weapon effect idea -explosive effect-

[taisong]

I have been playing with World of Warships for awhile and thought, "these AP bullets are real fun to use!"
And then I thought this thing might give a lot of depth on weapon damage optimizations, so, I am proposing this.

Explosive effect ===> Makes bullets explode inside a ship!

Whenever an explosive effect is slaved to a cannon, The damage of the bullet decreases by (effect ratio)%. Then, there will be a new damage value called "explosion damage" That increases by the effect ratio x weapon damage.

If a size 100 cannon is used without slaves, the bullet damage will be 1000 and there will be no explosion damage.
If a size 100 cannon is used with 25% explosion slave, then the bullet damage will be 750 and explosion damage will be 250.

The bullet will use up the damage to pierce into a ship. When all the damage is used up and is stopped by a block, the bullet explodes IN THAT BLOCK (Important!), dealing damage to the surrounding blocks. The explosion will be equivalent to a missile.

The bullet also cares about the type of the block it is stopped by. If it is an armor block, then the explosion damage will be severely decreased (Probably based on the armor value).

(lol I have so much empty white spaces on this pic o-0)
When the explosive bullet is stopped by any armor blocks, then the explosion damage will be decreased like this;
Explosion damage = (Explosion damage) - (Explosion damage) x armor damage reduction %

So, any explosive bullet stopped by Adv.Armor will have its explosion damage reduced by 95%.
Damage calculation will then proceed with no changes or whatsoever, so the damage calculation on whole will look like this;
(Explosion damage) - (Explosion damage) x armor damage reduction % - (Explosion damage) x armor damage reduction %



I want this thing to be similar to AP bullets in World of Warships. If it penetrates through the ship, then the damage will be minimal. Being stopped by armor will also minimize the damage. Only when it detonates INSIDE the ship the bullet will do its worst.
Theres a second reason for the proposal too.
Right now, a bullet that has too much firepower will just penetrate a ship and do almost nothing. So, I thought adding this might allow heavy bullets to have low penetration and high explosion damage.

Seriously guys, isn't this a good idea? Please comment on it. I would want to find some problems I did not think about.

By the way, setting the slave to 100 percent will make it detonate instantly, much like missiles right now. Unexpected, but good side effect, is not it? It will most likely be stopped by the armor, which makes it a little inefficient.

Recognized problem
After playing this model around in the excel files, I found out that the larger ships can't protect themselves well enough from the explosive bullets. This is a problem caused by how armor scales with the rest of our ships.
I guess this problem will be gone if the armor scaling is fixed.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I like the theory. I kinda wish exlosive effect wasn't "limited size" but rather a spreading wave (like missiles). I will give you a way to implement your idea (kinda) in current system:

2(or more) cannon outputs on one computer, in-line with each other. Rear output of arbitrarily large size, front output of exactly enough size to destroy 2 blocks of un-modded advanced. Apply wanted secondary, and tertiary explosive effect to appropriate size based on combined totals of primary cannons.

Sadly explosive effect will be limited to the current tiny radius, but it will allow you to make an interior-explosive as you've called it.
At a slight angle, or while in motion, the shells "following" the primary will even have a chance of "detonating" in one of the side-cavities created by the primary's own explosive radius further reducing over-pen and pen-loss.

 

[taisong]

The meta cannon.

I like the theory. I kinda wish exlosive effect wasn't "limited size" but rather a spreading wave (like missiles). I will give you a way to implement your idea (kinda) in current system:

2(or more) cannon outputs on one computer, in-line with each other. Rear output of arbitrarily large size, front output of exactly enough size to destroy 2 blocks of un-modded advanced. Apply wanted secondary, and tertiary explosive effect to appropriate size based on combined totals of primary cannons.

Sadly explosive effect will be limited to the current tiny radius, but it will allow you to make an interior-explosive as you've called it.
At a slight angle, or while in motion, the shells "following" the primary will even have a chance of "detonating" in one of the side-cavities created by the primary's own explosive radius further reducing over-pen and pen-loss.

Yes. I get your point. This is very similar to what i tried to accomplish. My proposal will be able to do this in one effect.

 

[Brokengauge]

I misunderstood what you were getting at, at first. A second read though allowed me to understand.

