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- May 7, 2013
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I'm rather new here but I have certainly observed a rather large trend in this game. Armor doesn't do too terribly much.
As it stands right now, armor doesn't do too terribly much to stop anything larger than a small fighter from tearing your ships to shreds, shields are king.
So I was thinking of a way to make armor worth using in more than a singular layer for aethstetic purposes.
As it stands right now, standard 'soft' hulls only block 25% of all damage and have 150 HP (effectively 150 * 1.33 , so about 200 HP) while hardened hulls have 1500 hp and 50% damage reduction, effectively 3000 HP.
The problem is that my AMCs can easily destroy both these hull types in 1 shot.
And it fires several dozen times in 1 second. Meaning that hull armor is effectively worthless unless if you stack it, which is much less effective than stacking shields.
So here I am thinking of multiple ideas to make armor much more effective while leaving them relatively balanced.
1) make hardened hulls much much harder, with less HP, and soft hulls have much more damage reduction regardless
e.g: Soft hulls should have 400 HP and 80% damage reduction, and weigh 0.25 tons and hardened hulls have 500 HP and 95% Damage reduction, as well as weighing 0.5 tons. This improves their effective HPs to 2000 and 10000 respectively. For things without armor penetration.
2) Make any damage from a destroyed block 'leak over' to adjacent blocks.
e.g: using the prior example for HP and Armor , lets say an unshielded soft hull gets hit with a 10000 damage , non Armor Penetrating shot. The damage is reduced to 2000, 1600 leaks through the 400 HP plate . it's surrounded by 4 other soft hulls (a flat plate, 2 dimensional) , each of these take 400 damage, reduced by 80% (to 100) . They are 'safe' until they take a second shot. The 10000 damage shot has been reduced to effectively 2000 + 400 damage. Not to mention hardened hulls would be fairly hard to kill.
Second example: lets say the armor was broken through and you start hitting soft reactor blocks, each one being surrounded by 2 other blocks. a 10000 damage hit would do it's full, 10000 damage, then 4900 (10000 - 200, 9800/2) damage to the adjacent blocks, then 2350 to those adjacent and so on, wreaking havoc once a shot fully penetrates armor.
Ballistics will still blow huge holes in armor, so they do have a use in taking out large amounts of armor quickly, but AMC will have to chew through it at a much slower pace than the instant armor destruction it is now. Hull tanking will be a thing!
3) Armor piercing laser/weapons that reduce the damage reduction by a certain %.
E.g
AMC would have 0% armor reduction, but the highest amount of raw damage a hit.
Theroetical Armor Piercing lasers would have 30% armor reduction. E.g 400 HP 80% would become 400HP 64% , reducing the effective HP from 2000 to 1111, and 500/95 to 500/66.5% effective HP being 1500. However this would be balanced by a higher energy cost per shot as well as lower raw damage (so while it'd cut through armor easily, it'd have a harder time working through shields)
For the effective mass of each block, soft armour would be stronger against this armor piercing weaponry, while hard armor has more effective HP against anything with less than 32% armor piercing.
So instead of shields being better in almost every way (due to the fact that you can just plain stack shields wherever and get more shield HP, the HP hulls provide just isn't enough) instead you get a more balanced pros and cons.
Shields could be easily bruteforced down compared to hull armor and it'd be easy to keep them down, they also cost energy to use. But they regenerate and you don't get damaged so easily when your shields hold up.
Meanwhile, hull plating would have a lot more effective HP for the same amount of mass(e.g a stack of 5 hull generators vs 1 hardened hull would be effective 1000 HP regenerating vs 10000 fixed (but reparable) HP) And protecting a squishy internal structure. They also don't require energy to keep alive asides from Astrotech beams (which would also be more effective since they're healing smaller amounts of HP that are protected by higher amounts of armor. But once they're gone, they're gone and they won't come back, they're also heavier and you have to cover your entire ship to keep it relatively safe. 100 blocks of hull plating that covers a ship 1-deep might not provide much more health towards focused fire than shields do, but general blasts and passing beams will be much less effective against heavy armor than shields.
I know this is a lot of just general sperging out but I think the idea is sound in my head.
