Is armor too weak?

[KiloZulu]

They're welcome to find other ways to balance it, but the current mass basically breaks the ship by turning it into a floating brick.

 

[Edymnion]

Actually, I can think of a rather simple way conceptually to do the job, don't know how easy it would be to program.

Make armor blocks indestructible while the ship still has armor hp, and then have the armor "fail" (aka, become destructible) at different levels based on type.

Like say basic hull becomes destroyable if the ship has less than 50% of its armor hp remaining. Standard becomes destroyable at 75%, and Advanced stays invincible until 100% of the armor hp is depeleted.

Then just treat armor hp the same as shield strength. Still require payments to the trade guild or resources at your station to repair the armor HP, but you don't start to actually lose the armor blocks themselves until they've gotten rid of most of your armor hp.

Means we could stop making armor a half dozen layers thick just to stop one missile, and would make smaller weapons on things like fighters efficient in tackling large opponents because every shot would be whittling down armor the same way it would shields. Just that the armor doesn't regenerate on it's own.

I'm liking this idea, actually. I'm going to copy it over into a stand alone suggestion.

 

[Panpiper]

The question as to the relative utility of armor really comes to the fore when one is dealing with build limits. A server could define a build limit of say, 100K mass, so as to not overly disadvantage people who build RP ships. On the other hand, a server could instead define a build limit of 1 million blocks, so as to not overly disadvantage those who wish to use armor as part of their defense strategy.

If faced with a mass limit, I dare say is is almost a no brainer to go 100% shield defense. Given that an armor tank will typically be 50% armor, this means that a ship that eschews armor can have for the same mass, literally twice the shielding, and perhaps more importantly, twice the weaponry than the armor tank. There is no way the armor tank could compete in that scenario. With a block limit, it is perhaps less obvious. I dare say however that in any scenario dealing with limits, armor will lose out.

 

[Edymnion]

Armor Revamp: Focus on Armor HP over Block Destruction

 

[Az14el]

Armor is quite weak, its also quite cheap to produce compared to a lot of other spammable blocks (shields, weapons, effects, jump drive, etc)
Logistically it's kinda hell, and takes so much more screwing around in factories & especially with blueprinting. As far as credits value i feel adv armor & hull are in a good place, with advanced armor running into problems with its weight value, it's not usually worth carrying large plates of it. it can be very worth carrying tactically placed thick bulwarks of it throughout the ship to insure critical rail locations & systems.

As far as Armor HP it should simply last longer than it does, that grey bar may as well not even exist below the frigate-destroyer range, and heavy alpha punch-through weapons fire between large ships can make it just disappear in a single strike regularly, armor tank or no.

 

[Lancake]

Actually, I can think of a rather simple way conceptually to do the job, don't know how easy it would be to program.

Make armor blocks indestructible while the ship still has armor hp, and then have the armor "fail" (aka, become destructible) at different levels based on type.

Like say basic hull becomes destroyable if the ship has less than 50% of its armor hp remaining. Standard becomes destroyable at 75%, and Advanced stays invincible until 100% of the armor hp is depeleted.

Then just treat armor hp the same as shield strength. Still require payments to the trade guild or resources at your station to repair the armor HP, but you don't start to actually lose the armor blocks themselves until they've gotten rid of most of your armor hp.

Means we could stop making armor a half dozen layers thick just to stop one missile, and would make smaller weapons on things like fighters efficient in tackling large opponents because every shot would be whittling down armor the same way it would shields. Just that the armor doesn't regenerate on it's own.

I'm liking this idea, actually. I'm going to copy it over into a stand alone suggestion.

I had my own idea which is similar to yours.
For starters: I would get rid of the AHP absorption of damage since it doesn't scale properly. And you would lose AHP for each destroyed block's AHP x factor (similar to SHP).

I don't want AHP to become a second shield though, at least not in a way this obvious. There's nothing more frustrating than unleashing everything you've got just to see a number go down when there's not a single block destroyed.

What I would do, is go back to our block armor % and make that scale according to your AHP. There are 3 types of armor, and each type would reach a max and min % depending on the set AHP needed to achieve that.

Advanced armor could be between 90% and 50%. 90% when above 50 mil AHP and 50% below 1 mil AHP. Between that it scales linear as you would expect.

Same goes for the other 2 types but then different values.
Docked entities would inherit the AHP value from the mothership so its armor would be of the same quality (to make turrets stronger).

This allows us to make the same armor block appear weaker on smaller ships but stronger on larger ships where it's needed.

