Another stupid armor idea

[AtraUnam]

[[Introduction]]
So when you get right down to it the main disparity between armor and shields is this; every shield block will always be working to protect you no matter what, armor blocks only work to protect you if they get hit. Even with all or nothing armor setups its extremely rare for even 50% of all armor blocks to be destroyed before a ship dies, this is largely because high penetration weapons make these ridiculous tiny holes that go right through to your systems. So rather than adding an armor health bar or making groups of armor blocks gain more health I propose a different solution that could work with or without the current AHP system.

[[Basics]]
Armor blocks force cannons or beams hitting them to spread their damage around the block hit in a radius based on the thickness of the armor hit. This would be done by performing a raycast on impact from the projectile to the first none armor block on the target, the number of armor blocks intersected by this line would be considered the thickness; radius is equal to 'thickness*0.5'. In order to save processing power no complicated explosion calculations would be performed, damage is simply split between all blocks in the radius.

1. 50% to first armor block hit,
2. 50% of remainder split between immediately surrounding armor blocks
3. 50% of remainders split between armor blocks immediately surrounding those blocks
4. and so on until max radius is reached or the damage per block drops below 1.

Additionally if all the blocks in the radius are destroyed the projectile is allowed to continue on and hit again.

"But Atra that just makes every weapon a missile!" you might say. Only it doesn't because this explosion isn't heavily calculated and because it only spreads through armor -which missiles do the worst against- so no this is not turning every weapon into a missile. It forces them to cut through more armor blocks thus lessening their penetration without affecting their damage against systems.

For illustartive purposes please enjoy these diagrams:

As you can see the thicker the armor the more blocks a projectile is forced to damage at once, now since damage is distributed in halves starting at the centre, smaller projectiles will still be moderately concentrated in a smallish area rather than being spread over hundreds of blocks and rendered completely useless.

[[Why I believe this is a good system]]
Per its name the main advantage of this system is the forced spreading of damage, thicker armor becomes exponentially harder to penetrate all in one go yet damage is not magically vanished away by weird hp gains or into some sort of health bar. The system also has some side advantages.

1. Shots comming in at low angles will trace a line going through more blocks thus increasing the radius of spread, this is not something I deliberately designed into the system but it does nicely represent the lesser effectiveness of low angled shots as well as making sloped armor work how one would expect.
2. Because damage is caused in a radius it means shots make kickass craters in thick plates of armor, this looks way cooler than crappy needle holes everywhere.
3. Thick armor can take a real beating from heavy fire -and have the looks the match- but at the same time progresively hitting the exact same spot over and over again can punch through it with far less total effort, just like some roided out sci-fi alien punching through a door.

[[Potentially taking it further]]
Having a radius also allows different weapon types to be made more unique through radius modifers. For example if a weapon had a radius modifier of 0.5 it means shots from that weapon will be spread out over only half the radius they usually would, thus improving their armor penetration. Here's a list of hypothetical radius modifiers to make weapon combos feel more unique.

• cannon/nothing: 1x
• cannon/cannon: 1.1x (It makes sense that rapid fire weapons have lower penetration)
• cannon/beam: 0.75x (Yay sniper cannons)
• cannon/pulse 1.5x (Big fat explody shells)

As you can imagine these modifiers would fairly alter how each weapon is used, for instance cannon/beam would become a superior weapon for penetrating armor and thus ships designed to fight in that way would benefit from using it. But its not just weapons, these modifiers could be used with the chamber systems as well, here are some more examples:

• A chamber to force a 10% radius increase on all weapons hitting the ship
• A chamber to cause a 10% radius decrease on all weapons fired by the ship
• A chamber to alter the damage spread on weapons hitting the ship so that damage is spread perfectly evenly rather than being focused in the middle, or perhaps just to decrease the level of focus.

