My speculation on HP implementation and why it will be awesomesauce

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    There are lots of threads on one hit KO being too easy and too boring. There are lots of replies of the "wait for HP system" variety. There is very little info on what the HP system will be.

    I'm bored, so I figured this is how I'd do it, and how it would make armor matter and battles much more involved, including the possibility of attempting combat repairs, targeting things other than core, etc.

    First, my thotz on what the HP system will be. It's very simple.

    Right now, the core has a measly fixed amount of HP's. So once you're through a ship's shields, it's pretty much game over. But what if armor added to those HP's?

    For example, let's say you get 500 HP for every advanced armor block, 250 HP for every standard, and 100 HP for basic hull. All those HP's get added to the core when the block is added. HP's get subtracted from the core when armor blocks are destroyed or removed. HP's also get subtracted when the core is damaged. Basically, core HP is dynamic and tied to armor.

    This would drastically change gameplay. The core would be much, much harder to kill as long as you actually armor your ship. We would almost certainly see ships with millions of core HP's. No more OHKO. Even small ships would benefit from adding better armor.

    Instead of focusing on the core, you might want to consider blowing up armor. After all, killing an armor block effectively damages the core along with the damage you're doing to the enemy ship. You're also going to want to consider attacking enemy systems so that you take less damage yourself.

    During combat, players could jump into build mode specifically to try to do damage control and repair. First, they'd actually have the time to do this. Second, it would benefit the ship greatly to start putting back lost armor blocks as that increases the core HP's. At the same time, just throwing armor on willy-nilly during a fight is going to leave systems and/or the core exposed to enemy fire. You'll want to be smart making repairs.

    In turn, captains will need to consider the possibility of enemy repairs when designing their offensive systems. You'll want to spread out damage as much as possible to make clean repairs in combat harder for your enemy. You'll want enough DPS to not simply blow through the shields, but to kill armor faster than it can be replaced. Small ships and drones will become that much more valuable as they can attack multiple areas making it harder for the enemy to repair as they'll be forced to search all over their ship for damaged areas.

    Of course, this is all speculation, but it'd be a lot of fun.
     
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    jayman38

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    Sounds fun. I think it might actually get to a point where a player will want to attack systems primarily, whittling down the enemy to the point where they can't effectively fight. Then they can hail the crippled ship and order a surrender. Which might lead to some different types of gameplay. (Ship theft and astronaut marooning, setting up warheads and detonating the crippled ship, continuing the attack, using push/pull beams to move the crippled ship into the damage radius of a star, or marooning the whole crippled ship on a planet.)

    On the other hand, I wonder if armor-repair methods would lead to common stalemate scenarios, where the defending engineer is laying down 1000+ blocks of armor in one press of the button, and the attacking ship can't mount enough firepower to overcome those additional HPs or destroy the new armor block group. (Keep in mind that at this stage, the ships would have been slugging away at each other, and both ships' weapons would be far weaker than when they started the battle, due to destroyed weapon blocks.)

    Plus, you'd probably see ugly ships with massively thick, plain, bulky hull-walls instead of detailed, greebled hull-walls.
     
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    I don't think things will ever stalemate.

    I think what'll happen is that once one ship starts taking serious damage, it jumps out. But that's a whole 'nother fix and prolly a fairly long argument.
     
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    Have you ever played robocraft? A lot of hp groundwork has been done in that game already. Might not fit us one on one but certainly interesting to take a look at.

    Adding hp directly to the core would give some odd ships. With dangling cubes of armour slapped on. I'd like to see functional armour. Think how to counter explosive, punch through etc effects with clever placement.
     

    CyberTao

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    I would have to take a swing at some issues here.
    Firstly, shipyards are planned, and that is how ships will ideally be repaired in the future. I don't know if the exacts of a damaged block will change, but throwing down large chunks of hull willy nilly would probably run into issues with shipyards, if not be completely exploitable in the sense of doomcubes (A giant flat face is much easier to patch with ABM).

    Second, you need to do more than just add HP to the core. Advanced armour can take up to 400 damage before breaking, and there are ships with guns designed to penetrate hundreds of meters of that. People make guns designed to drill through the front 300m of a battleship to core it, and no doubt will continue to focus on coring, since destruction of everything else is collateral. The focus needs to be taken off of the core, and more on destroying the full ship.
     

    Mered4

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    Plus, you'd probably see ugly ships with massively thick, plain, bulky hull-walls instead of detailed, greebled hull-walls.
    I don't think this is true - I think folks would build a layer of decoration, then 3-4 armor layers below that.

    That being said, armor repairing in combat might be something that needs removed if it could be exploited by, say, dropping 20^3 blocks on the rear of the ship for an instant HP boost.

    I'd rather have a system that disabled HP regen during combat - that way, any new blocks added don't add to the HP pool.
     
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    Keptick

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    From what I've gathered this is pretty much how it's gonna work. Except that it's gonna be fraction of the combined HP of all the blocks on the ship.