Currently, a cannon with explosive will hit a block, transfer explosive damage to the 5 blocks directly touching it, then continue inward to repeat the process.

You instead want it to penetrate as deep as it's ratio will allow, before transferring explosive damage to all surrounding blocks, which will each transfer that damage to all of the subsequent touching blocks, until to total damage is used up.

An overpowered shot will pass through the target, wasting damage potential. A high explosive ratio will simply do superficial damage, spread out along the outer layers of hull/armor.

I like it!

 

[Lecic]

So you are suggesting we make both M/C and M useless, because there is zero reason to take a slower, PD-vulnerable explosive weapon over their cannon equivalents of C and C/P? Not only is it faster and immune to PD, but I can also have it penetrate the armor of my enemy first?

 

[sayerulz]

I basically agree with Lecic on this one. This would make dumb fire missiles pretty much useless, and make other missiles a good deal less useful. Not only that, but this would be an ENORMOUS nerf to armor. Pretty much any decent-sized cannon can go through several layers of advanced armor. But armor is still worthwhile because it's very effective against the more spread out damage of missiles, which are what do most of the hull damage anyway. If this was implemented, it would be extremely easy to make cannons that go straight through armor and rip up internals.

However, I do think that the max radius of explosive effect needs to be upped. Right now I don't find heavy explosive cannons useful at all.

 

[taisong]

[doublepost=1496546685,1496546429][/doublepost]

I basically agree with Lecic on this one. This would make dumb fire missiles pretty much useless, and make other missiles a good deal less useful. Not only that, but this would be an ENORMOUS nerf to armor. Pretty much any decent-sized cannon can go through several layers of advanced armor. But armor is still worthwhile because it's very effective against the more spread out damage of missiles, which are what do most of the hull damage anyway. If this was implemented, it would be extremely easy to make cannons that go straight through armor and rip up internals.

However, I do think that the max radius of explosive effect needs to be upped. Right now I don't find heavy explosive cannons useful at all.

The reason I wanted this was because M/C was not what I expected it to be. Right now, M/C is very sluggish with low fire rate to cannons. Theres honestly no use for it right now, because PD turrets are always on the watch.

Now, I also stated that, if the bullet is stopped by any armor, it will severely reduce its explosion damage. This I will probably fix in my main post, but I wanted these bullets to be very weak when it stops at an armor block.

If you did not put enough damage to pierce through the first layer of the armor, then the bullet will not deal much damage.
If the bullet gets stopped on the other side of the armor (penetrating all the way through) then the bullet will not deal much damage too.
If the bullet piercing was just right, and it stops INSIDE the ship, the ship will take HEAVY damage.


With this in mind, the explosive effect has to be very carefully treated to make the full use out of it.
This can make a guessing game of some sort, by calibrating the piercing damage to be fit for Adv.Armor, Standard, Hull, or even Adv.Armor with some defensive effects.

 

[Mortiferum]

Meh, watch me abuse this.

I will have small groups with exactly enough power to break through 2 layers of advanced armor and explode. I will also make sure max damage cannot penetrate greater than 30 blocks, since only the smallest of ships arent longer than 30 blocks at its longest point.

Then I am going to separate it into 500 separate computers with 500 separate outputs and proceed to instantly kill anything that loses their shields.

Unless I misinterpreted something, group size no longer matters above a certain size since over penetration. So instead of using large groups, you simply spam groups to guarantee maximum damage.

 

[taisong]

Meh, watch me abuse this.

I will have small groups with exactly enough power to break through 2 layers of advanced armor and explode. I will also make sure max damage cannot penetrate greater than 30 blocks, since only the smallest of ships arent longer than 30 blocks at its longest point.

Then I am going to separate it into 500 separate computers with 500 separate outputs and proceed to instantly kill anything that loses their shields.

Unless I misinterpreted something, group size no longer matters above a certain size since over penetration. So instead of using large groups, you simply spam groups to guarantee maximum damage.

What if the enemy is using a single layer of armor? What if the enemy had even more layers of armor? What if the enemy is using that 50% armor buff defensive effect? What if the enemy was a RP ship and they had hull as their armor? There are many situations. There are not right answers to how you do it.