I kinda wish I could personally change the block properties but I don't actually know how, haha.
As it stands right now, armor doesn't do too terribly much to stop anything larger than a small fighter from tearing your ships to shreds, shields are king.
So I was thinking of a way to make armor worth using in more than a singular layer for aethstetic purposes.
As it stands right now, standard 'soft' hulls only block 25% of all damage and have 150 HP (effectively 150 * 1.33 , so about 200 HP) while hardened hulls have 1500 hp and 50% damage reduction, effectively 3000 HP.
The problem is that my AMCs can easily destroy both these hull types in 1 shot.
And it fires several dozen times in 1 second. Meaning that hull armor is effectively worthless unless if you stack it, which is much less effective than stacking shields.
So here I am thinking of multiple ideas to make armor much more effective while leaving them relatively balanced.
1) make hardened hulls much much harder, with less HP, and soft hulls have much more damage reduction regardless
e.g: Soft hulls should have 400 HP and 80% damage reduction, and weigh 0.25 tons and hardened hulls have 500 HP and 95% Damage reduction, as well as weighing 0.5 tons. This improves their effective HPs to 2000 and 10000 respectively. For things without armor penetration.
2) Make any damage from a destroyed block 'leak over' to adjacent blocks.
e.g: using the prior example for HP and Armor , lets say an unshielded soft hull gets hit with a 10000 damage , non Armor Penetrating shot. The damage is reduced to 2000, 1600 leaks through the 400 HP plate . it's surrounded by 4 other soft hulls (a flat plate, 2 dimensional) , each of these take 400 damage, reduced by 80% (to 100) . They are 'safe' until they take a second shot. The 10000 damage shot has been reduced to effectively 2000 + 400 damage. Not to mention hardened hulls would be fairly hard to kill.
Second example: lets say the armor was broken through and you start hitting soft reactor blocks, each one being surrounded by 2 other blocks. a 10000 damage hit would do it's full, 10000 damage, then 4900 (10000 - 200, 9800/2) damage to the adjacent blocks, then 2350 to those adjacent and so on, wreaking havoc once a shot fully penetrates armor.
Ballistics will still blow huge holes in armor, so they do have a use in taking out large amounts of armor quickly, but AMC will have to chew through it at a much slower pace than the instant armor destruction it is now. Hull tanking will be a thing!
3) Armor piercing laser/weapons that reduce the damage reduction by a certain %.
E.g
AMC would have 0% armor reduction, but the highest amount of raw damage a hit.
Theroetical Armor Piercing lasers would have 30% armor reduction. E.g 400 HP 80% would become 400HP 64% , reducing the effective HP from 2000 to 1111, and 500/95 to 500/66.5% effective HP being 1500. However this would be balanced by a higher energy cost per shot as well as lower raw damage (so while it'd cut through armor easily, it'd have a harder time working through shields)
For the effective mass of each block, soft armour would be stronger against this armor piercing weaponry, while hard armor has more effective HP against anything with less than 32% armor piercing.
So instead of shields being better in almost every way (due to the fact that you can just plain stack shields wherever and get more shield HP, the HP hulls provide just isn't enough) instead you get a more balanced pros and cons.
Shields could be easily bruteforced down compared to hull armor and it'd be easy to keep them down, they also cost energy to use. But they regenerate and you don't get damaged so easily when your shields hold up.
Meanwhile, hull plating would have a lot more effective HP for the same amount of mass(e.g a stack of 5 hull generators vs 1 hardened hull would be effective 1000 HP regenerating vs 10000 fixed (but reparable) HP) And protecting a squishy internal structure. They also don't require energy to keep alive asides from Astrotech beams (which would also be more effective since they're healing smaller amounts of HP that are protected by higher amounts of armor. But once they're gone, they're gone and they won't come back, they're also heavier and you have to cover your entire ship to keep it relatively safe. 100 blocks of hull plating that covers a ship 1-deep might not provide much more health towards focused fire than shields do, but general blasts and passing beams will be much less effective against heavy armor than shields.
I know this is a lot of just general sperging out but I think the idea is sound in my head.
I kinda wish I could personally change the block properties but I don't actually know how, haha.