My take on a new AMC system

[McDili]

Namely because the \"Mega Cannons of Doom\" aren\'t as powerful as you seem to perceive them.



They fire at slower fire rates, and in terms of DPS the \"Scattercannons\" are better for DPS. But the idea of the \"Mega Cannon\" as you put it, is that it puts out big \'potential\' damage in bursts. So it would actually be less effective in the DPS department, but more effective in that it can dish out way more damage in very small periods of time.

It\'s simple really, scatter cannons do supreme sustain DPS, and \"Mega Cannons\" does massive damage in short bursts.

There\'s different scenarios where each weapon is viable, if I understand it correctly, scattercannons are more effective at taking out shields. The \"Mega Cannons\" would do less comparitive damage to shields, because they fire slower. The size of the projectile has no influence on damage, so 1000 blocks of AMC\'s that fire rapidly will be better against shields than 1000 blocks of AMC\'s built to make a bigger projectile, even though they do the same damage. The wider the barrel at the output point, the bigger surface area is covered and the less accuracy the cannon has. And since you can\'t penetrate a shield, or affect it multiple times via AoE, you would only hit the shield for 1000 damage each shot. Against hull, you would do 1000 damage to each block within the surface area, and then penetrate with the remainder of damage that hasn\'t been accounted for.



The thing I like most about this proposal is how it allows you to specialize, and also design. You\'ll see people with different tastes and talents making different types of weapons.

While I would agree that hull is underpowered right now(There are also good suggestions out there to fix it), the suggestion here made by Fortius is a good step forward for the diversity of AMC groupings.(And it\'s just super fun)

I would not agree that Fortius\' proposal has a \'criticial flaw\' based on the fact that hull has its shortcomings. Rather I would assert that hull is inherently flawed in its own right. So personally, I think it\'s a better idea to make suggestions on hull separately.

 

[Maniox]

Schema, take some inspiration from these illustrations please.

 

[Captain Fortius]

I\'m considering adding a new paragraph, concerning defenses.

McDili, you have explored such a topic earlier, and others have raised their concerns, so opinions are welcome.

How I see the state of armor;

-If it\'s small ship vs small ship, armor actually performs well. No one-hit block breaking, due to cannon size limits.

-If it\'s small ship vs big ship, it\'d be unreasonable to expect the small ship not to take immediate, drastic damage; (giant cannon against thin armor argument) again, armor is working fine, even if fine working happens to mean \"swift evaporation\" in this instance.

-Big ship vs big ship looks to be the only questionable circumstance. By \"big ship\" I mean anything that\'s large enough to contain an amc cannon that can one-hit hardened hull blocks and have a multi-layered hull.

One generic sci-fi based argument AGAINST the whole armor issue, is that large energy weapons are supposedly so ridiculously powerful, that the hull by itself cannot withstand direct hits; That\'s why shields are necessary in the first place. I can recall several scenes from various TV shows, where once the shields were gone, weapons fire regularly punched clean through the ship from one side to the other.

However, there are also some ideas that\'d support an armor boost. And it\'d be fun. Special superstrong alloys, heat absorbing plating (as mentioned by Nebulon-B above) and such, or simply an insanely thick armor that can actually take a FEW shots from really powerful weaponry before getting punched through. That doesn\'t sound like much, but it\'s still more than armor blocks can currently take. And keep in mind we\'re shooting miniature suns at each other. Damage is to be expected.

The heat absorbing plating is a brilliant idea. It\'d probably need to be a new block type, preferably super-flat that could be plated on the surface of other blocks, and you could easily retrofit your ships with it once you can afford it. I\'d like to see that in the game.

There\'s one more method that\'s more related to the topic, as it\'s modifying how the AMC bolts work:

When an AMC bolt hits an armor block, before calculating any damage it should check how many more armor blocks are there in the direction it was heading, and then use that number to multiply the block\'s armor value. The equation is; final armor = base armor + (base armor * Y * number of additional blocks). Y is a number you could set in the cfg file to tweak how much armor bonus is granted from this effect.

Reason; When a projectile hits armor that it can still penetrate, it\'ll go through in one shot. However if the armor is several times thicker, that doesn\'t mean the same strength projectile can chip it away shot by shot until it becomes thin enough to punch through - though that\'s how it works ingame now. But the thing is, 1000 shots with a rifle still won\'t dig a hole in a battle tank.

