Armor Revamp: Focus on Armor HP over Block Destruction

[Edymnion]

I think we can all agree that armor is... in less than an ideal place right now. You need multiple layers of the stuff to stop even moderate incoming fire which limits usable interior space, its cumbersome to repair/replace due to having to actually make and place new blocks (or deconstruct the entire ship so you can add a hundred armor cubes to the box and reconstruct the whole thing), and you reach the point where you're so heavy you can barely move long before you reach actual usable defensive amounts of the stuff.

Then we have sci-fi shows like Star Trek where you will routinely hear lines like "Hull integrity down to 20%!", and yet when the hero ship invariably wins the fight, it flies off looking pretty much unscathed.

So, what if we started treating armor in a similar way as shields?

What if instead of having armor hp that decreases damage to everything hit until its gone, the armor hp prevents the armor itself from being damaged? As in, as long as you have a certain percentage of armor hp (based on armor type), your actual armor blocks cannot be destroyed.

Just rough idea, but say Basic Hull is indestructible until armor hp falls below 50%, Standard Armor holds up until 75% of your armor hp are depleted, and Advanced Armor stays up until 100% of your armor hp is depleted.

So that it would basically act the way shields do now, except that it doesn't use energy and it doesn't regenerate. Gotta pay the shop to repair you, or use the oft-forgotten astromech beams to repair your armor hp at your station.

Then you could use far less heavy armor blocks to get the same protection by virtue of actually being able to USE all of your armor to protect you instead of anything not directly being hit not being of any real use (other than as an armor hp sponge pool).

Once armor hp is depleted, the actual armor blocks could be destroyed normally.

So we have shields that cost energy but regenerate while stopping all damage cold, we could then have armor that stops all damage to actual blocks cold but doesn't regenerate.

 

[Ezekial Alexander]

I agree whole heartedly. Armor in its current form is only useful against missiles and beams (and only because they're bugged).

The only modification I could think of is a large reduction in damage to the armor block in a late stage of the tank, but still able to be destroyed. Say standard armor is invincible to 60%, then has a 90% damage reduction until AHP is gone (with that 90% applied to AHP of course). Hull's numbers would be less and advanced's more robust.

 

[Az14el]

im gonna get me my first flaming points someday soon, i can feel it

 

[MrFURB]

What you describe is possible within the blockbehavior.cfg file. Here is what I found:

<ArmorHpDamageThreshold>1.0</ArmorHpDamageThreshold> <!-- absorbedDamageToArmorHP = (ArmorHpDamageThreshold * [armorhp of the block]) * [current ArmorHp Left On Ship]; Note: this is not used as long as ArmorHpAbsorbtion != 0; This means, a ship wont take damage other than armorHP damage as long as a single shot isn't above the trheshold; -->

What this does is create a dynamic AHP absorption mechanic based on the armor of the block hit. By changing the armor values of blocks you can create a setup almost identical to what you are describing.

 

[Edymnion]

What you describe is possible within the blockbehavior.cfg file.

 

[Ezekial Alexander]

What you describe is possible within the blockbehavior.cfg file. Here is what I found:

<ArmorHpDamageThreshold>1.0</ArmorHpDamageThreshold> <!-- absorbedDamageToArmorHP = (ArmorHpDamageThreshold * [armorhp of the block]) * [current ArmorHp Left On Ship]; Note: this is not used as long as ArmorHpAbsorbtion != 0; This means, a ship wont take damage other than armorHP damage as long as a single shot isn't above the trheshold; -->.

I'm assuming [current armor HP left on the ship] is a percent expressed in decimal form? Or is it raw value so that it would absorb an alpha hit up front, then not resist as the armor wore down?

 

[Zyrr]

I think we can all agree that armor is... in less than an ideal place right now. You need multiple layers of the stuff to stop even moderate incoming fire which limits usable interior space, its cumbersome to repair/replace due to having to actually make and place new blocks (or deconstruct the entire ship so you can add a hundred armor cubes to the box and reconstruct the whole thing), and you reach the point where you're so heavy you can barely move long before you reach actual usable defensive amounts of the stuff.

Then we have sci-fi shows like Star Trek where you will routinely hear lines like "Hull integrity down to 20%!", and yet when the hero ship invariably wins the fight, it flies off looking pretty much unscathed.

So, what if we started treating armor in a similar way as shields?

What if instead of having armor hp that decreases damage to everything hit until its gone, the armor hp prevents the armor itself from being damaged? As in, as long as you have a certain percentage of armor hp (based on armor type), your actual armor blocks cannot be destroyed.

