The obvious solution to butter armour and it's pointlessness compared to shields

[jaakl]

As it stands armour is completely inferior against shields and finds it's primary use as the aesthetically pleasing single layered shell of all most every ship design in star made. Armour has no other exceptional practical purpose.

I propose two solutions, both relatively similar yet the later more code intensive and complex.
These solutions plan to have armour behave differently than shields so that they both have different practicalities.

a)
give armour a chance to deflect weapons with ballistic behaviour, currently the only one being anti matter (yes I know realistically antimatter does not behave like this, but come on, its super future space armour!).
This will also give missiles situations where they will be valid over AM as they will have a 100% chance of inflicting damage whilst AM has the possibility of being deflected. The orientation of the surface hit has no effect on the chance of the munition being deflected. This brings me to my second suggestion.

b)
with all of the same characteristics of suggestion a), save for surface orientation, Have the probability of munitions being deflected increase and decrease depending on the orientation of the surface being hit.
If the surface is angled away from the direction of the munition it has just come into contact with, the munition will have a higher chance of deflecting, but if the munition hits more directly and head-on, the chance of deflection decreases. Along with this the more layers of armour, the higher the chance of deflection. Much like how modern armour behaves.

personally I prefer suggestion a) but I feel as if it was worth throwing out there.

With theses implementations I believe that armour would not only be effective enough to no longer be pointless, but with proper balancing armour and shields would work great in conjunction with each other as they will have separate roles, perhaps armour being great against rapid fire weapons like AM's as the rapid fire would be reduced considering that a portion of the bullets would not even have an effect. making armour great for reducing the amount of shields reduced, whilst missiles might have a roll as armour destroyers so the now armour-free hole can be target with more shield effective weapons.

So in summary the major outcome of this is weapons will figuratively be divided into 3 different categories.
1) weapons effective at destroying armour.
2) weapons effective at diminishing shields.
3) weapons that are relatively efficient at destroying armour and diminishing shields but are not extensively good at either.

If put into effect I can envision ships being designed around particular roles with certain ships being better against some and weaker towards others. this would help add brand knew considerations into ship builds.

I understand this suggestion is not entirely flawless, in fact there are some gaping holes in the concept.
Please help add and revise. Thank you.




- jaakl

 

[Azurite]

Mmmm. Butter armor.

 

[CyberTao]

It only takes 250 AMC blocks to destroy a HH in 1 shot :/ which all but the smallest of ships can do...
All this seems like it would do is slow it down ever so slightly - 3-

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I think this is entirely the wrong approach to correcting the armor problem. The problem is that damage to a block is isolated to that block, and weaponfire converges. It becomes a simple game of drilling a line into the core. Essentially, the problem is that a cubic increase in armor blocks yields a linear increase in protection. That is the worst scaling in the entire game, and deflection will not solve the issue, rather it will simply slightly raise the DPS to get through hull.

 

[Zedrackis]

I dislike this. I would rather see an approach with armour regeneration and armour resist modules added. Larger ships could this way make their armour more resistant and make them resist typical flak cannons composed of large quantities of low damage weapons. While we are at it, shield resistance blocks would be nice too.

 

[NeonSturm]

Armour lacks synergy. Weapons focus on one.

That makes the armour either OP on small ships or UP on large ships as long as you just modify individual blocks.​

There are two things that can solve this issue:

1. Let armour do something while the shield takes damage -> Makes shield stronger with hull beneath.
   • Might be OP as bigger ships have thinner layers of hull if it does not account for depth of hull.
2. Let hull pieces increase your maximum shield (not regeneration) like a capacitor does or create synergy otherwise.

Additionally, you could weapon some penetration of shields if they exceed -maybe 10%- shield capacity in damage with burst fire, but nerf dps in general for weapons which are able to do that -> thus giving hull a purpose prior to the shield being down and buff hull at the same time.