 

[Lancake]

I had my own idea which is similar to yours.
For starters: I would get rid of the AHP absorption of damage since it doesn't scale properly. And you would lose AHP for each destroyed block's AHP x factor (similar to SHP).

I don't want AHP to become a second shield though, at least not in a way this obvious. There's nothing more frustrating than unleashing everything you've got just to see a number go down when there's not a single block destroyed.

What I would do, is go back to our block armor % and make that scale according to your AHP. There are 3 types of armor, and each type would reach a max and min % depending on the set AHP needed to achieve that.

Advanced armor could be between 90% and 50%. 90% when above 50 mil AHP and 50% below 1 mil AHP. Between that it scales linear as you would expect.

Same goes for the other 2 types but then different values.
Docked entities would inherit the AHP value from the mothership so its armor would be of the same quality (to make turrets stronger).

This allows us to make the same armor block appear weaker on smaller ships but stronger on larger ships where it's needed.

A follow up on this to explain myself a bit better ^^

The BAD of the current AHP system

1. Doesn't scale well:
   
   50% reduced of 100 damage, or 50% reduced of 1 000 000 damage is the same for shield damage. But for block HP it's not since each block has a lower HP threshold than damage to be dealt. In other words, your 5000 EHP block dies anyway no matter how big your absorption rate is
   
   
2. AHP reduced doesn't correspond with armor blocks destroyed:
   
   Similar to the 1st problem, because it absorbs 50% of the incoming damage (which doesn't all translate to block damage anyway), it also deducts the same amount of your current AHP.
   A single weapon that deals 10 000 000 damage meant to kill shields, would also kill 5 000 000 (not using effects) of your AHP when hit. The actual armor blocks destroyed could range from 1 to 100 which is nothing to the amount of AHP lost.
   
   In this case, something like 1 000 - 10 000 times more AHP lost than the blocks that provide them.
   
   
3. Ship size matters
   
   Similar to the 1st problem again ^^
   Advanced armor on its own is already extremely strong on small ships (small vs small can't kill each other with that much EHP), add the 50% to 75% absorption rate to that and it's even stronger.
   
   I can't make advanced armor weaker, without affecting the larger ships where this sort of EHP is better suited for.
   

The GOOD of the current AHP system

1. Adds another layer of defense:
   
   Although it's not as revolutionized or as strong as people would like, it's still an added layer of protection that in some cases helps.
   It doesn't feel like a second shield but more of a structural part. Armor placement still matters and how much you place can reduce or increase the effectiveness of your ship's purpose.

Conclusion

The new system I propose, tackles all of the bad but doesn't introduce any serious negatives

1. ---> Doesn't scale well:
   
   Luckily here it scales way better. The more AHP you have, the stronger each hull type becomes (up to a limit). Docked entities would inherit the AHP so they get the same level of protection of their mothership. This also includes docked smaller ships so when they're docked, their armor will appear stronger than undocked.
   
   This is indeed odd but it's the only way to make turrets of large ships as strong as their mothership which makes sense considering the size of the turret compared to the main ship. They already inherit most shields of the mothership so we could do the same for AHP, but perhaps they don't inherit the total AHP but just 50% of it or so.
   
   Large ships still have a strong layer that shrugs of smaller ships and adds some protection against equal sized ships. Most likely the EHP of advanced armor won't be increased much for large ships so for them not much changes when looking at pure EHP stats.
   
   Small ships though will still be able to use advanced armor, but due to their low amount of AHP, the advanced armor will be considerably weaker than their large ship counterparts -> around 400-500 EHP per block instead of the 2500-5000.
   
   
2. ---> AHP reduced doesn't correspond with armor blocks destroyed:
   
   AHP deduction would be the same as SHP deduction, requiring you to kill the full block first. An AHP "penalty" will exist just like SHP, making sure large ships lose way more AHP per block than smaller ones. The base factor would already be 2 or 3, going up to maybe 20 times as much.
   
   This completely annihilates the use of single high damage weapons since you're required to destroy a lot of blocks. And fast firing weapons have issues killing strong armor due to the amount of focused hits required.
   
   In short, your AHP will only reduce depending on how much armor blocks you lose, not how much damage is thrown in your way.
   
   The only downside I can see here is that small vs small ships will require more focused fire to reduce AHP, they're required to kill the entire block and not just damage the blocks. They don't really benefit from their AHP as much anyway (at least not for advanced armor, they would for basic and standard) so I see this as negligible.
   
   
3. ---> Ship size matters
   
   Ship size still matters but in a different way. Small ships have weaker armor armor compared to larger ships and there's nothing you can do about that but it doesn't make armor useless for any of those ships.
   