Just rough idea, but say Basic Hull is indestructible until armor hp falls below 50%, Standard Armor holds up until 75% of your armor hp are depleted, and Advanced Armor stays up until 100% of your armor hp is depleted.

So that it would basically act the way shields do now, except that it doesn't use energy and it doesn't regenerate. Gotta pay the shop to repair you, or use the oft-forgotten astromech beams to repair your armor hp at your station.

Then you could use far less heavy armor blocks to get the same protection by virtue of actually being able to USE all of your armor to protect you instead of anything not directly being hit not being of any real use (other than as an armor hp sponge pool).

Once armor hp is depleted, the actual armor blocks could be destroyed normally.

So we have shields that cost energy but regenerate while stopping all damage cold, we could then have armor that stops all damage to actual blocks cold but doesn't regenerate.

Blast doors -> R to open.

Laughably easy to exploit.

 

[Jojomo]

Wouldn't this make armour act like shields? I.e. a single pool of potential damage no matter where the ship was hit?

I think that would be less tactical and less interesting than location-specific damage.

 

[Nickizzy]

Blast doors -> R to open.

Laughably easy to exploit.

Oh. Those have AHP don't they.
[doublepost=1481833244,1481832232][/doublepost]

Wouldn't this make armour act like shields? I.e. a single pool of potential damage no matter where the ship was hit?

I think that would be less tactical and less interesting than location-specific damage.

AHP would reduce a percentage of damage taken by armor blocks based on how much[%] AHP was left. So Adv armor would only take 1% damage until 10% loss, 5% until 15%, 10:25, 20:35, 40:50, 60:50, 75:75, 80:80, 90:90, and finally 100% damage at no AHP. Maybe smooth the curves between the datapoints.

(Don't take my numbers for granted, this is a rough idea of it. Standard and Hull blocks would have comparatively weaker values, degrading to full damage at a faster rate, then maybe slowing in the last 90% damage taken and slowly going 91,92,93 while the rest of the AHP is destroyed.)

 

[FlyingDebris]

tbh this system seems inherently tuned towards rewarding the use of large clumps of open doors around the ship

 

[MrFURB]

Blast doors -> R to open.

Laughably easy to exploit.

Eeeeeh... Not so much. Those would add armor HP to the pool, but do nothing else. Keep in mind that AHP is not calculated per block, but per entity.

A ship with one layer of basic hull and 80,000 open doors would take just over 400,000 damage absorbed into AHP as damage is poured in, then the basic hull would begin to break.

 

[Comradecolonel]

I like the basic idea. Armor provides more of an all around defense instead of being just a high hp block. One problem I see though is that the exact implementation you described makes weapons that are based on block destruction to be severely nerfed. Once both shields and armor are down, the fight would basically be over at that point. The way the current system is, damage is more random and you never know when I critical system will be damaged. Waffle type setups have already been nerfed by the excess 10% power per group. Now they would only be useful at the very end of a battle. Torpedoes would also become quite useless as they don't do that much raw damage.

I think the system for armor should focus on reducing the penetration effect of weapons. This is the biggest problem with armor right now as even if the armor block is a directly between you and the high pen cannon, it still gets chewed up no problem. There's no direct defense against this type of weapon, you just have to hope they don't hit anything important.

 

[Nickizzy]

I like the basic idea. Armor provides more of an all around defense instead of being just a high hp block. One problem I see though is that the exact implementation you described makes weapons that are based on block destruction to be severely nerfed. Once both shields and armor are down, the fight would basically be over at that point. The way the current system is, damage is more random and you never know when I critical system will be damaged. Waffle type setups have already been nerfed by the excess 10% power per group. Now they would only be useful at the very end of a battle. Torpedoes would also become quite useless as they don't do that much raw damage.

I think the system for armor should focus on reducing the penetration effect of weapons. This is the biggest problem with armor right now as even if the armor block is a directly between you and the high pen cannon, it still gets chewed up no problem. There's no direct defense against this type of weapon, you just have to hope they don't hit anything important.

You'd still do damage, just it would do a low amount and then more and more as AHP dropped. I think AP weapons should be AP weapons, and pierce through blocks until it's piercing value dropped so it couldn't go further. So layers of Adv armor would drop the pierce value more than layers of fluff shield caps.

Warheads could really just do "True" damage, as in it will do 5k in 20 radius or whatever, no matter what.