Oh yes, It is possible to have a bullet with 1,000,000 damage to only having 1000 penetration damage, and have 999,000 explosion damage.
Just slave a 99.9% explosion effect on a 1,000,000 damage cannon, and you get a bullet with meager penetration and massive explosion.

Besides, you CAN do that "lets-alpha-strike-and-kill-him-instantly" abuse using missiles too. If rebundance is an abuse, then theres no way I can stop that.

 

[Mortiferum]

What if the enemy is using a single layer of armor? What if the enemy had even more layers of armor? What if the enemy is using that 50% armor buff defensive effect? What if the enemy was a RP ship and they had hull as their armor? There are many situations. There are not right answers to how you do it.

Oh yes, It is possible to have a bullet with 1,000,000 damage to only having 1000 penetration damage, and have 999,000 explosion damage.
Just slave a 99.9% explosion effect on a 1,000,000 damage cannon, and you get a bullet with meager penetration and massive explosion.

Besides, you CAN do that "lets-alpha-strike-and-kill-him-instantly" abuse using missiles too. If abundance is an abuse, then theres no way I can stop that.

1) What if the enemy is using single armor? - The block penetration will be increased by maybe 5 blocks into 35 blocks, hell, even if it increased to 50 blocks it will still kill most ships with ease since most ships are >50m in any direction.
2) What if they have even more? - Thats where a waffle group makes it irrelevant, multiple hits on the same area means I will be slowed by 1 second before I have full effect.
3) What if they have 50% armor effect? - Makes little difference since a cannon that can penetrate 30 blocks + can also penetrate 1 advance armor regardless of armor effect
4) What if it is an RP ship? - It would be a useless piece of shit that I can kill regardless of whether I optimise my cannons.

And Alpha striking is not an abuse, it is game play mechanic. In exchange your ship becomes a moving power capacitor.

As for another answer. I will simply modify my waffle so that some explode earlier than others and some explode later by tweaking damage. Then stack the outputs.

I am simply thinking of ways to game the crap out of things people suggest and break it as much as possible.

 

[taisong]

then, I guess you can abuse the crap out of any mechanics in game then.

1) What if the enemy is using single armor? - The block penetration will be increased by maybe 5 blocks into 35 blocks, hell, even if it increased to 50 blocks it will still kill most ships with ease since most ships are >50m in any direction.
2) What if they have even more? - Thats where a waffle group makes it irrelevant, multiple hits on the same area means I will be slowed by 1 second before I have full effect.
3) What if they have 50% armor effect? - Makes little difference since a cannon that can penetrate 30 blocks + can also penetrate 1 advance armor regardless of armor effect
4) What if it is an RP ship? - It would be a useless piece of shit that I can kill regardless of whether I optimise my cannons.

That is really not where I wanted to take this conversation to. I just wanted to tell you that there are a lot of variables for armor protection.
Besides, people will adapt. I intentionally made these bullets counter-able. Just like how we are going to adapt to the new power change.

 

[Brokengauge]

I still think that an explosive round shouldn't detonate until after it's penetrated as far as it can. It doesn't make sense how the effect is applied now. That's really the main part of the suggestion that I like.

 

[Lecic]

The reason I wanted this was because M/C was not what I expected it to be. Right now, M/C is very sluggish with low fire rate to cannons. Theres honestly no use for it right now, because PD turrets are always on the watch.

So your solution to M/C and M being underpowered is to buff the fuck out of cannons? Fantastic logic.

Now, I also stated that, if the bullet is stopped by any armor, it will severely reduce its explosion damage. This I will probably fix in my main post, but I wanted these bullets to be very weak when it stops at an armor block.

Except it's incredibly easy to penetrate armor with cannons. Any cannon designer with a lick of sense already designs their cannons to not have overpenetration. Combined with how penetration damage scales and it would be nearly impossible for someone to design a cannon that would overpenetrate on all but the smallest of ships. The most likely scenario for the large majority of guns, which are already designed to penetrate a few layers of armor and stop in the systems, would be that they would clear the armor and detonate right in the core area of the ship. Even if they did make it past all the systems, they would almost certainly detonate on the armor on the opposite end of the ship, which would still deal significant system damage even if it does explode "inside the armor block." And if the cannon has too little penetration damage to make it through the armor, it will still rapidly clear the armor away.

