Armor is not that important currently

[TechSY730]

Right now, armor doesn't have that much impact in the game. This makes thinks like polarizers, armor piercing, and armor rotting a not so effective gimmick.

I think I can nail two reasons behind this:
1. On average, armor is about an order of magnitude lower than single shot damage. Even if you constrain it to ships that are specialized in armor, it still on average  a half an order of magnitude lower than average single shot damage.
2. Currently, armor cannot stop more than 80% of the incoming damage, aka, the minimum damage due to armor damage reduction is 20%. That minimum seems a bit high.

Sadly, this is not the kind of thing that can easily be fixed, but will require a major re-balance.

But to start, how about something like, reduce minimum damage due to armor to 10%. This should still be high enough to not be annoying, but low enough to make high armor values mean something. (It used to be 5%, which proved to be too low)

Across the board increase armor by a factor of 1.25, except for things that already have absurdly high armor values (raid starships, armored force fields, things like that)
Exact multiplier may need to be tweaked.

Anyone else have thoughts about this subject?

[chemical_art]

armor is usually not noticeable, like you said, because average shot damage is so much higher then armor.

That is before damage bonuses are added.

[Diazo]

I suppose it depends on what role armor has in the game. I see it being used differently then I think you are describing.

I don't have access to the game to check numbers but armor is really what differentiates 'light' ships from 'heavy' ships.

Because of the way armor is implemented, low damage high ROF ships are hampered a lot more then high damage low ROF ships. That means a 'light' raider type ship with no armor is vulnerable to 'light' type interceptors, as opposed to a 'heavy' type ship which has armor and takes a lot less damage from a 'light' interceptor, but both the 'light' raider and 'heavy' type take roughly the same damage from a high damage fixed guard post.

In comparison, if the amount of HP a ship has was the difference between a 'light' and 'heavy' ship type, that fixed guard post's damage would have to be higher to deal with the 'heavy' attack ship, it would one or two shot the 'light' types that were present making them superfluous in that situation.

As it stands at 20%, sufficient 'light' type ships can take down a high armor target, they are just not a good choice to do so. Even dropping the minimum damage to 10% would be a huge change, you have just halved the damage of a ship that is running into the armor cap and I think hitting the armor cap is more common then we think.

I suppose it comes down to if you want armor to be a gameplay mechanic that players have to pay attention too, or is it a balancing tool for the developers to use to differentiate between ships?

Either way, I would not touch this until the next big rebalance when the next expansion pack comes out as any changes to armor will require a rebalance anyway.

(Does anyone have access to the actual numbers to see? I've got them in a nice spreadsheet that's sitting at home at the moment, will not be able to check them until tomorrow.)

[chemical_art]

For example:

The "armored" ship is meant to take down other light craft. On the combat triangle, that would be the fighter.

<this is low caps>

Armored ship has:
3,000 armor

Fighter has:
9,600 damage
750 armor piercing

so doing the math

(9,600) - (3000 - 750) = 7350

7350 / 9600 = 76%

so the armor of the "armored" fleet ship can reduce the damage of the fighter (which is not meant to counter armor) by 25%.

Granted, the armored ship gaves much more of a beating back, but that is not the point. It should be tough, given its description.
That seems really, really weak to me.

[chemical_art]

Compare the space "tank" to that of its triangle clone, the bomber:

cost:
2800 + 400
4396

space tank 37% more

Raw damage:
2311 (effective 3061 after armor pierce)
1600

space tank up to 191% more

Bonus damage
5546 (effective 7346 after armor pierce
9600

bomber probably up  to 30% better

Armor:
3000
2400

armored ship up to 25% more BUT many many things have some armor piercing AND with damage being magnitudes higher then armor this armor difference is usually small, and with damage bonuses it becomes almost irreverent.

[keith.lamothe]

I do think that ships that rely on a high volume of small shots are significantly impacted by armor.  I also think that the really huge stuff with tons of armor make the stuff that ignores or counters (or exploits) target armor at least somewhat more useful (but situational, I admit).

But I have been toying with the idea of making armor rating a percent reduction instead of a straight reduction.  Like:
damage = (shot's raw damage) * (attacker's bonus against defender's hull type) * (get_armor_percent_damage_reduction(defender's armor rating - attacker's armor piercing))

and get_armor_percent_damage_reduction would be something like:

Effective Armor	Damage Reduction
100	10.00%
200	19.35%
300	28.05%
400	36.10%
500	43.50%
600	50.25%
700	56.35%
800	61.80%
900	66.60%
1000	70.75%
1100	74.25%
1200	77.10%
1300	79.30%
1400	80.85%
1500	81.75%
1600	82.00%

Those just being points on the curve rather than the exact computation, you understand, but that's the general idea.

But anything like that would be a pretty major rebalance; in fact those numbers may be way too high and too likely to blow the hull-type-bonuses out of the water significance-wise, etc.  So I rather question the wisdom of it, but it is different

[chemical_art]

I actually think using percentages would make things easier.

