Armor scaling with mass

[Scypio]

Okay, here is some math about a new scaling mechanic for armor. Armor suffer a lot since the beginning due to their side effect with their base stats, fixed values are good when you're are at a small scale but soon enough the blocks themselves get outscaled and become useless. And i'm here to throw in small formulas to correct the fact that hull use fixed values.

So let's start with the first formula :

Total damage reduction = (Total mass of the ship hull blocks/Total mass of the entity with dock included) + Base damage reduction

The idea is simple, the more your ship get armor in it's total mass, the more the damage reduction become stronger. For example a ship with 10% of it's mass dedicated to hull would see the damage reduction on the advanced hull blocks going up to 100%. Of course to prevent that there should be a cap of 99%.
The more a ship dedicate it's mass to hull the more it's hull get stronger. To prevent spamming docked hull with 99.9% of the mass dedicated to hull the damage reduction should be indexed on the mother entity damage reduction. I also strongly suggest to lower the base damage reduction by 10 or 20% from the current values. Maybe more.

Let's take a small example with a docked hull and some advanced armor with only 80% base damage reduction. The mother ship get 19% of it's mass, without docked hull, to reach the 99% max reduction cap. Then some docked hull is added on top of it that add like 5% to it's total mass. This would mean that in order to reach the 99% reduction cap on the docked hull the ship should convert 1% of it's mass to hull again. Resulting in a ship with less mass dedicated to system blocks.
Here the example has been with advanced armor but keep in mind that this is even worst for other kind of hull blocs. The reduction shouldn't be refreshed under combat circumstances and only on building/reboot. This would also make station much more easier to protect with all types of armor as they don't care about moving. Keep in mind that this is something best used in addition to this : SOLUTION TO SPAGHETTI AND DOCKED ARMOR - YEAY MATH!


The second is about the block hp themselves. A fixed value for something that needs scaling isn't a good start because there is the reduction itself but also the block hp themselves. Blocks can have 99% reduction, if they have 1 hp they'll still be destroyed by the first scratch. So the armor hp per block should be scaling along with the amout of armor hp sounds a good idea to make it useful.

Block hp = Base block hp + Base Block hp * (Total armor hp/1000000)

Basically, every 1 000 000 armor hp the hp of the blocks is doubled. Conjured to a better damage reduction, armor blocks should soak up more damage each. I don't know for this one and feel like the scalability could be easily halved or maybe more. I'm just not sure about how to set it.
Also, like for the previous damage reduction, it shouldn't change during combat but only on construction and reboot.


All in all, i can't find a bad use of theses fomulas and thus, making armor blocks scale along with the ship is a better idea in my opinion than simply giving more AHP with the more armor block that there is. It already feel like this is just some bar to drop before moving to the next one.

 

[Zoolimar]

You don't need to modify block HP if you allow for reduction percentages to go over 99% but less than 100.

At 99% you multiply each HP of a block by 100. At 99.99% by 10000.

Also cap is not a very elegant solution, it's much better to use some kind of ratio formula that naturally limits the results. The simplest solution - remove innate damage reduction from armor but leave the difference in HP - say 20 - 50 - 100. Then your formula could look something like:

Armor Mass / Armor Mass + Y*Total Ship Mass

Where Y<1 and would determine how easy it is to reach high levels of armor damage reduction.

If you want to still have innate damage resistance then you could use something like 0.15+0.85*F, where 0.15 is innate damage resistance and F is the previous formula.

 

[NeonSturm]

On a 10m ship you have 1x1x1 blocks = 1
On a 40m ship you have 4x4x4 blocks = 64
On a 1000m ship you have 100x100x100 blocks = 1'000'000.
The problem is that shots don't hit 100x100x100 chunks to make it balanced vs the 40m and 10m ships.

But you have thicker layers of armour.
Basically that means that blocks get smaller only by length and height of a ship, not by depth/width.

If you want equal penetration, you need to take "blocks^(2/3)" as armour multiplier and set 1 minimum damage.

But all that reduced damage must damage the armour-hp with reduction diminishing on a low armour-hp value.

 

[Zoolimar]

If you want equal penetration, you need to take "blocks^(2/3)" as armour multiplier and set 1 minimum damage.

But all that reduced damage must damage the armour-hp with reduction diminishing on a low armour-hp value.

Why ? Inability of very weak guns to damage armor seems like a good way to limit use of waffles and should lead to fewer but heavier cannons. Also I doubt you need AHP at all in such a variant.

Though you do need weapons to be able to spread their damage around the hit block much better than now.

 

[madman Captain]

On a 10m ship you have 1x1x1 blocks = 1
On a 40m ship you have 4x4x4 blocks = 64
On a 1000m ship you have 100x100x100 blocks = 1'000'000.
The problem is that shots don't hit 100x100x100 chunks to make it balanced vs the 40m and 10m ships.

But small ships already can better dogde shots than large ships, there is no reason why the should benefit in the same way from armor than large ships.

Small ships should relay on speed and small size to survive and large ships should relay on Shields and armor to survive.

 

[NeonSturm]

But small ships already can better dogde shots than large ships, there is no reason why the should benefit in the same way from armor than large ships.

True, but small ships also lose the focus of shields.
If 25/100 fighters are shot down their damage is 3/4 while a big ship still has it's shields.

Also it doesn't matter vs lockon or heatseakers, shotgun drones or laser AI depending on the config.

 

[madman Captain]

True, but small ships also lose the focus of shields.
If 25/100 fighters are shot down their damage is 3/4 while a big ship still has it's shields.

Its maybe a bad idea to attack a cruiser with fighters. On the other hand you have 100 fighters means a far higher gun count than the cruiser.
How many fighters can the cruiser shoot down in the time where the fighters can use their entire firepower against the cruiser?
I think in that case the cruiser has far less defense turrets than you have fighters.

Also it doesn't matter vs lockon or heatseakers, shotgun drones or laser AI depending on the config.

Put an ams turret on the fighter or use an an radar jammer, fixing the AI behavior/accuracy isnt something you should achive with weapons or defence systems. And if you mean with lasers beam weapons mean hitscan weapons I would say: combining a hitscan weapon with a pinpoint accuracy AI and let the beam weapon has aside from this the same stats as weapons with bullet traveltime is a stupid idea at all.

 

[Scypio]

You don't need to modify block HP if you allow for reduction percentages to go over 99% but less than 100.

At 99% you multiply each HP of a block by 100. At 99.99% by 10000.

That's a good call but there is a point where values are rounded and this will be the limit of the system. I could take a swarm of small drones shooting at a armored ship with the hull too strong to do at least 1 damage to the blocs as a example.

 

[Zoolimar]

That's a good call but there is a point where values are rounded and this will be the limit of the system.

The limit would depend on how large the Y is in the formula. For example if you use 0.1 you'll need to have at least 10% of your ship mass in armor to reach 50% of armor reduction and 99% to reach 90.8%. By modifying it you could change the realistically achievable damage reduction.

Ah no sorry there is a problem. You basically could armor tank ship of any size. As long as you adjust the ratio right.