Is individual block HP pointless?

[Edymnion]

Been thinking about this, and there is actually a system used by other game formats that might actually work here.

In d20 based roleplaying games (like Dungeons and Dragons 3e, Pathfinder, etc) there is a system for measuring static success with dice rolls known as Difficulty Class.

The basic idea in these games is that you have a 20 sided dice that you roll. Based on how your character is made, there are modifiers to what you roll (if you're highly trained or naturally gifted, you get bonuses, if you're clumsy or situation is poor, you get negatives). For things like picking a lock, the lock has a set difficult class, or DC. A really simple lock would be DC 15, meaning you need to roll a 15 or higher (after the mods) in order to succeed.

Another system, Mutants and Masterminds, expanded that system to replace hitpoints for your character. Damage was more or less fixed (as in, you had an attack that had a damage of 5 or 10, you didn't roll for it), and the person getting hit rolled a check similar to the above of base 10 + modifiers + damage. If they rolled high enough to make the check, they were fine and nothing happened. If they rolled low but not too low (5 or less under), they took a "wound" that lowered all of their future rolls that battle. If they rolled super low (10 or more under), then they died/went unconscious.

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That might be applicable here.

If we gave each block a fixed DC to break (say 1-100 in increments of 5 or 10), we would use far fewer bits to store that number in. When a weapon hit instead of tracking exactly how much damage it does, it generates a random number check based on the break DC and the incoming damage. If the block rolls high, it survives. If it rolls medium, it's DC to break goes down one level. If it rolls really low, it breaks.

Then all of the things like armor pools and defensive bonuses could be converted into bonuses to those break rolls, and the tertiary effects on weapons could raise/lower those check DCs.

Would also make combat a lot more random/dynamic, considering we wouldn't be able to do pure math builds of "this always works" sized weapons, because unless you just go unreasonably huge, there's always a chance that the target will survive on a lucky roll. Inversely, smaller fighters would get a boost in that even against small weapons, the target ship could always just roll poorly and take damage.

 

[Raisinbat]

And how would you tackle low weapon damage? As in fighter vs fighter. Right now that barely works anyway but my own idea was to make armor scale with your AHP. Small ship's advanced armor would be extremely weak compared to a large ship's advanced armor because of the AHP pool difference.

I read this suggestion but i don't think it would actually help that much the problem with armor is that doubling a ships volume requires more than double armor in order to completely absord the damage of a weapon, since the weapon doubles in size and armor needs to double in thickness, but still cover the entire ship. Think it would just kick the issue further back instead of fixing it. That and your turrets still fall of.

I like this idea and I'll definitely try to work out some solid examples, it's just that I don't think we can avoid "RNGesus" here and you'll end up with waffle guns anyway unless we use a very specific chance based system that moves around when it should.

Small weapons would be extremely random yes, with ams turrets occasionally cutting through a ship, but those highly random weapons aren't really any good and for proper weapons it will only apply to a tiny fraction of the incoming damage. Point is, currently this damage is effectively lost for cannons and beams already, as the damaged block gets hit with the highest damage tick next shot anyway, so whether it's at 100hp or 16hp that 250 damage tick is going to kill it either way, and that's with very low damage weapons.

People like to min/max and this system would not be different in that aspect I believe. You would end up aiming for the highest threshold of a ship size you expect to fight and then make all your single weapon groups in your waffle gun, meet the damage requirements to meet them.

What threshold? I don't get this.

You mean matching weapons to block HP? That's already a thing, so there's no difference before and after the change.

Perhaps I misinterpreted its context, but to discourage low damage fast firing waffle guns and to encourage slower firing ones seems to be part of the reason why according to Raisinbat, you would want to switch over to this threshold system.

That's not the point, just a side effect.

 

[nightrune]

Been thinking about this, and there is actually a system used by other game formats that might actually work here.

In d20 based roleplaying games (like Dungeons and Dragons 3e, Pathfinder, etc) there is a system for measuring static success with dice rolls known as Difficulty Class.

The basic idea in these games is that you have a 20 sided dice that you roll. Based on how your character is made, there are modifiers to what you roll (if you're highly trained or naturally gifted, you get bonuses, if you're clumsy or situation is poor, you get negatives). For things like picking a lock, the lock has a set difficult class, or DC. A really simple lock would be DC 15, meaning you need to roll a 15 or higher (after the mods) in order to succeed.

Another system, Mutants and Masterminds, expanded that system to replace hitpoints for your character. Damage was more or less fixed (as in, you had an attack that had a damage of 5 or 10, you didn't roll for it), and the person getting hit rolled a check similar to the above of base 10 + modifiers + damage. If they rolled high enough to make the check, they were fine and nothing happened. If they rolled low but not too low (5 or less under), they took a "wound" that lowered all of their future rolls that battle. If they rolled super low (10 or more under), then they died/went unconscious.

---

That might be applicable here.

If we gave each block a fixed DC to break (say 1-100 in increments of 5 or 10), we would use far fewer bits to store that number in. When a weapon hit instead of tracking exactly how much damage it does, it generates a random number check based on the break DC and the incoming damage. If the block rolls high, it survives. If it rolls medium, it's DC to break goes down one level. If it rolls really low, it breaks.

Then all of the things like armor pools and defensive bonuses could be converted into bonuses to those break rolls, and the tertiary effects on weapons could raise/lower those check DCs.

Would also make combat a lot more random/dynamic, considering we wouldn't be able to do pure math builds of "this always works" sized weapons, because unless you just go unreasonably huge, there's always a chance that the target will survive on a lucky roll. Inversely, smaller fighters would get a boost in that even against small weapons, the target ship could always just roll poorly and take damage.

In the spirit of ops post this still requires you to track the data for each block. It's a cool idea but I don't think it scales well. Randomness tends to be slow computationally.