[[Conclusion]]
So thats my proposal, to sum it up the idea is to make armor distribute damage to surrounding armor blocks thus forceing the enemy to break more of them and forming kickass pitts and craters in the process.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I'm going to take a much closer look at this when I have more free time. Looks good so far.

 

[Ithirahad]

If it is feasible, I 100% support this. It would give armor the buff that everyone wants, while creating expected behaviour (weapons creating dents and craters in armor) rather than unintuitive numerical mechanics.

Also, as Aethi Imperial vessels are basically 100% sloped armor, I suppose I have a bit of a vested interest in this system being implemented. :P

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Ah, this reminds me quite strongly of the original Battlestar Galactica (not the bloody remake), since this is how their ship-armor was stated to work.
(and, equally important, shown to work)

EDIT: the only gripe I have about it is that it would, by necessity, add yet more calulations to a game allready choking on them.

 

[Cluwne]

Question, how would it work with current armor-related effects? Both defensive and offensive.
Overall sounds like a good idea that may have a chance of making armor an alternative to shield spam.
One last thing, will this suggestion work with armored doors/forcefields as well?

 

[AtraUnam]

Question, how would it work with current armor-related effects? Both defensive and offensive.
Overall sounds like a good idea that may have a chance of making armor an alternative to shield spam.
One last thing, will this suggestion work with armored doors/forcefields as well?

With this system both defensive and offensive effects could feasably be left as is however I would propose that they also include some spread increase/decrease. Perhaps punch could increase damage with no change to spread while Pierce would no longer increase damage but reduce spreading. Passive effects are being co-opted into the chamber system and thus would probably work as described in my examples, I would presume punch ewuivelent just buffs armor hp while the pierce chamber equivelent could perhaps increase the spread of all impacting shots.

Yes It would work with all armor type blocks such as blast doors and forcefields. On that note though I would rather forcefields be massless but consume constant power when on, but thats for another thread.

 

[Comradecolonel]

I've been thinking about a similar concept myself. As you said, armor doesn't do much against penetration. The only thing that makes a difference is how many blocks deep you need to go. This would make armor function like it does in real life. I hope this is something that Schine takes into account for future development.

 

[Calhoun]

The problem I have with this is that while it's a buff to armour, it's also a direct buff to cannons and beams. Instead of poking little holes we'll be blowing large craters.How does that solve the problems with armour exactly?

 

[Hidden Porpoise]

It's good, it's another thing that isn't a raw stat.

The problem I have with this is that while it's a buff to armour, it's also a direct buff to cannons and beams. Instead of poking little holes we'll be blowing large craters.How does that solve the problems with armour exactly?

What?

 

[sayerulz]

I definitely support this. Armor is just not as good as it feels like it should be. Pretty much every ship has or easily could have a cannon that can go straight though the whole length of a similarly sized ship, so battle damage is just needleholes and armor that does nothing.

The problem I have with this is that while it's a buff to armour, it's also a direct buff to cannons and beams. Instead of poking little holes we'll be blowing large craters.How does that solve the problems with armour exactly?

Damage is spread ONLY over armor blocks. The large craters would only be in a ships armor. Systems still only get pinholes.

 

[Arcaner]

Um, wouldn't this favor building the (new AND old) systems (power mainly) in a spiky way (tentacled) with armor surrounding the spikes to absorb as much damage as possible? That WOULD greatly offset building cubical (new) power reactors. Cool. (MANY people were worried about the loss of complexity with reactor blocks)

For a sec, it seemed like all was good, but then there was the thought-HACKS
What I mean is this-What defines the "depth" of armor blocks? What if I had a 1*10*10 wall of armor in the side of my ship, and every two block spacings I placed a vertical line of 1*1*10 armor. Wouldn't something like this be the most efficient way of building? That would mean we (i.e, serious ship builders)would have to start ship building again-from scratch, because all previous designs would be nullified.

