. Cruiser lasers are great, but they probably aren’t so great that you can set them on targets ignoring 80% of their shots and still not be better off with a penetrator.
It gets more interesting when you consider a larger cruiser with the same 18 armor threshold but 14 modules instead. At this point you have 252 absorb to achieve the same threshold, and so that frigate hit only drops 10% coverage. If you’re considering solely penetration weapons, the chances of eliminating that last bit of armor gets smaller and smaller. I’m not entirely sure if that benefit is too strong once you consider repair modules, but that sort of happens already with designs that have many plates.
This system allows fighters set on titans to start doing minor damage earlier. The first crit opens up a tiny hole (4 damage of 126 is 3%) which they could very slowly start to exploit provided there’s no repair system active.
It might be too random, I’m not sure how else to work around the existing absorb mechanics. Tribe ship armor will be fluctuating wildly with repairs but I guess that’s their thing.
Well, if you get into it, armoring is a science in itself. Determining where and what thickness should be efficiently distributed suddenly becomes a geometry problem once you figure out that impacts at low angles to armor tend to just glance off, and that some kinds of weapons can be defeated by just putting crap in the way. I’m sure there’s a tank simmer or two lurking about that could write dissertations big enough to make poor Cliffski run in terror.