Once Armor and Shields are gone, isn't the fight over anyway?

 

[Comradecolonel]

My point is weapons that do raw damage would really be all you would need with a system like the OP described. Having weapons that focus on block destruction would be a detriment until the very end of the battle. The most effective weapons would be a simple single group weapon that just pounds away at your ship. Then maybe you have a missile to finish off your foe.

I agree with you that AP should be AP. Armor should not be able to stop a weapon made specifically to to defeat it. They problem is that the damage of weapons scales up in way that armor does not. The individual HP of the block matters less and less as you get bigger weapons. Purpose built AP cannons are far less effect that just a big array of C/C. I have never seen armor stop cannon fire at bigger sizes, unless it was layered like crazy. I feel that it is pretty silly to simply build anything in layers to stop penetrating fire. I would like some sort of mechanic that allows you to specifically counter AP weapons.

Having read your idea Nickizzy, I have to say I like it more than the OP's because it is fundementally different. It still allows block damage but provides increase strength to individual blocks. It is actually very similar to the current system except the buff doesn't apply to all blocks and it scales with total armor HP. I'm just not sure how well it will address some of the balance issues that current exist.

Also losing armor HP and shield does not mean you are out currently, especially if you have done some serious damage to your enemy in the process. With the OPs system it would make battles have more of a binary feel to them, It would just boil down to a normal game were DPS correlates directly to TTK.

 

[StarWars1981]

If there were a way (I doubt it), it would probably be best to scale up resistance of armor blocks (both their block HP and their resistance to damage) by the number of blocks in a line; for instance, a three-block armor belt would have significant advantages over a single layer, and a 30-layer belt would actually live up to its apparent durability: such a belt could shrug off 99% of incoming damage, tanking fire for a long time before giving way completely. It would give it a use worthy of its mass. Such ships as the NFD Cherokee, with a 100m forward armor slab, would be nigh-indestructible from the front, at least for most weaponry ever built. Large weapons (Titan size, lol) could, of course, annihilate that, given time; but the point is it would buy more time than it will now, as building a drilling weapon to puncture that is child's play for most builders who are even going to compete with that size vessel. And a good-sized C-C array will burn that block off faster than the pilot can turn around. I do mean thousands of blocks for the C-C array, but still - throughout history, armor has always lagged behind weapons in development, but probably almost never this far behind. Armor is insignificant versus the awesome destructive power of large-scale weaponry; it does need buffs, because to live up to its mass and space requirements, it needs to be far tougher.

 

[kaemcedlra]

In my opinion, armor shouldn't be a second layer of shield, it should play a different role. Armor already acts a hull to keep our ships together, but I get that we need to have a use for the advanced tiers of armor. The thing is, in space things move really freaking fast. In atmosphere things which would be launched out of an explosion at (reallyhighnumber) km/hr slow down immediately due to air. In space these tiny kinetic missile continue on until they hit something. Unfortunately at these high speeds your armor, no matter how thick titanium or whatever will be like butter. For kinetic damage, shields are king. Bullets, missiles, debris. However, when it comes to energy weapons (beams, pulse, radar, push, pull, etc.) Thats when armor is good, because energy can be deflected by metals. With this in mind, it's how we should move forward. I could see shield being obsolete or perhaps extremely nerfed against energy weapons. So your beams will go through shields at a minor reduction of damage, and then clash with the hull armor. In my opinion this kind of idea (maybe not my exact implementation) is how we should go forward.

 

[Nickizzy]

scale up resistance of armor blocks (both their block HP and their resistance to damage) by the number of blocks in a line; for instance, a three-block armor belt would have significant advantages over a single layer,

Ay. Like in From The Depths. Layered heavy armor tank is OP . (I'm on another one of those "an example but it's the whole thing" things again. Watch out)

Spoiler: Layered armor improvements

I'll be going off percentages again, because they scale he best and are easiest to work with. An armor block checks all it's sides if they have armor blocks on them. If there are armor blocks along those axises then it gets a damage reduction based on how many there are.

One Adv armor block gives a 25% damage reduction, Standard armor would give a start of 17.5, and Hull a start of 10. Then each additional armor block would increase the effect by 50% of the previous improvement(25, 37.5, 44.25, ect). This would mean people could have a single layer of Adv armor, then hull, but they could be easily stripped of the Adv layer and would be stuck with a great disadvantage with a max of only 20% damage reduction as apposed to 50%.

This might stack multiply with my other system, so if this system means that it takes 50% damage, and my other system means it will take 40% damage, they multiply to a total damage taken of 20%.