   Small ships will die quicker against their counterparts, but they won't die quicker against larger sized opponents. Mostly because those larger ships already have enough firepower to blast through a single layer of advanced armor.
   
   Large ships will remain as they are now, except that their armor effectiveness will last much longer due to the AHP not getting depleted immediately.

It creates more diversity between armor types, even allowing us to make basic hull much stronger than it is now. You don't have a second shield mechanic either. That's also the most important part for me, keep armor and shields completely different from each other in terms of combat.

I'm not entirely sure yet what I'll do with the AHP changing effects but it looks like they don't need much changing to work with this.

 

[kingreol]

AHP covering docked entities, count me in if it means my turrets don't get snipped off

 

[godmars]

A follow up on this to explain myself a bit better ^^

This sounds good for bigger ship but it also sounds like anything below 1 mil blocks (if thats the threshold you'd go with) will basically have the same issue but worse
Even with a 200 mass fighter I can build a gun that can shoot 30+ blocks deep, if their armor deduction is decreased it would make that even better. so instead of investing in armor for smaller ships it be better to just invest in shields?

 

[Nauvran]

A follow up on this to explain myself a bit better ^^

The BAD of the current AHP system

1. Doesn't scale well:
   
   50% reduced of 100 damage, or 50% reduced of 1 000 000 damage is the same for shield damage. But for block HP it's not since each block has a lower HP threshold than damage to be dealt. In other words, your 5000 EHP block dies anyway no matter how big your absorption rate is
   
   
2. AHP reduced doesn't correspond with armor blocks destroyed:
   
   Similar to the 1st problem, because it absorbs 50% of the incoming damage (which doesn't all translate to block damage anyway), it also deducts the same amount of your current AHP.
   A single weapon that deals 10 000 000 damage meant to kill shields, would also kill 5 000 000 (not using effects) of your AHP when hit. The actual armor blocks destroyed could range from 1 to 100 which is nothing to the amount of AHP lost.
   
   In this case, something like 1 000 - 10 000 times more AHP lost than the blocks that provide them.
   
   
3. Ship size matters
   
   Similar to the 1st problem again ^^
   Advanced armor on its own is already extremely strong on small ships (small vs small can't kill each other with that much EHP), add the 50% to 75% absorption rate to that and it's even stronger.
   
   I can't make advanced armor weaker, without affecting the larger ships where this sort of EHP is better suited for.

The GOOD of the current AHP system

1. Adds another layer of defense:
   
   Although it's not as revolutionized or as strong as people would like, it's still an added layer of protection that in some cases helps.
   It doesn't feel like a second shield but more of a structural part. Armor placement still matters and how much you place can reduce or increase the effectiveness of your ship's purpose.

Conclusion

The new system I propose, tackles all of the bad but doesn't introduce any serious negatives

1. ---> Doesn't scale well:
   
   Luckily here it scales way better. The more AHP you have, the stronger each hull type becomes (up to a limit). Docked entities would inherit the AHP so they get the same level of protection of their mothership. This also includes docked smaller ships so when they're docked, their armor will appear stronger than undocked.
   
   This is indeed odd but it's the only way to make turrets of large ships as strong as their mothership which makes sense considering the size of the turret compared to the main ship. They already inherit most shields of the mothership so we could do the same for AHP, but perhaps they don't inherit the total AHP but just 50% of it or so.
   
   Large ships still have a strong layer that shrugs of smaller ships and adds some protection against equal sized ships. Most likely the EHP of advanced armor won't be increased much for large ships so for them not much changes when looking at pure EHP stats.
   
   Small ships though will still be able to use advanced armor, but due to their low amount of AHP, the advanced armor will be considerably weaker than their large ship counterparts -> around 400-500 EHP per block instead of the 2500-5000.
   
   
2. ---> AHP reduced doesn't correspond with armor blocks destroyed:
   
   AHP deduction would be the same as SHP deduction, requiring you to kill the full block first. An AHP "penalty" will exist just like SHP, making sure large ships lose way more AHP per block than smaller ones. The base factor would already be 2 or 3, going up to maybe 20 times as much.
   
   This completely annihilates the use of single high damage weapons since you're required to destroy a lot of blocks. And fast firing weapons have issues killing strong armor due to the amount of focused hits required.
   
   In short, your AHP will only reduce depending on how much armor blocks you lose, not how much damage is thrown in your way.
   
   The only downside I can see here is that small vs small ships will require more focused fire to reduce AHP, they're required to kill the entire block and not just damage the blocks. They don't really benefit from their AHP as much anyway (at least not for advanced armor, they would for basic and standard) so I see this as negligible.
   