 

[Argyle_Ninja]

Honestly, I think that raising standard hull to something like 500hp, figuring that this is basically "civilian grade", but it's made to hold back the void of space, and survive asteroid collisions.. It's not like space-worthy vessels are put together out of all the aluminum cans some guy collected from the home office.
With Hardened hull to say (maybe?) 1000, you would visibly see your hull taking more punishment, and actually have a step between 100% and vaporized. The only time I really see "damaged" hull is when something gets gnawed on by fighter craft, or the crusty toasty edges around a gaping missile crater.
Along the same lines, I think that people shouldn't expect to get some massive amount of protection from hull, but still only putting down 1 or maybe 2 layers deep on their battleship. Increasing the hp on hull should encourage builders to actually have thicker hull to get more protection, right? I figure that way you're not trying to figure out synergies, or constantly computing how many blocks of hull you have total, or how many adjacent... since all of that can be changing by the second with somebody chewing your face off.

I'm just sayin, I know that capital ship ordinance is supposed to blow holes clean through just about anything, but as it scales down, even a bomber flying with some hardened hull should be able to call himself lucky to survive one or two shots to the face.
As I imagine it, hardened hull seems like it's made to look like you're putting a meter of solid steel between you and the pirates. Might as well beef it up so it starts to feel that way too.

 

[Ithirahad]

*sigh* Amount of connected hull should increase each hull block's HP... Capital ship armor should be able to take a lot more damage than shuttle armor, even if they're the same thickness. It just looks so much better, and is much, much simpler than all of the other suggestions for buffing hull.

 

[marcus87]

*sigh* Amount of connected hull should increase each hull block's HP... Capital ship armor should be able to take a lot more damage than shuttle armor, even if they're the same thickness. It just looks so much better, and is much, much simpler than all of the other suggestions for buffing hull.

maybe make a simple counter of how much hardened hull and normal hull is on the ship. Based on this use a frormula like the one for shields which will give you a factor X.

This factor X will be multiplied with the normal hp of the hull blocks. This could be saved to the blueprint so it does not change when the ship is lusing block. It would probably cost to much serverpower to calkulate these everytime a armorblock is lost.

 

[Ithirahad]

maybe make a simple counter of how much hardened hull and normal hull is on the ship. Based on this use a frormula like the one for shields which will give you a factor X.

This factor X will be multiplied with the normal hp of the hull blocks. This could be saved to the blueprint so it does not change when the ship is lusing block. It would probably cost to much serverpower to calkulate these everytime a armorblock is lost.

It shouldn't take any more calculation than when, say, shield blocks or powergen blocks are destroyed (or placed)...

 

[Mr. V]

I think almost everyone agrees that it is a problem that hull is largely aesthetic in this game at the present implementation. What if they just added a third hull type designed to withstand much more damage.

But such ultra-dense hull would come at a huge drawback that would likely find most rational people shying away from using it and substantial amounts of shields on the same ships?

You could make the new hull type have lots of mass due to it's extreme density, meaning that large amounts of it would greatly up requirements for thrust and power to use that thrust -- as long as the hull was strong enough, people might decide to go with hull only on smaller to medium ships - but opt to avoid using it on much larger ships where shields would allow the same amount of coverage everywhere for their large target of a capital ship.

As a benefit for usage of this hull you could make it so that it would automatically regenerate from damage over a really long period of time, and make it so that it actually provided better armor for smaller ships than they would normally be able to achieve with shield blocks for their size.

... just an idea - I'm not sure this is really a great solution either

 

[Ithirahad]

I think almost everyone agrees that it is a problem that hull is largely aesthetic in this game at the present implementation. What if they just added a third hull type designed to withstand much more damage.

But such ultra-dense hull would come at a huge drawback that would likely find most rational people shying away from using it and substantial amounts of shields on the same ships?

You could make the new hull type have lots of mass due to it's extreme density, meaning that large amounts of it would greatly up requirements for thrust and power to use that thrust -- as long as the hull was strong enough, people might decide to go with hull only on smaller to medium ships - but opt to avoid using it on much larger ships where shields would allow the same amount of coverage everywhere for their large target of a capital ship.

As a benefit for usage of this hull you could make it so that it would automatically regenerate from damage over a really long period of time, and make it so that it actually provided better armor for smaller ships than they would normally be able to achieve with shield blocks for their size.

... just an idea - I'm not sure this is really a great solution either

...Neutronium Hull? Sounds good in principle, but in practice, someone's going to build a gun powerful enough to just drill through it, unless it works by something like the system I proposed.

 

[NeonSturm]

IRL I would build ellipsoid hull which rotates and an outer ellipsoid shell which rotates in the opposite direction.
With that, you would have to destroy an entire circle, not just dig a tiny hole
Also rotating things increases their mass thus armour vs kinetic, also works as capacitor, for artificial gravity, for damage distribution, .............