[doublepost=1481853400,1481853158][/doublepost]

Blast doors -> R to open.

Laughably easy to exploit.

Can we all agree that this is an exploit through and through and should and will be burned?

 

[taisong]

Lets make it so the armor will be able to actually stop bullets.

In real life, firing a gun at an armor will probably dent it, but the whole structure will be able to survive the shot. A similar mechanic is already in the game as Armor HP, but I think it is not enough. So, I will propose this.

Whenever an armor block takes a hit, that armor block will take some of the damage, and will spread the rest to adjacent armor blocks (armor blocks ONLY). The amount of damage the block will spread is calculated through the number of adjacent blocks.

The calculation formula for the damage the block will take when hit is;
= 100% - (8% + (ArmorHP ÷ ArmorHPCap) x 10%) x (number of adjacent armor blocks)
Then, the damage will be deducted by the traditional armor system.

If there are 4 adjacent armor blocks and your armor value is full, the block will take 28% of the damage and spread the rest to the adjacent blocks equally. If there are 4 adjacent armor blocks and your armor HP is zero, the block will take 68% of the damage and spread the rest.

This new system will buff armor against Cannon-cannon machinegun but does not effect Cannon-Beam or Cannon-pulse snipers.
Also, this opens for more weapon effect diversity, such as the "pierce" effect decreasing the damage spread, and punch increasing the block damage and also damage spread.

 

[jijiji]

So, what if we started treating armor in a similar way as shields?

So you can do it using config file? I agree that armor is weak right now. Game is early alpha and we should to tell to devs that armor needs buff.

But I agree that:

Wouldn't this make armour act like shields? I.e. a single pool of potential damage no matter where the ship was hit?

I think that would be less tactical and less interesting than location-specific damage.

So it will be like EVE online or something about. I think that an idea of Starmade is that you can build what you want. And I think that players should choose how to build armor, because it is a tactical issue. Just in real life it is.

But here is a problem that armor is weak and can be penetrated by small cannon/pulse(/overdrive) weapon... I think that every armor block should require more penetration to penetrate it. It may be linear or nonlinear.

Linear means multiple cost of penetation needed to penetrate one advanced armor block (2, 3, 5, 10 or 20 for example).

Nonlinear means that X layer will require X^2 penetration to penetrate it. Or X^1.5, or X^3 or about...
For example:

• 1 adv. armor block require 1^2 = 1 penetration.
• 3 adv. armor blocks require 3^2 = 9 penetration.
• 5 adv. armor blocks require 5^2 = 25 penetration.

It will allow to avoid placing of over 100500 armor layers.

Standard armor blocks may have less effect.

Also here is a way just to buff defencive penetration effect.

Sorry for bad English. Hope you can understand me.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Lets make it so the armor will be able to actually stop bullets.

In real life, firing a gun at an armor will probably dent it, but the whole structure will be able to survive the shot. A similar mechanic is already in the game as Armor HP, but I think it is not enough. So, I will propose this.

Whenever an armor block takes a hit, that armor block will take some of the damage, and will spread the rest to adjacent armor blocks (armor blocks ONLY). The amount of damage the block will spread is calculated through the number of adjacent blocks.

The calculation formula for the damage the block will take when hit is;
= 100% - (8% + (ArmorHP ÷ ArmorHPCap) x 10%) x (number of adjacent armor blocks)
Then, the damage will be deducted by the traditional armor system.

If there are 4 adjacent armor blocks and your armor value is full, the block will take 28% of the damage and spread the rest to the adjacent blocks equally. If there are 4 adjacent armor blocks and your armor HP is zero, the block will take 68% of the damage and spread the rest.

This new system will buff armor against Cannon-cannon machinegun but does not effect Cannon-Beam or Cannon-pulse snipers.
Also, this opens for more weapon effect diversity, such as the "pierce" effect decreasing the damage spread, and punch increasing the block damage and also damage spread.

I would go so far as to add a minimum damage which is somehow calculated based on mass/armor distribution or something (someone smarter than I can figure that part out). If an attack hits armor and does less damage than that minimum, it does nothing. If it's over the minimum, then it starts causing damage. This is more like real-life armor. You could shoot 1,000,000 rounds of 9mm Luger at a main battle tank and it will never dent or damage the armor because the steel is too hard and most small-arms fire is below the damage threshold. Upgrade to .50 BMG with armor-piercing incendiary ammo, though, and you'll get throug.