When explosives start hitting inside their own craters, the effectiveness of the armor quickly drops, because they are dealing more AHP damage, are hitting already damaged blocks, and are wasting less damage into space. This usually doesn't happen very quickly regular missiles because their fire rate is so low and they are less likely to hit the same spot, but with cannons, which can fire rapidly and have high velocity, they would quickly bore their way through even a thick armor belt and annihilate the systems.

Missiles also take longer to penetrate through armor because of spaced armor belts, but cannons don't care about spaced armor.

 

[taisong]

So your solution to M/C and M being underpowered is to buff the fuck out of cannons? Fantastic logic.



Except it's incredibly easy to penetrate armor with cannons. Any cannon designer with a lick of sense already designs their cannons to not have overpenetration. Combined with how penetration damage scales and it would be nearly impossible for someone to design a cannon that would overpenetrate on all but the smallest of ships. The most likely scenario for the large majority of guns, which are already designed to penetrate a few layers of armor and stop in the systems, would be that they would clear the armor and detonate right in the core area of the ship. Even if they did make it past all the systems, they would almost certainly detonate on the armor on the opposite end of the ship, which would still deal significant system damage even if it does explode "inside the armor block." And if the cannon has too little penetration damage to make it through the armor, it will still rapidly clear the armor away.

When explosives start hitting inside their own craters, the effectiveness of the armor quickly drops, because they are dealing more AHP damage, are hitting already damaged blocks, and are wasting less damage into space. This usually doesn't happen very quickly regular missiles because their fire rate is so low and they are less likely to hit the same spot, but with cannons, which can fire rapidly and have high velocity, they would quickly bore their way through even a thick armor belt and annihilate the systems.

Missiles also take longer to penetrate through armor because of spaced armor belts, but cannons don't care about spaced armor.

First argument; missiles will be better against armor on all occations, because the explosive bullets will weaken when stopped by armor. 95%. That much damage pretty much disappears into thin air. Another 95% will be absorbed by the normal armor damage calculation. This makes the explosive bullets far more ineffective against armor than missiles.

Second argument; We could always tweak numbers to make it hard to create the "best condition" bullet. Maybe let the armor be more efficient against the penetration of the explosive bullet. I do not want people to stop making best condition bullets. I just want them to have to do a guessing game of how many layers of armor an enemy has. If you failed to guess, then you will deal minimal damage. That is the thing I wanted, and I can probably tweak things to do so.

When explosives start hitting inside their own craters, then the bullet will whizz right past all the system blocks and land on the other side of the armor, where it gets absorbed. If you tweaked the bullet to be effective against two layers of armor, then it will not be optimized for bare system blocks.

M/C and M being underpowered has nothing to do with my idea. It has been underpowered for quite some time. That is for the devs to fix, not I. Maybe I might think of a separate Idea for the M/C sometime.
Besides, the new update will remove capacitors, which will help a lot for missiles.

 

[Lecic]

First argument; missiles will be better against armor on all occations, because the explosive bullets will weaken when stopped by armor. 95%. That much damage pretty much disappears into thin air. Another 95% will be absorbed by the normal armor damage calculation. This makes the explosive bullets far more ineffective against armor than missiles.

So 95% of damage is absorbed by armor even during normal calculations, meaning instead of 4000 damage to break through a passive boosted advanced armor block, I need 80,000 damage? Wow, congrats, you just made explosive cannons completely worthless against anything with armor.

When explosives start hitting inside their own craters, then the bullet will whizz right past all the system blocks and land on the other side of the armor, where it gets absorbed. If you tweaked the bullet to be effective against two layers of armor, then it will not be optimized for bare system blocks.

Except they won't, because penetration depth is not linear. Very few cannons except truly massive ones can penetrate all the way through a ship like that. Even hitting bare systems, it's almost certain that the cannon shot will detonate in systems.

Besides, the new update will remove capacitors, which will help a lot for missiles.

M/Cs problems have entirely nothing to do with capacitors. They are a DPS weapon. M/Cs problems have to deal with slow projectile speed, low rate of fire, weakness to point defense, and ineffectiveness versus armor.

