hi,
i can’t deny that. i’m well aware of the fact that armor is a science in itself, considerung sloping armor, thickness, reactive…
well, i just said it to emphasize that there might be a simple solution without too much mathematics. maybe cliffski will find one.
however as long as there isn’t, every proposal is worth considering. as i said , i just don’t want armor to be a second form of shields.
greetings
driver
Okay, I’m willing to throw my two cents in here. There are a lot of folk saying that armor shouldn’t be a second form of shields. To which I have to ask, why not? They are both bubbles whose purpose is to block and/or absorb weapon attacks; one is made of energy and is away from the hull, while the other is matter wrapped tightly around the hull. But their essential function is the same. My single-pass-at-it solution:
Any shield or armor has three basic statistics:
Resistance: Determines the strength of weapon required to deal damage on a normal hit (we’ll call this value X)
Strength: Determines how much damage the shield/armor can absorb before it fails (we’ll call this value Y)
Regeneration: Determines how fast the shield/armor recovers from damage (we’ll call this value Z)
The basics:
A weapon with the appropriate penetration value equal to or higher than X deals damage with normal hits; weapons with penetration below X deal damage only on critical hits.
For shields: when the shield has taken Y damage, the shield bubble collapses.
For armor: when the armor has taken Y damage, it is destroyed.
The shield/armor removes Z damage from itself every [unit time]. This can result in shields coming back up after a short period, assuming the shield generator has not been destroyed in the meantime. Armor that has been destroyed cannot be regenerated.
Most armor has a Z of 0 (powered armor may have a VERY low nonzero Z value); armor repair modules increase the Z of all the ship’s armor modules, but only for a fixed number of [unit time] regenerations.
I think this scheme would make it more important to have at least a slight variety of weapons; at least one high-penetration weapon each for shields and armor might become the norm.
I agree with both of these points. To achieve, simply make armor have a higher Y than an equivalent shield - without making it insanely higher. The shield doesn’t need to be as tough, because it can recharge. Maybe 2 to 2.5 times the Y value for the same level of armor (i.e., Basic Shield Generator vs. Armor I).
If properly balanced, this sort of “parity” between the two types of defense wouldn’t drag combat out so much as promote a bit more diversification of weapons. Balancing your fleet with shield penetration and armor penetration would become a LOT more important. And while I’m all for letting you field an entire fleet of one weapon/ship type if you want to, and making it possible for you to win, I think it’s a telling sign that we all call it “spamming”.
Not necessarily. Here is where flavor helps define the game mechanic. Consider the Ion Cannon: much higher shield penetration than armor penetration. So the energy of the cannon is designed to disrupt and damage shields, but is much less effective against armor. That is believable. It’s specialization. Now in the case of a weapon with high penetration on both counts, you’re talking a gun that simply packs so much power into every shot that it tears through everything like wet crepe paper - and typically, such weapons have drawbacks: low rate of fire, low accuracy, high weight, high power and/or crew requirements, high cost, or some combination of the above. Again, believable.
And paying attention to the differences between a given weapon’s two penetration stats becomes much more important if shields and armor are playing by the same rules.
I don’t see this as a major problem. One big gun to crack the shell, then a bunch of little ones to pour fire in through the hole. Sounds pretty gratuitous to me. 
Indeed. By leaving the armor resistance alone until its strength has been compromised, you achieve this effect. Once the armor has absorbed its full strength in damage, the idea is that now it has enough large holes knocked in it that no gunner has a problem finding one to lob his “bomb-a-gram” through.
Sorry for being long-winded, and I hope some of this makes sense. Heaven forfend if my post was … gratuitous.
But that’s exactly the situation we have now that we’re trying to fix.
My point is that the value you call “Y” would be such that the ship would already be destroyed, IMO. At the point that only 50% of hits manage to shoot through an existing hole, the ship is literally 50% holes by surface area!
If you assume a laser makes a hole a few square cm, and another weapon another area punched, you can at least do a ballpark to see how many hits you need to make a large % of the surface holes. It’s gonna be a HUGE number of hits.
IMO armor should simply never be destroyed for simplicity.
If your armor value is, say, 15, then any weapon doing much less than 15 should do zero interior damage.
Within some value close to 15 (within 10%, perhaps?), then there can be a low chance of some damage happening (spalling, etc).
At 15+, the hit penetrates and does interior damage.