 

[Dire Venom]

Um, wouldn't this favor building the (new AND old) systems (power mainly) in a spiky way (tentacled) with armor surrounding the spikes to absorb as much damage as possible? That WOULD greatly offset building cubical (new) power reactors. Cool. (MANY people were worried about the loss of complexity with reactor blocks)

For a sec, it seemed like all was good, but then there was the thought-HACKS
What I mean is this-What defines the "depth" of armor blocks? What if I had a 1*10*10 wall of armor in the side of my ship, and every two block spacings I placed a vertical line of 1*1*10 armor. Wouldn't something like this be the most efficient way of building? That would mean we (i.e, serious ship builders)would have to start ship building again-from scratch, because all previous designs would be nullified.

This is just a thought up proposal from a dedicated community fan :P You wouldn't expect everything to be covered/factored in.
That being said you do have a good point. How the damage path works would be very important to how ships are built. From what I can tell, damage is applied in an ever increasing radius until all of it is gone. Thus building spikes does not reduce the damage you take, and the same number of armored blocks would still be destroyed.
I'm not against having various building options to direct damage as long as it is well explained and obvious to players.

 

[Lancake]

Every decent armor suggestion so far, relies on the damage being mitigated perpendicular of the shot's direction. This is a variation on the ones I've read so far, yet has the same potential issues too.

First being, performance. A ray cast is rather cheap, but then proceeding to go down the "touching blocks" damage distribution is something else. Having to do this for every projectile hit would be a concern, as you also need to flag every block it already went over.

Second issue being, potential exploits or gameplay issues. It seems to be that there's missing information of how it would work in more complex situations, I wouldn't mind seeing more examples.

1. The method of using multiple outputs behind each other to penetrate through armor, seems to still apply here if you use the 50% damage to 1st block, 50% to surrounding and 50% of that 50%, etc.
   
   If the projectile has damage remaining, it continues. But that's going to give you the same result as it does right now, where you lose X% damage per hit block. Here all of the damage distributed is only 50% of its original damage, the other 50% is applied on the 1st block.
   It would act like 50% armor HP absorption but also damage all armor blocks nearby, which in this case makes your armor as it damages way more armor blocks, yet projectiles still penetrate just as well as before.
   
   This could be helped by adapting that 50% distribution to higher or lower levels depending on some factors, but then you might as well apply the same thing on the armor HP % absorption where no performance loss is seen at all.
   
   
2. How deeps does the armor depth raycast go? Seems something you can use to determine the exact amount of spaced armor layers you need to get the most out of it.
   
   
3. Do you differentiate between basic hull, standard hull and advanced armor with that raycast? basic hull could be used in some situations to force the armor depth to go to crazy amounts when in reality it should not even matter.
   
   
4. Does the armor depth raycast check docked entities too?
   
   
5. Does the sphere damage also apply damage backwards, as it's a full sphere and not a hemisphere? Leads to some weird situations where a hit at the deepest layer still distributes it all nicely to the blocks to its back.

 

[JinM]

A different mechanic would be great but seems not realistic.

My workaround would be:

1. Lower shield stats until armor feels as strong as placing down a shield block. For this I would increase shield mass to 0.2 for rechargers and capacitors, and lower capacity and recharge by 20%.

2. Shields should be able to get turned off: The shields should drop to zero.

3. The under fire mechanic should be extended: If shields reach zero percent, they turn off and need to regenerate until they reach 50% again, and then they come back at 50%.

4. The difference between normal hull, standard, and heavy armor should be bigger. Advanced armor should have 400 hp instead of 250, but have a mass of 0.35. Standard armor should have 150 hp and 0.20 hp. All other values should stay the same.

5 (experimental and just an additional idea, point 3 should be scratched for this mechanic). Lossing armor integrity should drain your shields too. The ship gets instable with more and more holes in its structure, and the shields are there to sustain it's structure. At 80% armor Hp I would constantly drain 5% of the shields recharge. At 50% armor Hp I would constantly drain 10% of the shields. If the shields get turned off and you have under 50% armor HP, you should loose ship hitpoints, like 1% per minute. At 30% armor Hp it should drain 15% of the shields recharge, and you should loose 2% ship hitpoints. At 0% armor Hp random module blocks of the ship should explode in the ammount of 2% of the ship hitpoints per minute, the recharge drain should stay the same.

