Hulls for better or worse?

[kadzooks]

What I'm suggesting is reworking hull armor to be relative to the mass of the ship.

I also like to suggest reworking AMC to deal inefficient damage to hulls (and only hulls!) kind of like how missiles are against shields.

Missiles will be super effective on hulls whilst AMC will be used to breach shields and other blocks that are not hulls.

 

[Jack Was Here]

I agree that armour should be armour but AMC\'s shouldnt be completely negated by it, just have its damage reduced to something thats noticeable.

 

[lazarus78]

No, They should not change hulls.

The hulls work exactly as they shoulf in a block based game. You want more armor, you make your hulls thicker.

Remember this is alpha. There will undoubtedly be more kinds of armor hull blocks in the future.

 

[McDili]

Right now, adding hull on your ship to protect your systems doesn\'t benefit you.



You\'d be better off using shields in place of hull, because if you add hull, you\'re buying yourself anywhere between 1-5 seconds depending on the distance between your core and the surface, and you gain way more mass for such little defense.



If you put shields in place of hull, you actually get more out of it. Even hardened hull get\'s destroyed by anything that does 400 damage minimum, even small ships can dish that out. So you could have a lot of mass worth of hardened hull that gets destroyed in one hit, or you could have that same amount of mass in shields that get\'s destroyed in one hit, but also gives you shields.



Shields are in every way better than hull right now. Hull is just an aesthetic choice at the moment.



And to address your claim that there will be more hull, it doesn\'t matter. If Hull is based on HP and Armor Rating, it still only protects against a flat value of damage. It would be better if AMC\'s did noticeable yet considerably less damage to hull. Gives you a reason to use Hull, and also missiles.

 

[robertkor]

solution



give regular hull 750 hp and hh 1000 hp



add a signifigant armor value to it to make it at least semi resiliant say 75% starting armor value that depleates based on the blocks remaining hp

this effectivly makes it harder to punch through a hull while still adding a degree of gradual weakness to it



since if you shoot something enough eventualy it goes through as the structure gets weaker and weaker

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Hull most certainly needs a buff or something. It\'s really like paper when fighting with big ships.

 

[mindlord0013]

I agree that your hull strength should be somewhat equivilant to your total mass. Even if that means making it weaker at lower masses.

 

[McDili]

This would not work. If regular hull had 750 HP it would take small ships ages just to break through one block of hull. That\'s why you can\'t just add numbers to things like this.



Let\'s try to understand the goal a bit more. The goal of the OP is to make AMC\'s less effective against hull, similar in concept to how missiles are ineffective against shields.



So, if you look at how that works between shields and missiles, regardless of how much damage a missile has, every time it hits a shield it does 1 damage. You don\'t have to have some sort of armor rating or super-HP on shields to make missiles negligible, instead the missiles have a mechanic on their own that accomplish that goal.



You could in concept do the same thing for AMC\'s. I would say that AMC\'s only doing 1 damage would be too harsh though.



Now, earlier in the thread Lazarus suggested using thick volumes of hull to protect yourself, as I mentioned earlior, that would be a waste of mass as you would get way more out of doing that if you used shields in place of hull.



Now Laz also suggested that there will be more hull blocks in the future. I would say that such a thing isn\'t necessary nor good. If you just add more and more hull blocks, you create a steep power curve, and that doesn\'t go well.



If for instance, it was set up so that AMC\'s did 50 damage vs hull regardless of the damage rating(Same concept as missiles have vs shields) then you\'d have a much better reason to use hull. Two shots to take out a block of normal hull, and 4 shots to take out Hardened Hull. This is just an example, but the concept is sound. It\'s already there for missiles, so why not balance it out for AMC\'s too?

 

[lazarus78]

Having a ships hull strength based on its mass makes no logical sense. If i have a steel plate and i make it wider, that doesn\'t make it stronger towards penetration simply because it is heavier. You need to make the plate thicker where you want the protection. The game is based on blocks, and as such, it should and damn well better continue to be based on this fact.

The problem currently is the disparity between the strength of the individual block, and the uncapped scaling of weapon damage. This is why there will HAVE TO be more hull blocks offering more HP and armor. The solution shouldn\'t be \"add more shields\". Fighters should not be able to take down cruser and battleships.