   
3. ---> Ship size matters
   
   Ship size still matters but in a different way. Small ships have weaker armor armor compared to larger ships and there's nothing you can do about that but it doesn't make armor useless for any of those ships.
   
   Small ships will die quicker against their counterparts, but they won't die quicker against larger sized opponents. Mostly because those larger ships already have enough firepower to blast through a single layer of advanced armor.
   
   Large ships will remain as they are now, except that their armor effectiveness will last much longer due to the AHP not getting depleted immediately.

It creates more diversity between armor types, even allowing us to make basic hull much stronger than it is now. You don't have a second shield mechanic either. That's also the most important part for me, keep armor and shields completely different from each other in terms of combat.

I'm not entirely sure yet what I'll do with the AHP changing effects but it looks like they don't need much changing to work with this.

Why have you not gotten this implemented yet :u
It sounds amazing

 

[Panpiper]

1. Ship size matters

I fear this will be yet another mechanic that will not simply encourage size creep, but actively require it. There is substantial reason right now for servers to impose block limits to ships, specifically to combat size creep. Clashes of titans can create massive lag for servers, especially if it becomes a common occurrence. With the numbers you are suggesting, the minimum effective size for an armor reliant ship would be one million blocks with 50% of it's mass in armor. Of course, as that is the minimum, there would be massive incentive to build well beyond that. The days of trying to keep your battlecruiser smaller would be over. That would be replaced by a race to the top, battlecruisers and battleships be damned, titans or bust!

What I would recommend for your suggestion is to tie the armor effectiveness not to a large fixed quantity of AHP but directly to percentage of armor blocks remaining. This way the first armor block hit on a fresh target, even if it is a tiny fighter, will have the same level of effectiveness as would the first block of armor hit on a titan. When it has 100% of it's 100 armor blocks still intact, it's armor will function at 100%. When the titan has 100% of it's million blocks of armor still intact, it too will function at 100%. It should be obvious however that the fighter will loose armor effectiveness far more quickly than would the titan.

Done this way, the system would not offer any particular extra incentive to build bigger than we do now.

 

[nulitor]

Advanced armor without supports(even if you include the armor hp mechanic) is inferior in total damage tanked per mass(tanks 56 damage per 0.01 masss) when compared to scaffold(and barely better than capsules).
That gets even worse if someone use punch-through or pierce against armor(against which scaffold take way less additional damage since punch will only multiply by 1.5 the damage and not have that armor hp slaying effect and pierce ignore a huge part of the damage reduction making advanced armor horribly bad)
So basically the game could nearly make an error message and refuse the placement of armor on ships without defensive pierce and defensive punch-through.
So I think armor should not be nerfed on small ships(which can use supports only when driven).(personally I already use capsule armor on small ships since capsules are so much cheaper for tanking.)
Also lower grade armors needs a huge buff for competing with capsules since they are a lot worse than capsule in damage blocked per mass and that hull or standard armor are way more expensive than capsule for reaching the same damage blocked
(capsule tanks 50 damage per 0.01 mass,standard armor tanks 29.166 damage per 0.01 mass,hull tanks 25 damage per mass)

 

[Nickizzy]

Advanced armor without supports(even if you include the armor hp mechanic) is inferior in total damage tanked per mass(56 damage tanked per mass) when compared to scaffold(and barely better than capsules).
That gets even worse if someone use punch-through or pierce against armor(against which scaffold take way less additional damage since punch will only multiply by 1.5 the damage and not have that armor hp slaying effect and pierce ignore a huge part of the damage reduction making advanced armor horribly bad)
So basically the game could nearly make an error message and refuse the placement of armor on ships without defensive pierce and defensive punch-through.
So I think armor should not be nerfed on small ships(which can use supports only when driven).(personally I already use capsule armor on small ships since capsules are so much cheaper for tanking.)
Also lower grade armors needs a huge buff for competing with capsules since they are a lot worse than capsule in damage blocked per mass and that hull or standard armor are way more expensive than capsule for reaching the same damage blocked

Using capsue blocks as armor!?? Doesn't that make really ugly and space-inefficient designs?

 

[nulitor]

You can stack multiple layers of capsules in the same space(thanks to docked entities and being far from ship core and fielding blueprints and entering and editing the docked entity).
And place them into the system blocks(in fact you can place them nearly everywhere).
You can use spaced capsule armor too(better at that than hull thanks to low mass per capsule and higher hp per mass)
Noobs using doomcubes do not understands the concept of ugly.
And all the armors are so insanely costly(both in time to craft and in resources) that it is way worse for tanking on a budget than non armor blocks
So in the end if you want cheap spammable Drones that tanks(for drone fights for example) using capsules and/or scaffold(if you find important to not be too much ugly) are good.

