@tandrith - You made some good points, I'll try to respond to all of them.
I agree that the current armor system is busted, and for the most part even the developers have admitted it needs a rework badly for a long time. I would propose something much simpler and more intuitive than what we have now to create the game's triangle balance without hull types.
Ships would have an Armor level and an Armor penetration level. There are 10 levels.
Each level of armor gives it 10% resistance to damage, with level 10 giving it 100% resistance to all damage. Each level of Armor penetration is subtracted from the Armor value to determine how what percentage of damage it does.
This is easy, intuitive, and can be explained quickly in the tutorial.
For example, if a Bomber has 5 Armor and a Frigate has 0 Armor Penetration, then the Frigate's attacks will be doing 50% reduced damage to the Bombers. However, if a Fighter has 3 Armor penetration, then that Armor penetration will be reduced by the Bomber's 5 Armor value, resulting in a 20% damage loss, which the Fighters care little about since their DPS is already so high.
However, if a Frigate has 7 Armor, then Fighters are doing only 60% of full damage, and this is much more significant.
Bombers get 10 Armor penetration because their whole role is taking out heavily armored targets like Starships, but they also work against Frigates for this reason.
So Armor value and Armor penetration becomes a statistic just like DPS, speed, health, range, fleet size, and so on.
What balance problems do you think have been around for 10 years? Laser gatlings? Laser gatlings are EXACTLY the fighter archetype you propose: "Fighters in general are numerous, have middling armor penetration, and are cost-effective. They are the most well-rounded aspect of your fleet. " That's a laser gatling: high cap, some armor pen, cheap, and small bonuses. IIRC, every time they've come up the dev response has been 'I know they're terrible but I don't have any good ideas for how to fix them yet'.
Laser Gatlings are terrible
BECAUSE of the Hull Type system. Pure DPS in high numbers means very little in the Hull Type system if its bonuses suck, which is one of the reasons Fighters are so underwhelming in the current system. Because no matter how much you BUFF THEM, they're just glorified Bomber killers and that's it. Because the Hull bonuses they have are fairly useless otherwise.
However, when DPS, especially the kind of DPS you can accomplish like in a huge swarm of Laser Gatlings, becomes valuable
on its own because the Hull Types system has been removed, suddenly you have an extremely powerful unit which is good against most things.
However, Laser Gatlings still have their weaknesses. They are weak to area of effect which many Guardians have, and also things like Electric Shuttles and Grenade Launchers. They are also weak to ships which shoot many projectiles like MLRS and the equivalent Guardian.
So the question is, why would you
want the current system, when so many ships have the Laser Gatling syndrome? I haven't heard a good answer to this yet. It's forced design, it doesn't even make sense. Why would a Bomber do 10x as much damage to a specific hull type. I can understand like maybe 50% more damage, maybe even double damage, but 10x the damage? Let's be real. This is the concept around which almost every ship is designed.
If you look at the trend in ship caps... all the high cap ships are from the original game. Everything since then seems to have trended to lower and lower caps, and eventually to bonus starships which are the ultimate low cap units. None of the high cap units are particularly popular, and they've often been some of the worst-performing ship classes in the game. I don't think having fighters be high cap is essential to your design, but it doesn't bode well for that part of it (note that the current triangle ships all have the same cap... I think that's telling).
The reason low caps ships are better often times isn't because they have lower caps, but because they have an immunity to absolutely everything, where the high cap ships have an immunity to absolutely nothing.
Low cap ships often have to an immunity to AoE, instakill, parasite attacks, snipers, tractor beams, maws, attrition, and everything else under the Sun, simply because they're low cap. Well of course this is going to be superior to high cap ships which have an immunity to nothing.
But here's the thing, when you balance ships based on archetype (Fighter, Bomber, Frigate), suddenly you can give out those immunities sparingly, and in a way that individualizes a ship's unique strengths and weaknesses. Because you're no longer basing around Hull Types, but around Archetypes, you have a lot more creative license to give immunities where necessary to create a diverse roster without making specific ships overpowered.
So for example, if you give a specific numerous Fighter-type immunity to aoe, it is now no longer defeated by its easiest counter, and it creates an entirely new dynamic which wasn't in the game before.
If you give a Bomber-type immunity to tractor beams, it now can do something no other Bomber can do, and sneak past enemy wormholes to take out priority targets much more easily than its counterparts. The possibilities are endless.
Now instead of just throwing out immunities willy nilly, you can give them out very intentionally to each type of ship to create a certain profound effect. Because Hull Types are no longer a factor, this effect will be felt much more deeply.
But, is it easy to tell looking at a fighter how good it is against a bomber vs against a missile frigate?
This is a good question, but generally the stats of any given archetype (Fighter, Bomber, Frigate) will fall within a range. I've already mentioned this before. Fighters are numerous, have no armor, have high DPS, and middling armor penetration. Bombers are less numerous, have some armor, and high armor penetration. Frigates are the least numerous, have heavy armor, no armor penetration, but can take out many small targets easily.
It will be explained in the tutorial (it already is) that Fighters beat Bombers, beat Frigates, beat Fighters, and each ship archetype can be tagged as such to make it easier for new players.
All ships that are created within an archetype will fit into these categories. However, that isn't to say that you are bound to them absolutely. For example, Armor Ships are technically Fighters, but you can give them some Armor (say 3) which makes them much less vulnerable to their counters (Frigates), however their Armor penetration will suffer as a result, given that the Wiki states that they are primarily Anti-Light. These ships counter other Fighters and survive pretty well against Frigates too, even though they are weak against anything with heavy armor.
Well anyway, this system makes vastly more sense than what we have, and the balance would be infinitely better and easier to achieve. The diversity of ships would also go up as well.