Ship Armor

[shadowman615]

What if there were different levels of hardened hull with diffent mass? I'm not sure if this is better suited for Suggestions, but I just wanted to get some feedback and discussion regarding this idea I was thinking about.

There seems to be a lot of discussion about the new shield changes, and while I haven't played with the new values yet, it got me thinking about other ways of protecting ships. It seems like some of the hatred for the new shields stems from the fact that shields are the only good way of protecting your ships. With the massive damages and splash radius from a good cluster of missiles, once your shields are down, even a large ship will get decimated rapidly, and hardened hulls simply don't do enough.

My suggestion to make combat more interesting (other than possibly nerfing some of the damage or splash radius on missiles), is to introduce different levels of hardened hulls with different mass values. I'm not sure if this would be easy to implement, because as far as I know, mass is standardized across the board at the moment, and I'm not sure how it would work to have certain blocks add more mass than others.

What this could allow is for is smaller ships could have lower tier plating, as less engine thrust would make it difficult to use higher tiered, but much more massive, plating. However, larger capital ships could utilize a layer of much more massive but more protective layer of armor due to having the possibility for more engines and trust. I haven't really looked into any numbers, but perhaps this could incorporate changes to thrust, where larger clusters of engines would scale in a certain way to balance it so that you would really have to have certain sized ships with a fairly large engine group in order to utilize the much more massive armor.

Now I believe that currently, shields are best overcome by sheer dps, as your damage is simply taken off the total shield capacity, but hardened hulls have damage reduction, meaning that larger guns with more single shot damage is better for penetrating armor. Having multiple layers of defense for capital ships, with each being better suited to defend against different types of weapons (i.e. better hardend hull), would encourage more diverse ship designs and teamwork. While smaller fighters and turrets with high dps would be good at penetrating shields, with stronger versions of hardened hulls, they would be less effective at damaging the actual hull. This would mean taking down capital ships would be best suited for combination of larger ships with bigger single shot weapons combined with smaller, higher dps fighters.

Obviously I haven't really given this too much thought, but the core concept sounded to me like a good idea if the numbers could be balanced well. I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on how this would help or hurt the game. Let me know what you think!

 

[Trinova]

I like the concept of stronger armor types (with the trade-off of having more mass).

The problem of rockets with hull is that layers of armor don\'t mitigate the explosion. If a layer of armor is behind another the 2nd layer should get less damage from the explosion than the further layer but since this is not implemented until now the moment your rocket does 400 damage you kill every block in a sphere if it\'s 20 layes of armor or just shield blocks. That effect reduces the gain of armor to an aesthetic block.

 

[shadowman615]

I didn\'t realize that was how missiles worked. Thanks for the input! I guess I just assumed that missiles did damage in layers, that it had to destroy one layer of blocks to deal damage to the ones behind it. Do you know if there will be changes to how this splash damage is done in the future?

 

[MikeV37]

Also, I think all hull needs to be buffed by about 150%



You can already trade mass for armor by stacking more hardened hulls. they\'re just not terribly effective.



There\'s a problem where ships will take a minute or two to take out the enemy shields, then tear through the rest of the ship in seconds.

 

[shadowman615]

I\'ve been looking at this a little bit more, and I think I got something else wrong. I don\'t think that hardened hulls currently have some kind of damage reduction, rather, it looked like they just have more hit points. If this is the case, then I\'m proposing the addition of damage reduction of varying degrees, perhaps with a flat minimum damage in the event that the damage dealt did not exceed the reduction value. This sort of reduction is not replicable in the game as it currently stands by simply stacking multiple layers of hulls.

 

[Trinova]

Hulls reduce the damage by 25% and have 100HP which means you need to do roughly 134 damage to destroy them with one hit (but due to some rounding errors i guess you actually need 136).

Hardened Hulls have 50% damage reduction and 200HP which requires 400 damage to get destroyed with one hit.

Faction Modules have a damage reduction of 99% (which means you need at least 100 damage to damage them at all) and i don\'t know the HP they have.

Since all blocks but faction modules have a maximum of effectively 400 HP you don\'t need rockets which do more damage.

For AMCs it depends on what you use them for. Shield-Breaker-AMCs need as much DPS as possible. Reduce Range to something you concider usefull (i use 350 for close combat fighters and 1000 as absolut maximum for all AMCs) and then balance the energy on damage and reload to maximize DPS.

Core-Killer-AMCs need only 400 damage per hit maximum and then max on reload. Since every damage bigger than 400 is wasted (since AMC projectiles don\'t penetrate blocks) faster attack speed means you drill faster down to the core.
If you can\'t reach 400 damage go down to 200. Since you need 2 hits with a 200 damage shot and 2 hits with a 399 damage shot and still one-hit normal blocks with 200 damage all power is wasted in the range between.

 

[Trafalgar]

Hardened hull with 75% armor and 400 HP seems pretty good, but missiles still ignore armor completely, of course.

 

[TangentialThreat]

I like the idea of armor that actually protects things.



Missile damage would also benefit from a rework. Minecraft does it by making a bunch of damage rays pointing away from the center of the explosion that lose power every time they break a block and pass through. While not quite perfect, that and a buff to armor would make armor more useful.