But IRL, I would try it first with

• minimal mass by creating a dynamic (moving) hull parts to deform my ship in a way that projectiles won't even hit.
• a robot-arm to put hull pieces between me and the incoming projectiles or asteroids, whatever.
• manipulate the movement of incoming projectiles by just a few degree.
• Kill missiles before they kill me.

And SM is not nearly that realistic.

 

[rece ktore leczo]

IRL I would build ellipsoid hull which rotates and an outer ellipsoid shell which rotates in the opposite direction.
With that, you would have to destroy an entire circle, not just dig a tiny hole
Also rotating things increases their mass thus armour vs kinetic, also works as capacitor, for artificial gravity, for damage distribution, .............

But IRL, I would try it first with

• minimal mass by creating a dynamic (moving) hull parts to deform my ship in a way that projectiles won't even hit.
• a robot-arm to put hull pieces between me and the incoming projectiles or asteroids, whatever.
• manipulate the movement of incoming projectiles by just a few degree.
• Kill missiles before they kill me.

And SM is not nearly that realistic.

IRL I would dodge projectiles.

And if in massive ships, in which dodging wouldn't be possible i would rather add mass to my ship with more passive defend systems (like in game shields or butter armor) than cover my ship with robot-arms. Except PD turrets which are awesome.

 

[Ghent96]

The obvious solution, is actually block permanence... especially if you've saved or imported your ship. The server has 2 ways of doing this, then: either treat destroyed blocks as porous/invisible until they are repaired, or reference the stored model in memory to repair/restore blocks again. Especially since we already have repair beams in game, with an intended purpose, we should make sure they actually WORK to some usable and worthwhile purpose. They shouldn't just clean orange goo off a block ;p They should restore lost/destroyed blocks, by either of the 2 methods above: restore their HP and "turn on" the block again, or rebuild the block from the stored model.

Thus, repair turrets, repair drones, etc... and armor, become useful in gameplay again. This seems a far simpler solution, especially #1 (simply turn the block off when 'destroyed'). We don't need complex solutions slowing down the game and servers more.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

IIRC the last Q&A stated that repair would allow replacement of blocks, but not by magically resummoning armor that's been obliterated/vaporized away.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

It shouldn't take any more calculation than when, say, shield blocks or powergen blocks are destroyed (or placed)...

I'm not against armor being stronger in clumps but I do not think you should gain strength because of the size of a ship. The sheet metal on a smart car has the same resistance to a bullet as the sheet metal of a semi truck. The "connected" armor blocks should affect parts of the hull potentially 10s, 100s 1000s of meters away from taking damage. My proposed method is armor spreads its damage out so it becomes harder to destroy single blocks, and the more hull blocks you have in a localized area the more damage that area can take. This way armor can't be overpowered and how you build it matters.

 

[SilverBack]

I like this idea, and think it should be in-game, but not in the objective to fix the over-powered shields.

Honestly the only way to nerf shields is to nerf them, but this doesn't mean simply changing a number. A simple addition to shield functionality would make them a lot less overpowered in general. Shields, in my opinion, should only protect in an area around them in a linear 1/1 equation per x,y, and z sides. This mean means that a single shield block will effectively make a bubble around it of 3Width 3Length 3Height. Having one block on top of the other would yield 3Width 3Length 5Height.

As it stands people just fill their empty space in their ship with shields. Due to that, this means that updating the shields to this method wouldn't invalidate current ships that players spent a lot of time on. Though, this would also enable the viability of fighter craft, and armor, as those craft would be the only ones able to fly "under" the shield bubble to attack the armor beneath it.

This shield bubble in space would also have *fun* implications as ship builders will have to take on new approaches to building ships in general. I can already imagine different techniques one might use such as building separate pockets of shielding into their ship to protect specific area's, lessening over-all shielding to reduce the size of the shield bubble to prevent a wide firing arc for any fighter type craft, and also promote armoring of ships to counter said fighter craft.

I hope this helps, and I'll just up-vote this suggestion as ricochets in general are cool!

 

[marcus87]

as far as I know there where bubble shields a while back. But the bubble form took to much power from the servers.

 

[SilverBack]

It would be more of a box given the mechanic really...