The values are not tested or finetuned. It's just a general idea of direction of my thoughts.

 

[AtraUnam]

Every decent armor suggestion so far, relies on the damage being mitigated perpendicular of the shot's direction. This is a variation on the ones I've read so far, yet has the same potential issues too.

First being, performance. A ray cast is rather cheap, but then proceeding to go down the "touching blocks" damage distribution is something else. Having to do this for every projectile hit would be a concern, as you also need to flag every block it already went over.

Second issue being, potential exploits or gameplay issues. It seems to be that there's missing information of how it would work in more complex situations, I wouldn't mind seeing more examples.

1. The method of using multiple outputs behind each other to penetrate through armor, seems to still apply here if you use the 50% damage to 1st block, 50% to surrounding and 50% of that 50%, etc.
   
   If the projectile has damage remaining, it continues. But that's going to give you the same result as it does right now, where you lose X% damage per hit block. Here all of the damage distributed is only 50% of its original damage, the other 50% is applied on the 1st block.
   It would act like 50% armor HP absorption but also damage all armor blocks nearby, which in this case makes your armor as it damages way more armor blocks, yet projectiles still penetrate just as well as before.
   
   This could be helped by adapting that 50% distribution to higher or lower levels depending on some factors, but then you might as well apply the same thing on the armor HP % absorption where no performance loss is seen at all.
   
   
2. How deeps does the armor depth raycast go? Seems something you can use to determine the exact amount of spaced armor layers you need to get the most out of it.
   
   
3. Do you differentiate between basic hull, standard hull and advanced armor with that raycast? basic hull could be used in some situations to force the armor depth to go to crazy amounts when in reality it should not even matter.
   
   
4. Does the armor depth raycast check docked entities too?
   
   
5. Does the sphere damage also apply damage backwards, as it's a full sphere and not a hemisphere? Leads to some weird situations where a hit at the deepest layer still distributes it all nicely to the blocks to its back.

1. I have to admit that was the least thought out part of the proposal, Perhaps a better system would be somethign akin to the old missile explosions where first it takes the damage required to destroy the first blocks, then ditributes the remainder between the blocks at r1, then if theres still damage left that is distributed between all the blocks at r2, etc etc until either the radius cap is reached or the damage is exhausted.
2. Raycast would only go until the first non armor block or empty space, so spaced armor would cause each layer to have its own thickness value.
3. Not sure on this one, ideally each type of armor block would count for a different depth so perhaps advanced armor blocks would count for 0.75 radius rather than 0.5, and hull might only count for 0.25 radius.
4. I honestly have no idea, either answer could lead to performance issues, or exploits, or both.
5. The original idea was actually a cone, but I figured it would be far less performance intensive to simply check if a block is within a certain distance or not. A half sphere would also be pretty good if that were possible.

 

[sayerulz]

A different mechanic would be great but seems not realistic.

My workaround would be:

1. Lower shield stats until armor feels as strong as placing down a shield block. For this I would increase shield mass to 0.2 for rechargers and capacitors, and lower capacity and recharge by 20%.

2. Shields should be able to get turned off: The shields should drop to zero.

3. The under fire mechanic should be extended: If shields reach zero percent, they turn off and need to regenerate until they reach 50% again, and then they come back at 50%.

4. The difference between normal hull, standard, and heavy armor should be bigger. Advanced armor should have 400 hp instead of 250, but have a mass of 0.35. Standard armor should have 150 hp and 0.20 hp. All other values should stay the same.

