Thicker, better, stronger, a new armor mechanic

[Scypio]

Uh, yeah. I did throw this idea in chat yesterday aaand dev's might like this one or at least work from. Thick armor doesn't feel like it is really and this might start to be an idea to correct this problem and add choices when you build your ship and i hope i do not need to explain this part.

So the idea is that a 2 blocks thick armor should be stronger than one layer of armor and then another. How ? Simply by adding the damage reduction to the remaining incoming damage to the hull itself.

Let's take an example to see this more clearly, an advanced armor block reduce the incoming damage by 75%. With this idea and a 2 thick layer of advanced the damages would be reduced by 75% and 75% of the remaining 25% damages or 18.75% of the initial damages if your prefer, so in fact the armour would reduce the incoming damages by a total of 93.75%.

Then this gives two problems, the first one being that we can potentially with the rounding system get up to 100% reduced incoming damages with simply 4/5 layers of advanced, wich can be easily fixed by capping this to only 2 or 3 blocs being added to the reduction. The second problem is how to detect that blocs are behind and not simply another bloc being a part of the wall and to that it's simply to detect if there is 5 of the 6 blocs connected to the hull that are hull blocs. You'll tell me that tips can't use this and that is fine as tips are good for something else.

So what do you guys think about that ?

 

[NeonSturm]

The core problem:

But as the weapon system grows, it gains depth, width and length while hull only gets depth and the width/length is elsewhere.

With elsewhere I mean not at the spot which is targeted.
This may be a lesser problem if the attacker suffers from inaccuracy or uses AOE, but it is always a problem.

​

To fix this, I once suggested "fluid hull".

First imagine, you have a robot arm with a hull plate attached which is always there where you need it.
A rocket will impact the front side of your ship? Armour goes there.

A sci-fi variant of this is "fluid armour" which flows like blood in the ship's hull and which is controlled by nanotech to rebuild the armour to it's original shape.


But to be different than shield, there is only a limited supply which does not regenerate or as fast or with the same mechanism as shields.
Additionally, damaged blocks need to be repaired so that you might penetrate a thin layer of armour, long before the supply is drained.

If a block is killed, it can setup an event for 12 seconds later which re-spawns the same block.
You can have a variable delay (3,6,12 sec), auto-repair armour after a delay and limit the number of respawning blocks depending on nano-controler passives.
Other than shield capacitors, nano-controlers might get hurt while armour-fluid is still available.​

 

[Haalon]

Let's take an example to see this more clearly, an advanced armor block reduce the incoming damage by 75%.

It has actually 90% reduction now.

With this idea and a 2 thick layer of advanced the damages would be reduced by 75% and 75% of the remaining 25% damages or 18.75% of the initial damages if your prefer

If you reduce damage twice with 75% reduction, you will get 6.25% of initial damage.

Overall, I don't clearly understand your idea. Do you want to apply reduction to damage that has left after destruction of armor block?

 

[Kimiro]

A neat idea to be sure, but I can see two core issues with this:

The first is one of performance, adding another check on each incoming blob of damage. At a small scale it wouldn't matter too much, but on a larger scale, where dozens of shots can be traded back and forth every second, that extra CPU time adds up.

The second issue is one of scaling. Even if the sequential reduction is capped, it's still percentage based. So with 3 layers of advanced armor, you have 99.9% reduction (fun fact: to figure out a sequential percentage based stacking, the formula is 1 - (1 - X) x (1 - Y) x (1 - Z) etc. where XYZ are the percentages, as a decimal - e.g. 0.9 for 90%), which means 999 out of every 1000 damage is ignored. This means that, effectively, the HP of that block would be 1000 times greater than it actually is - armor that has something like 100,000 health. This also means that a weapon required to defeat that thickness of armor would be required to be 1000x bigger to compensate.

 

[Scypio]

It has actually 90% reduction now.

Uh yeah sorry, i keep using the old value in my mind.

If you reduce damage twice with 75% reduction, you will get 0.0625% of initial damage.

The calcul is right, you just forgot to multiply by 100 at the end to get the percents.

The first is one of performance, adding another check on each incoming blob of damage. At a small scale it wouldn't matter too much, but on a larger scale, where dozens of shots can be traded back and forth every second, that extra CPU time adds up.

The second issue is one of scaling. Even if the sequential reduction is capped, it's still percentage based. So with 3 layers of advanced armor, you have 99.9% reduction (fun fact: to figure out a sequential percentage based stacking, the formula is 1 - (1 - X) x (1 - Y) x (1 - Z) etc. where XYZ are the percentages, as a decimal - e.g. 0.9 for 90%), which means 999 out of every 1000 damage is ignored. This means that, effectively, the HP of that block would be 1000 times greater than it actually is - armor that has something like 100,000 health. This also means that a weapon required to defeat that thickness of armor would be required to be 1000x bigger to compensate.

This was my concerns about that, the performance isn't that big of a deal if you don't go crazy about the number of armor used, that's just 1 layer on top of something that the game already do. Though i'm not a dev and i can't tell if that possible without destroying cpu or not. Second one, getting 100% reduction with the rounding is possible if you stack indefinitely or at least enough your armor blocs, wich can be capped to prevent performance issues and further problems. Even with only the possibility to get the addition of the previous armor bloc having a 10m thick armor will be way stronger than 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2.

