Why use HP bar armour when you can use HP bar shields? Especially when you are suggesting to up their regen by a lot.
This suggestion also further moves Starmade from building ships and into just slapping blobs of systems and armour together as geometry matters even less when HP bars come into picture.
Sure, why have reactor HP at all. Lets just auto-overheat and despawn when shields=0.
You are killing design with your suggestion. What you will get will be ships that use shields as external armour, because after shield is dead it's better to have them outside to soak up damage and use armour internally to have a little more HP on other systems. So you will have Shield->armour->other systems.
If they want to die to overheat before using the armor's damage-reduction qualities I suppose that's their choice.
I'm assuming you mean using sheild capacity/regen blocks as the outer layer, which would in turn reduce the RHP for every one of those blocks destroyed (cause BHP is used for damage to the RHP bar on the interface as far as I know)
It would probably be smarter to hide everything under the damage-reduction qualities of armor, but with the way you talk I could see why you would do the silly thing.
What you don't seem to understand is that ships can be disabled long before some arbitrary number comes down. You have defence, offence and mobility. With reactor providing energy for everything. Losing offence or mobility (weapons/thrusters) puts the ship down as surely as losing all reactor HP.
I mean, not really? FTL needs to be knocked out or escape is still an option(not really possible after FTL blocks were removed). Just cause you can't duck and weave much(called punch-drunk or snared in most gaming circles) doesn't mean you can't tank and shoot back.
You seem to be using further and further "gray area" and "grasping at straws" to avoid dealing with actual math and actual balance.
It's VERY obvious you don't understad what a .jar actually IS so...Are numbers scary to you? Have you actually read BlockBehaviourConfig.xml EffectCofic.xml and BlockConfig.xml? Do you understand what the values are/do? Can you solve for X when 95.2=2.1X^(X-2.112F) ?
Even when we had SHP you could be out of the fight long before the SHP will roll down.
No argument here. But that system had it's own "bad tripod" at the time too. It's a very common thing for this game. Schema does NOT seem to spreadsheet before they code, just throws in random values and "sees if it works" for absolutely everything from resources to building to combat to seed. Back to my above mention of "nail it on top" balance a few posts back. Changing what weapon combos do is exactly this kind of "nail it on top" method rather than switching what resource-pools(RHP, BHP, AR, E/s, Mass, etc) branch off to what balance mechanism.
They've got cool ideas but they have listened WAY too much to idiots who can't express things in mathematics as far as game design since 2015.
Reading though this thread AND the github AND a good chunk of the starbase discord tells me next to nobody actually does math, they "feel like" something and just nail-it-ontop. The issue is FOUNDATIONAL it's not something you fix by adding more nails or a layer of paint. Do go back and try to understand my earlier posts and objections to silly stuff like "you have to put sheilds and thrusters on the outside because they are less important in the meta-build"
That kind of "cookie cutter" ideology is directly caused by the FOUNDATIONAL PROBLEMS of MISPLACED RESOURCE POOL BALANCE.