Mothership VS Armored Golem

[Pumpkin]

WHAT? The MotherShip is (slightly) less powerful than the Armored Golem?!?

MotherShip - Armored Golem

Health: 8,000,000 - 9,000,000
DPS: 80,000 - 100,000
Range: 83,000 - 13,000
Armor: 10,000 - 1,000

Well, ok for range and armor.
I know there is a gameplay balance here: the AI golems (Some exo and Golemite AI Type) are 1/10 (health and dps, IIRC) of broken golems repaired by humans. But lore-wise...

The AI would not normally consider the entire Milky Way galaxy worth the attention of a mothership

Ok, then the Minor Faction where the AI send only exowaves at the humans should be called "very easy" (easier versions would be called "extremely easy" and "ridiculously easy") if "worth the Milky Way" is a bit weaker than one golem.

I remember the AI send a MotherShip somewhere in the Fallen Spire campaign. Do someone know if it appears somewhere else?

Also, I need to check the special Showdown campaign's BSS (Big Scary Ship)... It's a long time I didn't played it.

[Chthon]

I think the Mothership was incorrectly involved in the general ship rebalancing like the Golems were. It is definitely a Superweapon and should have only been reduced by 10x, and not 100x. Perhaps an increase to 80M health and 800k damage is in order.

[Toranth]

Doesn't the Mothership have modules on it?  Add in a few shields, some HBCs, and suddenly the Golem gets toasted, fast.
Although it may have been hit oddly by the rebalance, as you said.  An endgame FS Mothership + support Exowave is usually close to equal to a 5-city Spire Capital Fleet.

[Chthon]

Don't know. I encountered it once, and I threw my entire fleet at it, in the end losing 3 golems and 3/4 of my fleet to it in taking it down. It would kill my level 3 shields in an instant. I learned to fear it.

[Radiant Phoenix]

Something to consider: the Mothership can shoot across the system. That's huge, because it denies you the first strike.

[Draco18s]

Its significant armor also boosts it's effective health dramatically. Most things don't do 10000 per shot,  making the mothership's effective health five times greater.

[Pumpkin]

Its significant armor also boosts it's effective health dramatically. Most things don't do 10000 per shot,  making the mothership's effective health five times greater.

Interesting.
Also, I realize I don't know how exactly does armor work. Is it just a plain reduction of damage? If a ship with armor 10 take one shot with damage 20, 10 points would be deduced from its health? However I think there is a minimum or 1 point per attack, so with an armor of 1000, a shot with 20 damages would remove 1 health point, right? (Attacking the mothership with anything below 1000 damage per shot would be useless.) I think armor piercing behave the same way: damage 100 and armor pierce 10 on a ship with armor 20 would deal 90 damage in the end, right?

I feel the armor and armor piercing mechanics have too few impact. The multiplier on hull type has a huge impact, like polycristal bomber VS fortress, but I never was in the situation of being in need of checking how many armor a ship has. But it sounds like lazer gatlings or fighters (or other many-shots ships) would do poorly on heavy armor ships. Do you often check armor? Do you think I should do it more often?

[Radiant Phoenix]

I believe that the way armor works is:

Code: [Select]

raw_damage = base_damage * multipliers ;
 effective_armor = max( 0 , ( armor - armor_piercing ) ) ;
 damage = max( ( raw_damage - effective_armor) , ( raw_damage * 0.2 ) ) ;

[Pumpkin]

Raw Damage * 0.2 ?!?
So when facing an insanely heavy shield, a ship still does 1/5th of its normal damage? It feels a lot! Hull multipliers are commonly between *4 and *6. Maybe that's why I think armor unremarkable.

Thanks for the formula! Where did you find it?

[Radiant Phoenix]

Memory and logic. I remember hearing in some thread (probably the one about armor from back when VotM was being developed) that armor had a maximum DR of 80%, but was otherwise flat DR.


EDIT: Maximum armor is enough to debonus most weapons.

9,999 armor penetration on a low damage attack is kind of like a 5x damage bonus against armored stuff.

[Pumpkin]

Ok, I'll try to pay attention to armors. Thanks!

