Solution for Armor Tanks

Yes, I know that I’ve been posting a Lot, however I just returned to the forums after a long break

Anyways, would it be possible to make a “limit” on the max armor value of a ship?

Example:

Cruiser could have no more than 65 (70 for Alliance) armor (thus allowing it to still take damagefrom Beam weapons)

Frigate…No idea. 50 (60 for All.), maybe?

Fighter…20 (though I don’t see why anyone would put armor on a fighter anyways)

I think people will find a way to abuse any coded limit (one of the reasons balance is so hard). It might be better just to avoid playing any games where someone has used a tank. That’ll get the message across better :wink:

Well, we don’t need more limits, we have too many right now, that is why i really don’t like this idea…
AFAIK this game is suposed to be hard, because you are not playing against AI, you are playing against other human strategies, plans and minds, when you become more veteran, you will find different and easier ways to reach the victory, sometimes with the original stuff, sometimes with modded (BUT NOT OP!) stuff…
At this moment, i’m a terrible commander, just because i’m focused on modding xP
BTW, i already thought about tanks, and Praetorian Industries will add more playing probabilities, tactics, and things like that. Why?
Well, think about Shield Tanks, Anti-Armour and Anti-Shield weapons, A LOT of different armours, Targeting Systems, Shield types, new weapons, new modules, new ship classes ^^
If you think that the game is hard now, then when the mod is released, it will be harder ^^

Just test Uni-T mod, in my opinion it makes the game insanely complex in a fun way :smiley:
When i downloaded that it was like:

[size=85]Ohh… Myyy… GAWD!
Too…Many…Modules! :open_mouth:
testing
-Woah!
-LOL WHAT??
-OMGWTF!!?
-AWESOME!! :smiley:
-What is that!? :open_mouth:
-Owww… ¬¬
-Look at that MONSTAR! :smiley:
-Ohhh i’m soooo fucked D:[/size]

xD

Point. After all, it would proabably eventually be hacked, and would severely curtail modders. Besides, one has to find some way to deflect those massive (modder-created) cannons.

Why do people keep insisting that Armor Tank is a problem anyway?

They are fine as is. Just switch your command to rescuer/retaliate and that’s that.

Also Plasma/Beam with co-op still walks all over them.

Solution is very simple:
Make AI not dumb. And by this I mean - make it aware whatever enemy unit is a threat or not - if it got single small gun but loads of shields/armor than AI should skip it and focus on units with some considerable weaponry. Right now it creates some weird kind of balance where it’s best to push a wall in front of you - it has nothing to deal with Space Battles of any kind, as game title suggests. You ever seen any space battle where one side would sent a unit made in 90% from solid metal, with barely any guns at all (or totally bare of them) and all the enemies would concentrate fire on it while being picked one by one by a units behind metal-ball? It’s just silly. But that’s oddly one of best tactics in this game right now.
(note: I don’t use it, but it makes me mad when someone does such crap whatever in challenges or in campaign. And: no, the problem isn’t in that I don’t know how to handle it. I know, it’s just that currently the Armor tanks are most stupid things in whole game IMO)

Why would you insist that exploiting AI weakness isn’t a problem?

Because the AI is only as dumb as you set it. Can tanks be bypassed with rescuer/retaliate? Yes. They even do exactly as you described above, shoot at targets that fire the most.

So this isn’t an AI weakness problem.

123stw - these ain’t orders “skip decoy ships” they are just “help dying one” or “return fire”. It doesn’t have anything to deal with fixing AI dumbness.
It is an AI weakness issue cause as I said: In no combat situation, even if ships software would be made by 6yo kid (and the game assumes that there’s some real crew onboard) you’d allow any of your guns fire at ship that does not have ANY weapons (or have 1 gun) while behind it stands a wall of gunned ships.

Oh c’mon, I don’t get it how can you not see it as a problem and give an excuse in orders made kinda for something else than bypassing tanks. They work for them - fine, but it’s just a side-effect of a key issue.

Let’s put it this way - ask cliffski if he made Rescue or Retaliate orders in order to solve the Tanks problem - if he did than you got my apology and I’ll STFU.
But otherwise - it’s just minor AI issue causing weird, abnormal behavior of ships. Changing it may change a lot in combat, especially for players who can’t fight any real combat, just have to relay on flying bricks, but it’s a change for much much better certainly - something that would make combat and strategy planning more realistic.

You’re argument here seems to be “I accept that the orders work in this situation, and that people use them as such, but they aren’t specifically labelled as ‘anti-tank’ so I refuse to accept them”. They are very much anti-tank orders though, as they ensure that your ships fire on the enemy ships that are causing the most damage to you.

I think the reason there’s a conflict here is that there’s two schools of thought. The first (yours) is that the AI should carry out some basic functions to act intelligently. The other side is that the player is the one controlling the AI, down to its basic functions of choosing priority targets, so if you don’t tell it to ignore the tank then it won’t ignore the tank.

Those already exist, in terms of protector/rescuer and retaliate.

Cliff’s description of Rescuer/Retaliate

Rescuer - Concentrate fire on enemy ships who are attacking our fellow ships…
Retaliate - Return fire against anyone attacking your ships

Does it need to be anymore clear than that? Is it not obvious that they are there to shoot at ships with guns? And ignore ships without guns?

Can you think of another reason why those 2 tags existed?

I just did an experiment, and created a challenge for myself with 2 tanks with 1 gun sitting in front of a line of AA cruisers. I then unleased a swarm of fighters on them, once with rescue/retaliate orders and once without. In both cases, the fighters concentrated on the tanks first, and then moved on to the line of cruisers that was actually doing 99% of the shooting.

So rescue/retaliate does not appear to have been designed as a solution to the tank problem. At least it doesn’t seem to work very well if that was in fact the case. To answer another question, another possible reason for those orders would be to get a ship under attack to shift targets away from a more distant one that it would otherwise be firing at (either because of attack priorities based on unit type or because of cooperate orders), in favor of a target that is closer and potentially doing a lot more damage.

Because fighters isn’t exactly getting hit often enough to work with them. Most of the shot either misses or the fighter already die. Frigates or Cruisers doesn’t have any problems bypassing tanks with the 2 commands. You also need to set engagement range shorter than max range so ship actually moves in to hit the back lines.

And this is assuming you don’t have the co-op tag on as well, which is “to focus and kill the first ship it encounters”.

100% efficient AI will kill this game. Not only would you have no control over it, it defeats the purpose of shield penetration/armor penetration weapons. It will be like playing age of empire 2 where the computer just dance around catapult fires and take no damage. Besides, “good on paper” complex AI patterns tend to be complete shipwreck in practice (ex - auto retreat on no weapon).

While messing around with the Classic Dreadnoughts mod, I realized that the stacking efficiency penalty made armor over 95 pretty much impossible. So, by adding a weapon with an armor penetration of 100, armor tanks will become far easier to destroy.

100 > 95 so, not far easier, just easy enough like any other ship.

In the vanilla races, u cant barely reach numbers over 50-60, not if u dont want to put a single weapon on the ship and almost no shields. In any case, any armour number will take a stack damage that will eventually break the armour resistance. So killing a tank with 100 armour is always possible. And in some cases , this op armour can make a modded race (for example the borg collective) more hard and interesting to play against, and nowadays GSB is a game based on modded content, and u will see a lot of extra powered weapons and all kind of hulls out there. The goal of this is not making the most overpowered hull / weapon, the goal is to make everything balanced as far as possible. If u make a hull with extreme armour bonus, u will need to make another negative bonus, for example on shields. And so on. This is the good thing and of course an extra armored tank should never be a problem in this way.