Ideally, the weapons modules, carrier modules, engines, and some other stuff might be OUTSIDE the armor, and damaged
Strap double pulse lasers to a few squads of rebel bombers and have them attack an unarmored cruiser. Low penetration weapons kill fast.
As it stands now, you are hurting yourself by taking too many penetration weapons (instead of DPS weapons) vs an armored target, because the armor will just eventually disappear and you could be killing the target faster. That doesn’t seem right.
The weapon statistics seem to be balanced around the fact that the lowest armor penetration weapons are often cheaper or the highest DPS. There really aren’t any high-AP high-DPS weapons - so AP weapons essentially become inefficient choices once they’ve served their function.
The Creator must’ve had a reason for making armor either/or instead of sliding-scale… I’d like to hear from Him.
Guys, please stop talking realism in this game. There are so many posts of
“Armour would fuction like this is actuality: therefore this is how it should be.”
It doesnt matter what it is like in realism, if there are critical shots (Something i disagre with on a gameplay basis)
All considerations should be into the gameplay experiance. And no, realism isnt part of the game play experiance of Gratuitous Space Battles.
I think the best option for armour is damage mitigation. Off the top of my head i would say the armour value is how much damage it mitigates in %. The armour penetration of a weapon is % of how much of this is calculated.
100 damage shot comes in. Armour of 80. 20 shot damage. But penetration of 50 so its like the armour is 40, so 60. This gives a reason for high penetration weapons, they would easily out dps another less penetrative weapon.
Then have a larger number for diminishing returns: FIrst is 100%effective, second 87,57,28,10% effectiveness. So you can never reach 100% damage mitigation.
And take out crits. I dislike randomness. Is it a game of luck or a game of skill?
Why not just make crits based on the inverse to the rate of fire of the weapon or the damage per shot of the weapon? The big problems are rapid fire weapons that can just chew through armor with crits alone.
I agree. In a lot of game forums, I see people complaining that this game or that gameplay mechanic isn’t realistic. And if the game you’re talking about is an uber-detailed simulation game I would agree that this is a problem. But by and large, most games are designed to be entertaining to a target audience. And sorry folks, but the “I want my game as realistic as possible” crowd seems to be a niche demographic.
The title of the game says it all. Realism isn’t gratuitous - based on my experiences of reality, the closer your game gets to being really realistic, the more microscopic details you have to manage. That’s not gratuitous. For most of us, it’s called boring.
Here I can’t agree, but that’s because I am a long-time RPGer, and thus there’s a critical hit chance printed on my soul. Plus I don’t think crits represent a huge element of randomness - certainly not enough to make GSB a game of only luck. It requires some skill, and some luck as well.
Hey, that sounds pretty realistic after all.
That’s what rapid fire is for - it appeals to the type of person who prefers dense carpet-bombing to accuracy. Now there might be an issue with rapid-fire weapons being too easy to use, but I don’t think so. Most of the really rapid GSB weapons have pretty low damage and/or penetration thresholds. Seems OK to me.
Cruiser Laser/Ion Cannon/Cruiser Howitzers have both some of the the highest rates of fires and DPS in the game. They pop shields and poke the armor to death with nothing but crits. What are you talking about?
Before we start talking about critting again… As I mention here, I’m not entirely sure if the armor values are what we expect they are.
Be sure to overshoot somewhere between 15-20% over your expected armor value. If you are at 15 average armor, you are not safe from cruiser lasers.
I am a long time RPGer as well. Favourite games are RPGs. And i can see how people can like crits, and i can accept them in single player games, though id prefer they are gone.
It annoys me as much to win by luck as to lsoe by it.
If i wanted to have a gmae based on luck, id flip a coin. Wouldnt that be exciting.
But in a multiplayer, competitve game, luck should be minimised to as little as possible. The whole point of competiton is a measure of ability of competing agents (Someone come up witha better word, please).
Luck, even in the form of crits, takes away from this. It allows the worse player to beat the better in situations he normally wouldnt.
Imagine you were a professional boxer, in a prize fight.
And in the middle of the round, your punch was decided to randomly award you 10 extra points!
Yay, you won the bout!
Except all sullied by the fact you had hjelp from some random mechanic, thus invalidating everything you were doing.
I know im fighting a losing battle here, played TF2 for quite a while, and its almost impossible to convince people that crits were a bad thing. I think people like to get randomly rewarded for stuff they dont deserve.
Ok so I thought this out a little more
The idea would be to prevent armor rating from dropping until a plate module is completely destroyed instead of eroding with each shot.
The mechanic would still be unique from shields.