 

[Comradecolonel]

Wow this thread has got out of hand. I don't understand why we have so many varied suggestions. I get that the current system isn't balanced but if we change the mechanics too much then it will be hell to balance it still. I really feel that something like a weight reduction or scaling AHP mechanics are the most we would need. No need to completely rewrite the mechanics so they are unnecessarily complicated.

 

[AtraUnam]

All my yes to Lancake's armor idea!

 

[Batavium]

I do not agree with Lancake's armor idea.

Let me explain why.

An armor block is a block with an X amount of health points. When it takes more damage then the block has listed then the block breaks. Anyone can understand that.

But this and the current armor % system makes the blocks rating dependent on a total armor rating. That means the bigger your ship the stronger each armor block gets. It favors big ships and that is bad from a server health point.

My advice is keep the ship HP system but remove the armor % bar completely. A ship dies "overload" when system % goes below 50%.

Let armor just be individual blocks with an X amount of health points. Than they act exactly as listed. Armor plates that are used to shore up weak points or be the hull of the ship.

What i can not understand is how that same armor block has a mass rating that effects the ships energy use. It should effect thrust only! So you can not keep adding armor indefinitely. At some point it will then simply not move anymore.

 

[Raisinbat]

Armor's biggest handicap is in weaponscaling; Because you can pile as much damage from weapons into a single point you can go through armor and knock out critical systems like computers logic and rail blocks, that severely cripple your ship, regardless of how thick your armor is.

If armor had mechanics that made weak weapons useless against it, instead of the current getup where bigger and heavier weapons are completely useless at penetration, while also increasing the impact area, and thus the number of armor blocks next to each other hit with each shot, the penetration issue could be overcome while giving more tactical advantages to larger/smaller weapons.

It would be beneficial for a lot of areas if passive effects were reworked so they aren't just max bonus gained at X% of mass, primarily because it would discourage a lot of docked entity nonsense.

If armor had a static value of incoming damage it COMPLETELY negates, that's determined by the number of passive piercing effect blocks, armor would be able to shrug off light weapons from smaller ships completely. Ofc this shouldn't grow very fast, but just the presence of this mechanic would be an extremely effective deterrent from hyper waffled weapons.

I think Lancake 's idea is missing the biggest issue with armor penetration, unless those values grow EXTREMELY quickly.

I'm currently testing a 160 output Beam/Can/EXP setup that deals 150 damage on main hit and 25 on side hits from explosive effect. This weapon can cut through 27 blocks of advanced armor PER TICK, without loosing effectiveness against hull or shield. How would lancake's setup react to such a setup? It would slow it down for sure, but it fails to address the problem with single block penetration; you just pile damage into one point and you need insane amounts of armor blocks to prevent penetration.

The problem lies in the stopping power being a percentage of the damage. It doesn't completely stop it, so no matter how much armor HP you have it's going to go through, and if you raise the percentage higher it just turns into shields, like we're trying to avoid.

I'd sugest having a penetration threshold for armor; damage below the threshold does damage to armor HP, but wont deal any damage to blocks. Damage above the threshold continues through after losing damage to armor hp = threshold (100k damage shot impacts armor with 20k threshold = 80k bullet passes through armor. Threshold being dependant on # of punch-through passive modules on the entity. Combine with complete negation effect for bonus points, and variety in armor designs.

To address lancake's suggestion, i'd refer you to Aurora 4x Games - Index and it's armor system, which is really good:

Spoiler: Aurora Armor Breakdown

Aurora has ship design, but ships are purely 2D and there's no internal layout. Armor is basically a large grid of tiles, with damage coming in from above and if they go through the grid into the bottom the ship will take internal damage:

Different ship weapons have different patterns for damage, instead of starmade's linear penetration:

There's also limits on how large the weapons can get.

The reason this armor works really well is because you can't stack weapons in one spot, they all hit different points. A weapons that's able to go through the armor in one hit will kill the ship very quickly, but even one damage short and it becomes really hard to get through. You have to get lucky and keep hitting the same spot. I think this is how armor SHOULD work; really effective against weaker weapons, but completely unable to stop heavy ones. The suggestion i posted creates the same sweet zone for armor, where it can be really really strong (Aurora armor is about 10x as durable as shields and both are still good), but anything stronger than sweet spot is barely affected by it.