 

[taisong]

So 95% of damage is absorbed by armor even during normal calculations, meaning instead of 4000 damage to break through a passive boosted advanced armor block, I need 80,000 damage? Wow, congrats, you just made explosive cannons completely worthless against anything with armor.

I may have caused some misunderstanding. The penetration damage and explosion damage is going to be calculated separately.
I should have told you that this is the explosion damage I am talking about, not penetration damage.
The penetration will not be affected by that 95% thing I talked about. Only when the bullet stops at armor the explosion damage will be decreased.

Except they won't, because penetration depth is not linear. Very few cannons except truly massive ones can penetrate all the way through a ship like that. Even hitting bare systems, it's almost certain that the cannon shot will detonate in systems.

It seems you see things from the titan's side. I never built a ship that large, so maybe I forgot about their problem entirely. Yes, it might be hard for massive titans to defend against this effect exploding in their guts. A few more layers of armor just won't help with a ship so large. This, I have to deal with. I acknowledge this problem.

M/Cs problems have entirely nothing to do with capacitors. They are a DPS weapon. M/Cs problems have to deal with slow projectile speed, low rate of fire, weakness to point defense, and ineffectiveness versus armor.

Now that is a lot of problem. I guess I will start thinking of a solution for missiles then...

 

[ohartenstein23]

What if instead of giving this effect to Cannon/X/Explosive, it was given to Missile/Cannon/X? Maybe in not quite so powerful a form, but adding a cannon secondary to a rocket sounds to me much like adding an armor-penetrating effect before the round explodes. I think it'd be interesting if some percentage (50%?) of the Missile/Cannon projectile was used to damage the first block it contacts, and then the explosion originates either on the surface of the block behind the impact if it was destroyed, or on the surface like the current Missile/Cannon.

Edit: Tertiary effects could be used to improve one part of the round over another - say, punch-through giving a greater penetration depth to the initial impact, explosive only increasing the radius of the explosion (i.e., not adding the adjacent block damage to the initial impact).

 

[Brokengauge]

What if instead of giving this effect to Cannon/X/Explosive, it was given to Missile/Cannon/X? Maybe in not quite so powerful a form, but adding a cannon secondary to a rocket sounds to me much like adding an armor-penetrating effect before the round explodes. I think it'd be interesting if some percentage (50%?) of the Missile/Cannon projectile was used to damage the first block it contacts, and then the explosion originates either on the surface of the block behind the impact if it was destroyed, or on the surface like the current Missile/Cannon.

Edit: Tertiary effects could be used to improve one part of the round over another - say, punch-through giving a greater penetration depth to the initial impact, explosive only increasing the radius of the explosion (i.e., not adding the adjacent block damage to the initial impact).

I think missile/cannon should stay as it is, since cannon has a secondary effect of enabling rapidfire.

I always saw the tertiary effects as analogous to ammo types (except for overdrive lol). The OP keeps in line with the game mechanics as they are, it's really just a change on how damage is calculated.

Changing missile/cannon from rapid fire to be a penetrating explosive weapon really just fucks up the weapon and design mechanics...how does it make sense that adding a cannon to a missile will make it explosive, but all others rapid fire?

 

[ohartenstein23]

I was more thinking that it would add both the rapid fire and the penetration qualities of the cannon system, while differentiating from the current cannon/explosive hole-drilling effect, with the added benefit of making missile/cannon a more attractive weapon type for DPS instead of just for overwhelming AMS.

 

[taisong]

I was more thinking that it would add both the rapid fire and the penetration qualities of the cannon system, while differentiating from the current cannon/explosive hole-drilling effect, with the added benefit of making missile/cannon a more attractive weapon type for DPS instead of just for overwhelming AMS.

Putting it on secondary systems may cause a myriad of problems. First, the Missile-cannon uses the missile projectile as its bullet. It has no penetration capabilities.

Second, my system allows you to determine the penetration damage by the % of modules placed. If you try to do that with a secondary weapon slave, then the fire-rate change from the cannon block will mess with the bullet damage. It will be very hard to control how much damage the bullet will have as penetration damage.

It will be best to control penetration damage by something that does only that. If it also interferes with other variables, then this system is going to be very hard to use.