Armor is not that important currently

[Hearteater]

Average  Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships (excluding suicide ships*): 6,518
Median  Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships (excluding suicide ships*): 2,000

* Mini-ram, Autobomb and Nanaswarm

[TechSY730]

Average  Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships (excluding suicide ships*): 6,518
Median  Damage per Attack of Fleet Ships (excluding suicide ships*): 2,000

* Mini-ram, Autobomb and Nanaswarm

OK, wow.

With the earlier stats of

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

This means that.
On average, fleet ship armor is about 3.7% that of fleet ship damage, or about 1.437 orders of magnitude behind
On median, fleet ship armor is 7.5% that of fleet ship damage, or about 1.125 orders of magnitude behind

This is really pathetic (no offense) and definitely needs to be worked on.

(Order of magnitude behind is computed by log(highervalue / lowervalue) with a base of 10)

[NickAragua]

Yeah, the numerical evidence seems pretty damning.

I have some qualitative evidence to throw into the pot:

I don't pay attention to armor rating at all when picking targets, only the armor type and multipliers. The only place where it seems to make a difference is for raid starships (and I always use a cap full of those).

[TechSY730]

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.

You mean remove the minimum damage due to armor completely? That seems like a bad idea, as that would be unintuitive and would lead to large numbers of "why aren't my ships damage X" reports. The minimum damage due to armor should be no lower than 1 HP. (Though putting it at 1HP would be sort of fun to watch, at first, but would quickly get annoying)

[Hearteater]

We currently have an 80% cap on armor mitigation.  We probably wouldn't ever want more than a 98% cap just to avoid total immunity.  There is the possibilty that we could have different caps either depending on specific ships or possibly by ship class.  For example, starships might have one cap, and fleet ships another.  However it gets done, fleet ships need to be reasonably killable by other fleet ships even if you have the worst match-up (immunity aside).  So a 98% mitigation cap on fleet ships might be too much.  On the other hand, a class vs class mitigation cap could work.  Something like:

		Target
	Fleet	Starship	Golem
Fleet	90%	95%	98%
Starship	80%	90%	95%
Golem	80%	80%	90%

[keith.lamothe]

Average and Median damage/armor is a very suspect place to start given that the distribution of types across games is far from uniform (namely, fighter, bomber, and missile frigate are always there) and that ships tend to target things they'll do well against instead of distributing their shots randomly.

That said, yes, there seems to simply be a mismatch of scale between damage and armor numbers.  Possibly dating back to before we changed the armor mitgation cap from 95% to 80%.

[Diazo]

Just had a thought, is armor affected by ship cap?

If not, things are going to be out of wack.

[keith.lamothe]

Just had a thought, is armor affected by ship cap?

If not, things are going to be out of wack.

It is.

[PokerChen]

A tiered armour reduction limits might work.... in game, we'll have to express this difference clearly, e.g. re-naming the class of armour. E.g.:
"Fleet-Armor 2,000" on a space-tank.
"Starship-armor 4,000" on a flagship.
"It's over 9,000!!" on an armored golem.

About the tension between unitary reduction (current, SC-II) and percentage-based reductions (many RPGs, 4x, etc) ... how much do we *really* want to model realistic armour penetration (somewhat sigmoidal, an expensive calculation for AI-war)? The bonus multipliers have *some* of the qualities of amour in the sense that chain-mail is good for swords and bad for arrows, and adding extra numbers on top complicates this. Need to think further.

 = = = =
Addendum: The space-tank dreams of one day being a Tiger-II in 1944, standing up to armies twenty-times its number and watching them flee like children....

[Hearteater]

Well, we already need some improvements in classifying units because targeting restrictions are currently unclear.  The tooltip text description alludes to them, but it isn't always clear to a player what a ship can even target.  In particular some of the larger Fleet ships are targetable by stuff that says it can't hit small things, but most new players will have no way to know that.  I believe there is a classification system already, we just don't see it (Keith's ship data post contains some of this information).  I'd guess classifications like: Small (most Fleet), Medium (some Fleet), Large (Starships and Guardians), Huge (Golems, Spirecraft, H/K, Mothership, Avenger).  A couple units are missing from that list, but something simple like that would be nice.  There could be some confusion with Medium size ships and Medium armor.

[keith.lamothe]

I believe there is a classification system already, we just don't see it (Keith's ship data post contains some of this information).

The "Category" field there was actually just something I added manually to that data dump, the game doesn't have size classes in that sense.  There are the event-attack-tiers used for pricing them for exos, but those have a lot of wiggle room particularly when it comes to comparing something like an SSB to something like a Light Starship, etc.

[Hearteater]

So what controlled, for example, what Dreadnoughts in their various incarnations could attack?  Because they couldn't attack certain things (like fleet ships) that didn't have immunity to their ammo.  That seemed to go off some kind of classification system.  Or was it just a special case.

[keith.lamothe]

So what controlled, for example, what Dreadnoughts in their various incarnations could attack?  Because they couldn't attack certain things (like fleet ships) that didn't have immunity to their ammo.  That seemed to go off some kind of classification system.  Or was it just a special case.

There's just a bool flag for can't-hit-fleet-ships and a bool flag for can't-be-hit-by-things-that-can't-hit-fleet-ships; and each ship type (Fighter, FighterII, Dreadnought, DreadnoughtII, etc) defines whether it has those flags.

[TechSY730]

I'm curious, how many people think that the armor mechanic needs to be adjusted? That is, the formula used to relate damage reduction with armor values. (I can post the current formula if someone wants it)
How many other people think that the current armor system is fine, but he current armor balance needs to be adjusted? That is, keep the formula the same, but revisit the armor values of all the ships.

If it is the mechanic that needs to be adjusted, is it a major or minor adjustments? Minor adjustments would be things like adjusting minimum damage due to armor, the formula adding a small multiplier based on what tier of ship is firing on what other tier of ship, having the minimum damage due to armor be based on what tier of ship is firing on what other tier of ship. Things like that. Basically, minor changes are such that the subtractive part of the armor damage reduction equation is still the dominant factor in the general case.

Major would be things like changing it to be a percentage based on the ratio of attack damage to armor value (which, may actually be equivalent to the subtractive model, but I'm not sure), use some sort of "non-continuous" tiered percentage damage system based on that ratio, or even more extreme, eliminating armor and balancing durability soley on hull type and HP. Basically, major changes would be to make the subtractive part fo the armor damage reduction equation not be the dominant part of the equation, or maybe even getting rid of the straight up subtraction.

EDIT: In my opinion, its mostly a balance thing. Yea, the minimum damage due to armor could go down a bit, but the problem is with the current values, not the current system.

[Wanderer]

I like the armor mechanic as is, it's just not useful atm.  Either you're sandpapering something to death or it's a useless number.  I'm not sure I'm happy at the 80% value, but I have no idea what the 95% looked like.