Scaled hull scrength makes no sense. There will be more hull types in the future, there is no escaping that. The current hulls are just two weak if weapon damage is allowed to be scaled at an unlimited rate.

 

[kiwionthemoon]

I agree that the more mass a ship has, the better the armour because generaly capital and other huge ships should be like tanks as they are important. What ik saying is its stupid a fighter has around the same hull resistance as a giatnt cruiser

 

[lazarus78]

There is no logical sense for this. There will undoubtedly be more stronger hull blocks in the future. for now, if you want a stronger hull, add more layers like you would have to in real life. Things don\'t get stronger just because they are larger and heavier, you have to add thickness where you want the defense.

What you people are proposing is I can have my core surrounded by one layer thick, then have a mass of hull blocks elsewhere and magically the core armor is stronger? No, that makes absolutly no sense at all.

 

[Zyrr]

But not a more mass = better armor rework. Normal hull is pretty good right now, but hardened hulls? Not so much. I\'m fine with the HP value but how the damage is calculated needs to be changed. So, as many others have, I propose that hardened hull acts like a bulkhead; it shares damage with other hardened hull around it, therefore making it more resilient to AMC\'s and particularly more effective towards missiles.

How I see this working is like so: when an AMC round, for example, is fired at a hardened hull block, it shares the damage with all hardened hull 3 (or more) blocks from it. However, damage wouldn\'t be \"evenly\" spread, as the block that is hit takes 50% of the damage, and the \"bulkhead\" blocks take the other 50%, spread among them. If any block inside this \"bulkhead\", besides the one hit by the round, takes enough damage to break it, it will remain there, except it will have no armor value and 1 HP.



That\'s my take, anyways.

 

[lman94]

the simple solution is to increase the armor rating of hardened hulls (to say 90%) and have missiles ignore armor.

although large enough AMCs will still be able to tear through hull so mayby this dosnt work so well

 

[lazarus78]

As I said, there will undoubtedly be more hull blocks offering more HP and more armor. Since weapons care not capped to the amount of damage they can do, 200hp and 50% armor is indeed insifficient, but the idea of scaling their resistance based on mass of the ship is just rediculus.

 

[McDili]

Having \"More Hull Blocks in the future\" doesn\'t fix this problem any more than Mass-related hull-strength does.



I agree with you that mass-related hull-blocks is a bad idea because as you said, it doesn\'t make any logical sense.



But the addition of new hull blocks in the future that have higher HP and Armor Rating is an even worse solution. We already have two types of hull, there is no need for more blocks that do the same thing.



Having a bunch of types of hull that all do the same thing is bad game design. Especially if each hull type is just straight up better than the last.



Let\'s think about this logically. Weapons can scale up infinitely as you said. So, just adding better hull blocks into the game never solves the problem. There will still be weapons that treat it like paper at one point or another.



So we need to think of a different mechanic for hull. I mentioned earlier that you could have a mechanic similar in concept to how missiles are vs shields.



It\'s simple, have a mechanic in place where AMC\'s do a fixed amount of damage based on the hull it\'s up against. You could do something as simple as AMC\'s only do 100 damage agaisnt hull. Standard hull would be destroyed in 2 hits, and hardened hull blocks would be destroyed in 4 hits. The numbers here aren\'t exactly important, that type of discretion is best left to the developers, I just want to convey the concept because as a concept, it works. And we already have it in place for missiles, so hull should be strong vs AMC\'s.



If you think about it, it makes sense too. Hull and Shields are two different items that both achieve the same goal, defense. But they are mechanically different. Shields have a strength, missiles are ineffective against them. And they are weak to AMC\'s. Currently, Hull is weak to everything, but the way I see it, it would make perfect sense if it was weak to missiles and strong vs AMC\'s.



It would make missiles better to use against hull, and AMC\'s best to use against shields. Right now missiles are useless, because AMC\'s are best against shields and they are the best at drilling holes in the hull.



I mean right off the bat when you start a standard StarMade game you have enough AMC blocks to make a cannon that takes out standard hull in one shot.



On a side-note, we already have two different type\'s of hull and only one type of shield. It would be neat if the standard hull allowed for more maneuverability while hardened hull slowed you down. With the concept I\'ve suggested here, that type of mechanic would compliment it.