A better way for missiles to distribute damage

[Planr]

I'm already aware that missiles are going to eventually be heavily overhauled and fixed to be better. I have a suggestion to change the way missiles do damage.

The current way missiles do damage is by doing complete spherical-shaped area damage in a radius of outward-faded severity of damage. All blocks within the same "layer area" of this radius recieve the same damage. Blocks outward from the radius take less damage. I've created an illustration of how this is here:

The problem with this system of radius damage is that there is no damage reduction for hidden blocks or blocks that are shielded from the direct missile blast of exposure. This makes all missile marks to have the same, cheesy explosion crater of a perfect sphere. Really boring and rather overdone levels of destruction, in my opinion. Makes being a shieldless object that much more of a death wish.

My suggestion is this: For each progressively "buried" or "thicker-in" layer of blocks at the area of contact where the missile hits, damage should be progressively reduced. (Let's assume for this following scenario that the missile being fired is of high enough power to easily destroy the first several layers of blocks under the current explosion effect) The first exposed layer of blocks hit by the blast takes the full force of the damage and is destroyed; The second takes the amount of damage for its areas of radius minus the damage absorbed by the first layer; The third layer takes the amount of normal radius damages minus the damage absorbed by the destruction of the blocks of the first and second layers; And so on. I have illustrated this concept as I can best think of here:

Here is an in-game comparison of the current explosion effect compared to a mockup I created of my idea:

One thing I should admit: I don't quite know how this would work for complex-shaped areas hit by missiles (eg. say the top tip of a mountain was hit by a missile). Guess i'll leave it to Schema to run some sorts of magical equations or something on the coding for missiles to figure that out.

With this revamp of damage distribution for missiles, they lose their immensely overpowered destruction they typically bring with their giant radiuses.

One further note: With this, I also think that the relative values of direct damage and radius-of-effect should be nerfed. So basically in a nutshell nerf the power of missiles. Oh, but increase their relative speed. I can hardly battle PVP with missiles on NASS because even at high levels of power, they travel far too slow to catch up with my enemies going at 150 KPH. Perhaps the speed of missiles should be relative to the maximum set flight speed on the server, in order for the missiles to keep up with what i'm trying to hit.



So, what do you guys think?

 

[MossyStone48]

Combine this with some counter measures and you have a solid proposal. Nerf the damage, up the speed and add in something more than just jamming as a counter for KBs and BBs and you\'re left with d1000s becoming the only solid missiles for making quick work of PVP targets.

 

[MichaelSeph]

May sound logic, but I think we should start thinking of using the performance (doable math) left to the most important/noticeable changes, as I doubt we can make the game \"calculate\" and think for all the possible good ideas, so we should start filtering the usseful ones of the less ussefel ones.

For example how would it affect walls, just break 1 wall and the stuff being 2 blocks of hallway untouched ? This idea can get to be unrealistic in some cases as much as it\'s more realistic than current explosion in some other cases.

 

[Planr]

May sound logic, but I think we should start thinking of using the performance (doable math) left to the most important/noticeable changes, as I doubt we can make the game \"calculate\" and think for all the possible good ideas, so we should start filtering the usseful ones of the less ussefel ones.


Can you please clarify? I don\'t understand what you mean by \'using performance left to the most important/noticeable changes\', nor \'i doubt we can make the game... ...think for all the possible good ideas\'.

If you mean how the game would calculate the effect on blocks, then I don\'t know how this kind of explosion effect would be calculated by the computer. However, it looks to me like it would only require a simple equation. Like I said, Schema could work the magic there



For example how would it affect walls, just break 1 wall and the stuff being 2 blocks of hallway untouched ? This idea can get to be unrealistic in some cases as much as it\'s more realistic than current explosion in some other cases.



If you\'re using a tiny missile launcher, then perhaps... but if it\'s of the size of capital ships or even frigates, then no way. It would be more than enough to breach the corridor. Just not make it into a giant block of swiss cheese.

 

[Ikalpo]

What you are proposing is pretty much how Minecraft does explosions.

 

[JonasWalker]

I like this idea and as mentioned this is very similiar to how Minecraft handles blast damage. Basically the actual damage is drawn as rays radiating out from the point of detonation that try to damage any blocks in their way and are attenuated by distance falloff. If I understand correctly it\'d sort of be like this:

Each block would attenuate the damage by its armor factor for the purpose of damaging that block only then soak as much as it could from its HP pool; if any damage remained the ray continues minus whatever was soaked by the previous blocks example until no further blocks remain to damage or the value falls to zero. If you adapt something similiar to AMC\'s it would allow you to also punch through more then one block at a time if you can cause sufficent amounts of raw damage thus setting up two seperate niches. Missiles for opening wide but shallow craters and AMC\'s for punching deeper but narrow holes. Even better if AMC\'s are eventually fixed where larger groupings produce more damage but reduce rate of fire rather then the current buff to everything.

If I\'m wrong please feel free to correct me.

 

[Ludovsky]

Also, just for a real world example,,,,

Recall that in RL, armor piercing missiles are -rarely- conventional explosive missiles. Rather, they are \"shaped\" charges which focus the full blast of their explosion in single direction. Sphere like explosions are generally the deal of high explosive ordnance.... which fares poorly against armor as though the wide blast is great for throwing sharpnel at high speed all around to eviscerate infantry, hard surfaces like armor diffuse greatly the blast which disperse upon hitting the plating due to be unfocused.

Armor piercing missiles in real life uses a different mechanism which instead of creating as large and wide as possible explosion, instead try to focus as much as possible of the blast in a single, narrow point.
This create a blast so intensely focused that it more or less moves through the molecules of the plating iirc what I\'d read, literally giving the impression of \"melting\" a hole in the meal.... however such holes are very often extremely small compared to the strenght of the blast due to how the explosion is focused in such a narrow area. In other words, missiles meant to penetrate armor in real life penetrate in depth rather than width as is currently the case.

And often, examples of things blowing up when it by such amissile has often much less to do with the actual missile, and more with the ammunition chamber or engine blowing up because of ammunition or fuel catching on fire. This is why hit location can often be critical in real life(and why you want to avoid cramping all the different components too close to each others in a millitary vehicle, to avoid such lethal explosions when plating -is- penetrated).

A way to further balance things in my eyes would be to make explosion sizes scale drastically less than it currently does, reducing explosion AoE if needed, so that even the bigger ordnance only punched a certain size of hole rather than a ship-devastating nuclear blast. A ship can look \"damaged\" with a certain amount of holes in it\'s plating without looking like it just got hit by the Czar Bomba.

However, counter-balance this by making critical components like power generator prone to explosion when destroyed. This could result in fighting might become a more cerebral affair of trying to find the critical system of an enemy ship and attempt to destroy them for maximal damages, and at the same time would further discourage \"gigantism syndrom\" of just building one massive generator for the whole ship that would thus cause -massive- damages to the ship if caused to explode(and cripple it hopelessly as the massive power generation is lost) and thus encourage smaller but more spread out designs which could also be better armored individually.

TL-DR: Drastically reduces missiles capacity to the level where they\'re good to punch decently deep but narrow holes in plating even at large array size, but counter balance it by making blocks like generator(or some types of weapon blocks) prone to chain reaction explosion when destroyed by weaponry. This way making missiles both more realist yet still useful for trying to track down these critical systems which would then need to be laid out with more thoughts due to the risks of damages to an exposed generator.

 

[KuramaFox]

I mean, Minecraft may not be the most efficient engine itself, but this is how it does its explosions (that is, Minecraft explosions DO use the sort of mechanic the topic maker is asking about), which are somewhat infamous for their oddly high proccessing requirements.