Effect; Thicker armor becomes more and more resilient. This way adding more armor blocks to your ship would be just as beneficial as adding more amc blocks.

Side effect; Shots with shallow angles would do less and less damage as they would include more and more neighbouring blocks to the equation, easily simulating glancing blows without extra code. Intricate armor designs become more useful, a serious blow is dealt to flat sided doomcubes.

Balance concerns; While one would be tempted to just build super-thick hulls and laugh at incoming damage, you must keep in mind how much extra weight and price will that add to your ship. Invincible behemots shouldn\'t be a regular problem, but they are possible to build. Possibilities are good.

 

[McDili]

I have one question though, shouldn\'t there be an armor cap? Possibly done by the server.cfg, but I definitely think there should be an armor cap.

If I use hardened hull, FA = 50 + (50*Y*#blocks). Is Y intended to be a float value? Because if it\'s just an integer, anything more than zero will give you 100% armor or more.

I may be misunderstanding this, or I\'m just terrible with numbers, can you explain this to me in more detail? Possibly with a scenario?



Apart from that, if you want to incorporate some defense changes then I can definitely get behind this idea. It\'s like a dampening effect, which is pretty neat. It will make big ship battles really neat and won\'t really mess up ship-size related balance.

 

[BearishMushroom]

I want this so bad.

+1

 

[Cool3303]

Nice suggestions you bring up but when tinking over it I dont really get how you want to prevent that people use scatterguns since you basically just have to dig a 1 block thick hole in your enemys ship (even with the 99% accuracy you suggest this will still work)

Increasing the stacking bonus would be bad for medium sized ships (and fighters)and would make big ships pretty overpowered.Could you please post some graphs about this?

the new armor system you suggest would be even more crucial and favor big ships.

Dont missunderstand me I love big ships and hate all those people whining about big ships killing their fighters but atleast some medium ships should be able to kill of an capital without having to punch through an 99.99% armor layer....

 

[Captain Fortius]

if an armor boost is a good idea or not.

If we cap how much damage can a block take at once, it\'ll be absurd to see thin armor not breaking immediately from a large blast.

If we boost all armor, regardless of shape or thickness, we just made it necessary to build twice as big cannons on everything.

My idea, in it\'s most basic form would indeed reward big ships more, and though larger weapons and thicker armor should outclass their smaller counterparts, some balance must be maintained to make sure the game\'s fun foreveryone. I\'ll get to that soon.

However, part of the problem of fighting an enemy ship bigger than yours is also tactics related. It\'ll have better armor and guns than you. That\'s a given. How would something larger not be stronger? You must fight stronger enemies by outmanouvering them, finding a weak spot in their armor, and exploiting it. To expect a head-on charge to be successfull would be unrealistic.

To be fair, you\'d also need the right tool for such a task. I think you\'ve all often seen or read about scenes where a fighter wing bombed a capital ship to hell, but possibly none where said fighter wing defeated the capital with their guns. That\'s where our long suffering missiles would come in; They\'d only have to fly faster, do more damage, and penetrate more than now, to make the same amount of missile blocks more powerful than an antimatter cannon. By the way they work, it\'d be inherently easier to target a big ship with small ones, while the opposite would be nearly impossible, and rather ineffective. So it\'s down to strong missiles and smart tactics.

Now to balance this whole mess;

Thanks for pointing it out by the way, we do need to cap the effect somehow, otherwise armor could literally become indestructible remarkably easily. My mistake. It\'ll be corrected.

I prefer diminishing returns, so it\'s up to every builder to decide what\'s the thickest hull that\'s still worth to build. The Y number in the cfg file will still be an important part of that. It\'s value should be a decimal between 0 and 0.5. At 0, the bonus is effectively turned off. At 0.5 it reaches a practical limit quickly; The 7th layer will add only 0.7% to the armor bonus, but it wil have already reached 99% by then. The golden route is probably in the middle. It\'s beyond my math skills to express it neatly in one equation, but the point is that each new block should add Y times as much armor as the previous one did, to make sure each new layer will add less of a bonus, and that it\'s impossible to reach 100% invulnerability. Medium ships can still get a decent bonus from having a 2 or 3 thick hull, while superheavy capitals can try to go as thick as they can, but they\'ll have to drastically increase their weight and cost for a few more percentage of armor.