I'm not that scared about the problem for weapons size, that is especially the idea, needing more weapons/damages per shots to destroy heavy armored blocs/parts. Currently a 10m thick layer of adv is shredded to pieces by a 20/30k blocs c/c in a few second of sustained fire, so if you want to pierce through 10 layers of advanced you'll probably need to use something else than the holy c/c, i know everyone like to be in any sci-fi universe and spam their shots but we can't balance the game to be easy for the weapon with the smallest amount of damages per shots. Building 10m thick armor is a choice made by players like the one to build rapid fire weapon or armor shredders as well as being able to shoot at the same spot and focus your fire to be effective. Not to mention piercing weapon that will ignore half of the armor and make your armor stacking almost useless.

 

[Haalon]

Let's take an example to see this more clearly, an advanced armor block reduce the incoming damage by 75%. With this idea and a 2 thick layer of advanced the damages would be reduced by 75% and 75% of the remaining 25% damages or 18.75% of the initial damages if your prefer, so in fact the armour would reduce the incoming damages by a total of 93.75%.

So, in case of 2 layers of standart armor, you want it to be (1-0.6)*0.6 = 0.24 of initial damage done to the first layer block?

 

[Scypio]

So, in case of 2 layers of standart armor, you want it to be (1-0.6)*0.6 = 0.24 of initial damage done to the first layer block?

Still not it, in that case that should be (1-0.6)*(1-0.6) or (1-0.6)² or more simply 0.4²=0.16.
You can say like his : damage * first reduction * reduction of the layer behind = total damage done.

 

[NeonSturm]

Examples:

Ship 10x10x10 has 1 block thick armour
Ship 100x100x100 has 10 blocks thick armour and 100 times the surface.
Gun 1x1x1 deals 1x damage
Gun 10x10x10 deals 1'000 damage

Your armour and weapon power both scale the same (10*100 = 1000),

but "your armour becomes smaller"
and "the ship becomes slower"​

at higher block counts (relative to ship sizes).​

This means that you just need a bigger splash for bigger guns.

(Bigger stuff = better) => how this can actually NERF big ships.

 

[Kimiro]

I'm not that scared about the problem for weapons size, that is especially the idea, needing more weapons/damages per shots to destroy heavy armored blocs/parts. Currently a 10m thick layer of adv is shredded to pieces by a 20/30k blocs c/c in a few second of sustained fire, so if you want to pierce through 10 layers of advanced you'll probably need to use something else than the holy c/c, i know everyone like to be in any sci-fi universe and spam their shots but we can't balance the game to be easy for the weapon with the smallest amount of damages per shots. Building 10m thick armor is a choice made by players like the one to build rapid fire weapon or armor shredders as well as being able to shoot at the same spot and focus your fire to be effective. Not to mention piercing weapon that will ignore half of the armor and make your armor stacking almost useless.

As stated though, each thickness of armor would require an exponentially more powerful gun to pierce.

To deal 1 point of damage to the block in question...
First layer would require 10 damage.
Second layer would require 100 damage.
Third layer would require 1000 damage.
The trend continues indefinitely until you round, at which point you'll have 100% reduction.

With Standard Armor it's not as bad, but is still pretty bad. To do 1 point of damage, you need to deal:
First layer would require ~3 damage.
Second layer would require ~4 damage.
Third layer would require ~8 damage.
Of course this varies with rounding but still provides too much protection.

This means a very modest investment of three layers of armor would probably defeat a gun built from a hundred times more blocks and render you nigh impervious to anything smaller. Conversely, it makes armor not a choice but a requirement, since ships will require these massive guns to defeat the massive damage reduction armor provides, anything without armor may as well be tissue paper. It would also make armor piercing effects not an option but a requirement, as otherwise your guns will be too large to fire. So yeah...

 

[DrTarDIS]

As stated though, each thickness of armor would require an exponentially more powerful gun to pierce.

To deal 1 point of damage to the block in question...
First layer would require 10 damage.
Second layer would require 100 damage.
Third layer would require 1000 damage.
The trend continues indefinitely until you round, at which point you'll have 100% reduction.

With Standard Armor it's not as bad, but is still pretty bad. To do 1 point of damage, you need to deal:
First layer would require ~3 damage.
Second layer would require ~4 damage.
Third layer would require ~8 damage.
Of course this varies with rounding but still provides too much protection.

This means a very modest investment of three layers of armor would probably defeat a gun built from a hundred times more blocks and render you nigh impervious to anything smaller. Conversely, it makes armor not a choice but a requirement, since ships will require these massive guns to defeat the massive damage reduction armor provides, anything without armor may as well be tissue paper. It would also make armor piercing effects not an option but a requirement, as otherwise your guns will be too large to fire. So yeah...

...for 1 round/tick to penetrate.
Some weapons projectile or tick 10 times/second. Armorthat's 1-use only is kinda meh. It does remind me to test out if 25% piercing passive on a 90% heavy armor block causes 115 damage to armor pool, or only 100, or what the new "cap" is though. Will report back!