[Radiant Phoenix]

I actually don't pay much attention to armor, but I did do some calcs on the Armored Golem because it actually scared me a bit for other reasons. 

Some numbers: (normal caps)

Armor values:

• Bomber 1: 12: This is fairly typical of an "armored" Mk1 fleet ship. If your ships do less than 100 damage per bullet, you should pay close attention to what you're fighting and its armor value. (i.e., Laser Gatlings aren't actually a counter to Bombers)
  
• Spirecraft Siege Tower 1: 120: Enough to laugh a Mk1 Zenith Starship to scorn. Does go up with mark level.
  
• Raid Starship 1: 900: This actually surprised me. It is something to pay attention to. Note that most armor levels of this level or higher don't go up with mark level.
  
• Armored Warhead 1: 1,000: shouldn't be a surprise.
  
• Hardened Forcefield 1: 5,000: If a weapon does over 6700 damage per bullet, it will find hardened forcefields softer than regular. Common examples would be Plasma Siege Starships and Spire Starships.
  
• Superfortress: 5,000: A sneaky aspect of its toughness.

Damage levels:

• Laser Gatling 1: 8: many, many things will resist most of this. Even if you have a tech advantage.
  
• Fighter 1: 40: same-mark Fleet ship armor will be trivial, but higher marks will put a crimp in your style, as will big armored ships.
  
• Bomber 1 / Missile Frigate 1: 96: A more typical number for fleet ships
  
• Zenith Starship 1: 116x25: If you were on ultra-low caps, even mk2 bombers would laugh at you.
  
• Plasma Siege Starship 1: 8000: Almost no armor is effective.
  
• Laser Turret 1: 300: Goes through most things, but heavily armored things can potentially shrug this off.

Summary:

• To shut down swarmers, about 10 * [M] armor is good
• To shut down fleet ships, about 100 * [M] will do the job
• You aren't going to shrug off big guns with armor.
• Cap scale is an important strategic decision. If you favor big ships, go as high as you can; if you favor small ships, go as low as you can... unless you use Botnet Golems, Ion Cannons, and Insanity Inducers; in that case, go as low as you can.
• On lower cap scales, bombers are more heavily armored than capital ships.

EDIT: Note that turrets count as small ships.

[Pumpkin]

Woh! Nice work! So armor has indeed an impact on the game. I still think it's strange because it fill the same function as hull multipliers, but anyway, more mechanism means more strategy and more things to learn and master. Great.

Also, I found this on the wiki. Why on earth does this core mechanic isn't linked from the front page?!? This is why I want to revamp the front page (here)

So bad that low cap scale influence so dramatically some otherwise balanced parts of the game. (I always play normal cap.)

[Radiant Phoenix]

Yeah... it's my opinion that cap scale should be a performance-optimizing mechanic only, not a gameplay-optimizing mechanic.

The fact that some ships scale with it and others don't was always going to make it a gameplay-optimizing mechanic, though, because some weapon-ship matchups are going to risk overkill and others aren't. Zombifying weapons and Ion Cannons are just some extreme examples of this, because they have nominal damage levels of "ZOMG LOTS" per shot against their preferred targets.

[Bognor]

Looks like this discussion will repeat each time a new generation of forumites becomes active :-)

Note it's not quite as simple as the above posts suggest: there are some weird behind-the-scenes effects that help balance the fact that some ships' caps vary with lobby settings, whereas others don't.  Eg if you have a single homeworld, you'll always have two Mark I Heavy Bomber Starships available, regardless of whether you play at high or ultra-low caps.  I don't know how it works, but if someone tries pitting a scaling ship (eg Fighter) against an non-scaling ship (eg Heavy Bomber Starship) at various ship caps, you'll see things don't work quite as the ship descriptions indicate.

What I've long been curious about it how armor interacts with photon lances, like the Spire Starship fires.  Does the armor only apply once, or every frame that the lance is hitting the target?  If the latter, does armor make a bigger difference at higher framerates?  I remember ages ago players disagreed about how effective photon lances were, and I wondered if this was the reason.