5 (experimental and just an additional idea, point 3 should be scratched for this mechanic). Lossing armor integrity should drain your shields too. The ship gets instable with more and more holes in its structure, and the shields are there to sustain it's structure. At 80% armor Hp I would constantly drain 5% of the shields recharge. At 50% armor Hp I would constantly drain 10% of the shields. If the shields get turned off and you have under 50% armor HP, you should loose ship hitpoints, like 1% per minute. At 30% armor Hp it should drain 15% of the shields recharge, and you should loose 2% ship hitpoints. At 0% armor Hp random module blocks of the ship should explode in the ammount of 2% of the ship hitpoints per minute, the recharge drain should stay the same.

The values are not tested or finetuned. It's just a general idea of direction of my thoughts.

This just seems like an all-round nerf to ship durability, and a big one at that.

 

[AtraUnam]

Ok super performance simplified version of this system:

Projectile hits, a ray is cast to the first non-armor space (we already know a single linecast is cheap) and the projectile must contend with the combined armor value of every armor block hit. So if armor blocks had 50% damage reduction it would go as follows.

1. block thick = 50% damage reduction
2. block thick = 75% damage reduction
3. block thick = 87.5% damage reductio
4. block thick = 93.75% damage reduction

And so on.

 

[JinM]

Ok super performance simplified version of this system:

Projectile hits, a ray is cast to the first non-armor space (we already know a single linecast is cheap) and the projectile must contend with the combined armor value of every armor block hit. So if armor blocks had 50% damage reduction it would go as follows.

1. block thick = 50% damage reduction
2. block thick = 75% damage reduction
3. block thick = 87.5% damage reductio
4. block thick = 93.75% damage reduction

And so on.

I like the idea, that an advanced armor block should half the remaining damage, instead of substracting a certain block hp value from the projectile damage. You don't even need to make the calculation of how many armor blocks get penetrated.

But sadly I am really into railguns that hole big ships. So this sort of armor buff is very strong, isn't it?

 

[AtraUnam]

I like the idea, that an advanced armor block should half the remaining damage, instead of substracting a certain block hp value from the projectile damage. You don't even need to make the calculation of how many armor blocks get penetrated.

But sadly I am really into railguns that hole big ships. So this sort of armor buff is very strong, isn't it?

Its very strong on heavy armor, 1 block thick armor would be basically unchanged but 10 block thick armor would be really strong.

 

[Valiant70]

The armor HP system as it is now actually weakens armor.

Why? The armor HP pool acts as a sort of "second shield" to stop damage from reaching your blocks ... except you can break individual blocks to make a hole and tear up systems anyway without depleting the "second shield." There are two possible ways to break an armor tank:

1. You can't break enough blocks to shoot through, so you pelt the whole thing until the "second shield" falls, which effectively deletes their armor.
   
2. You mostly ignore the "second shield" by breaking the individual armor blocks with high-penetration weapons.

This gives armor tanks the worst of both worlds because it's a "break whichever is easier" scenario. One method of breaking armor always undermines the other's resistance. To eliminate this scenario, you must:

EITHER pick one or the other:

1. Armor is simply a second shield. Armor HP absorbs all incoming damage until depleted, then blocks are damaged as normal. Armor is just a non-regenerating shield, so it must have a lot more HP to compensate for lack of regeneration and cost of repair.
2. Or, armor blocks cancel part of the incoming damage and/or distribute it to surrounding armor blocks. This means you have to open a hole somewhere in order to damage what's underneath.

OR do both combined:

1. Once shields are down, armor acts as a non-regenerating HP pool that must be depleted before blocks are damaged.
2. And, weapon fire striking blocks has its strength reduced according to the type and thickness of armor in the path of the shot before being applied to either armor HP (if not depleted) or the block's HP.

OR do both separately:

1. As above, armor acts as a non-regenerating HP pool that must be depleted before blocks are damaged.
   
2. After armor HP is depleted, weapons fire striking blocks has its strength reduced/dispersed according to the type and thickness of armor in the path of the shot.