Example;

Y is set to 0.5. You have a cannon with 400 damage (currently it takes about 250 amc blocks to build it). You shoot at a 1 block thick wall of hardened hull straight in front of you. The amc bolt hits the wall, checks for another block in it\'s direction but finds none. The check ends, the block\'s base armor value of 50 reduces your damage by 50%, so you deal 200 and still destroy the block, as it has 200 hp.

Try it with a wall twice as thick; The amc bolt impacts the wall, checks for another block and finds 1; An armor bonus is added to the first block at Y times 50; that\'s +25. Checks for a hull block again, finds no more, so the process ends. The first block\'s total armor is now 50+25=75% reduction from 400 damage leaves 100; the block survived at half health; it\'ll take a second shot to destroy it, and a third to destroy the one behind it. 3 shots in total to punch through the wall. Without this mechanic it\'d take 2 shots from the same cannon.

It gets better! Same setting, same cannon, same wall, but the angle of the shot is way too shallow; closing 20 degrees to the wall\'s surface. The amc bolt impacts, checks for another block in it\'s direction, it finds one, adds an armor bonus of Y times 50 that is 25, checks for one more block, it finds one (as it\'ll also have to pass through a neighbouring block due to it\'s shallow angle), adds another armor bonus of Y times 25 =12.5. The first block\'s armor is now up to 50+25+12,5 = 87,5%; 400 damage reduced by 87,5% is 50, meaning it\'ll take 4 shots to destroy the first block, then 2 for the second and 1 for the last; It took a total of 7 shots to punch through the same wall as above, simply because you couldn\'t find a good angle.

After that, it\'s up to community feedback and a lot of space combat to find the best default value for the Y multiplier.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

When I clicked this thread I thought \"Oh boy another kid that hasn\'t thought about implementation and/or balancing.\" Fortunately, it looks like you are one of the few people that actually thought about his idea. I think this is great. It adds way more depth and variety to the game.

 

[McDili]

This would effectively make \"Doom Cubes\" less attractive beasts. You could effectively design your hull in a way that it makes it hard for an enemy to get good square shots on it, and allow for glancing blows. A doom cube would actually be very inefficient use of armor considering it\'s just a giant square. I also like that Y is a server.cfg option in the proposal.



This thread is chock full of awesome.

 

[MrNo]

This needs to happen. I\'ve seen so many threads with similar descriptions, all of them wonderful, all of them with their own little twist, and all of them lost to the depths of the suggestion forums. This needs to happen at some point, it is such an amazing idea. Especially wonderful because it only limits creativity in the most minor way possible, by requiring shapes which, it turns out, are going to fit well with a ship designed to look like it\'s a sniper/fighter.

I\'d also love to see this system used to make ships which are quite literally massive cannon-generators, carried around by a cargo ship, and dropped somewhere to fire at rediculous range. That just seems so fun to me.

I\'d like to see something with \"piercing\" actually ignoring some layers of hull, and partially passing through them (dealing some damage, and carrying the rest to later blocks) with really long cannons (40+ blocks). Perhaps not with hull blocks themselves, but with weaker things like Plexglass and weapons blocks/computers.

 

[MichaelSeph]

He actually prefers not to post on suggestions (at all), but he does see and know about this stuff.

 

[aceface]

HAHA! I totally agree with this cartoon you made and looks awesome :D The unfortunate thing is Schema appears to have stopped checking the suggestions a few months ago

 

[aceface]

HAHA! I totally agree with this cartoon you made and looks awesome :D The unfortunate thing is Schema appears to have stopped checking the suggestions a few months ago

 

[Captain Fortius]

Any good cannon that can break a few layers of armor would easily rip through a ship\'s squishy bits once they\'re exposed, simply by virtue of high damage vs low block hp and no armor rating. We\'d actually be able to intentionally disable functions of an enemy ship by destroying enough power / thruster / whatever blocks.

As to damage the insides before the armor breaks, well that\'d drive people nuts.

 

[Morrigi]

This is the best thought out and most reasonable suggestion I\'ve seen regarding the current issues with AMCs, including my own. Kudos to you and your ideas, sir.

 

[NotAFile]

I am 210% for penetration

 

[4plains]

You Sir have my full support on that idea. (You will even give me more material to research for my youtube series: http://youtu.be/_Qo9RSP8vk4)

Greets

 

[4plains]

I\'ve been playing around with ideas for armor buffs because as of now armor is kinda useless.

You have the most sophisticated idea for a armor buff by far that i have found up to now.

 

[4plains]

+1

 

[4plains]

Agreed. This is how it works atm.