The numbers would be tricky because you would have to factor in armor piercing, but I think it certainly is the way to go. It would take a lot more work up front, but make things significantly easier to fine tune down the road, compared to now where you have a complex mess that seems to not accomplish much except in the extraordinary cases.

[chemical_art]

Yep, now that I notice armored and space tanks have the most armor of the fleet ships, I can say that now among them at least armor is almost not noticable in the triangle ships, and immune to all but the lightest of the fleet ships.

[Hearteater]

Some quick numbers, more to follow on Keith's alternate armor idea.

Average Armor of Fleet Ships: 238.4
Median Armor of Fleet Ships: 150
Maximum Armor of any Fleet Ship: 750
Fleet Ships with no Armor: 20 of 56 (35%)

Average Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships: 13,468.6
Median Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships: 2,000
Maximum Damage of any Fleet Ships: 400,000
Maximum Damage of non-suicide Fleet Ships: 90,000

Average Armor Piercing of Fleet Ships (excluding MAX Piercing): 3,750
Median Armor Piercing of Fleet Ships: 750
Fleet Ships with Maximum Armor Piercing: 8 of 56 (14%)
Fleet Ships with no Armor Piercing: 27 (48%)

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, sorry for the confusion, I didn't mean to leave existing armor ratings and piercings as-is; it would be a new scale.

[Hearteater]

I actually don't really like %-reduction armor, at least by itself.  I think per-shot reduction (what we have now) is very valuable.  Both would be fine.  But per-shot reductions allow number-of-shots to be a positive or negative balancing factor for ships.  Positive against unarmored ships because you get the least overkill when damage is broken into smaller chunks for delivery.  Negative against armored ships because the effectiveness of armor is multiplied by the number of shots.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, a percentage system is typically used to avoid significant balance differences between high-rof and low-rof units.  And in this case I don't think we want to do that.

But it does make a nice, smooth-looking curve

[TechSY730]

Yea, I don't like the percentage system either. Most armor/defense stat system's I have seen scale the damage by a subtraction, like it is currently. A percentage based system would lead to all kinds of weird things, especially between interactions of very different "tiers" of ships (or more accuratley, "tiers" of armor ratings and damage ratings). Like oddities between fleet ships vs. golems, both ways.

With the current system, something with 20000 attack doesn't get impacted much by a difference between 0 and 2000 armor. That is good, as it shows that what is great  armor for fleet ships starts not doing all that much for damage from higher "tier" threats, which thematically makes sense.

The problem is that this sort of situation is the norm within ship tiers, making armor pretty much pointless.

Just look at hearteater's numbers:

Average Armor of Fleet Ships: 238.4
Median Armor of Fleet Ships: 150

Average Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships: 13,468.6
Median Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships: 2,000

(Could someone do a average and median damage of non-suicide fleet ships? Those suicide ships are REALLY skewing the average)

My intuition was right, armor is a good order of magnitude below average shot damage. An even worse ratio if the non-suicide average turns out to be significantly higher than the overall median.

And this is whiten fleet ships, the same "tier" of ships.

[TechSY730]

(All average base damage ignores suicide ships. Numbers subject to adjustment. Of course, each ship can have a little more or less than the amount suggested based on its role)

How about this? Make sure that within each tier of ships, ships specializing in armor need to have armor approaching (not at, that would be sort of busted) the average base damage of ships within that tier. (.7, .8?) Ships specializing in moderate bulk should have armor around .4 that of the average base damage of ships within that tier.
Ships with "average bulk" should have an an armor rating of about around .2 of the average base damage of ships in that tier. Ships "specializing" in "being fragile" should have an armor rating of 0 to .1 the average base damage of the average base damage of ships in that tier.

(My suggested scaling multipliers may be a bit too high, or a bit too "non-continuous")

Of course, this is a continuum, not strictly four categories. However, its good to keep the anticipated overall bulkiness in mind when deciding their new armor rating.

Also, you need to make sure about whether the ships job is to be bulky due to HP, bulky due to armor, or some combination of both. That will influence where on the "continuum" they will lie.

Also, I'm not quite sure how to categorize interactions between tiers. Like I'm not sure how big a role armor should play when a fleet ship fires on a starship or golem, or vice versa.

[Eternaly_Lost]

I think if you keep in armor piercing, and spread it a lot more liberally around the high powered shots, you should be able to get things to work just right with a Damage Reduction.

Basically, anything over a certain firepower basically ignores all but the best armor. After all, if a beam the size of your ship is flying at you, it does not matter how much armor you have on that hull. (Golem shooting at just about anything.) Where if you are being shot at by a lot of low power attacks, then your armor can reduce a lot of the incoming damage.

I do suggest that the scale goes to over 100% however, not so that it does not heal a ship, but more so you can have cases where a fighter can't hurt a ship at all without having a 0x multiply against it unless something has weaken it armor first.

That would make armor rotters a lot more useful, as you can have ships that you need to either bring some big guns to take out, or hit them with armor rotters first then attack them with everything.