So, this whole armor thing

[LaughingThesaurus]

I don't understand the obsession with making this game mechanic out of all of them make sense. Like has been pointed out, there are plenty of really silly mechanics in this game, like things just mysteriously doing more or less damage based on what ship it is rather than the ammo type it fires. What's going on with the spire when YOU engage the AI in direct warfare via fallen spire or showdown? You'd think the spire would win, with how many forces are being directed to you. Why does the AI send all of its waves to the same planet when it could just have a slightly longer travel time to get into one of your actual weak spots? A lot of this game is a little bit silly, but it never really feels entirely arbitrary. Percentage-reduction armor is a bit silly, yeah, but it's also a mechanic that makes some sense. It's a mechanic that is in a whoooooooooole lot of games that feature the ability to take damage (which is quite a lot of them).

Let's try to find something that works, rather than a system that makes sense. We can try to make it make sense later, if it's really necessary. I think the most important thing right now is to find a system that is all of the below;
1. Transparent to the player. It needs to be intuitive, something that makes sense mechanically.
2. Simple. There's a lot of complex multi-level thought to do in AI War. The last thing we need is any complex math or a bunch more numbers to consider in each engagement.
3. Avoid random chance as much as possible. Imagine losing a close fight because you had bad luck? You didn't make a bad decision. You made all the right decisions. Too much random chance in the wrong place takes skill and strategy out of the equation.
4. A system that avoids the flaws of flat damage reduction.
5. A system that legitimately adds complexity to the game.

If we can't find that, then armor probably needs to be dropped entirely.

[Diazo]

Okay, we are starting to fragment into two different discussions here.

In both, the point of armor is to differentiate between the fast fighter type ships and the slow assault type ships.

For the discussion looking at armor alone, I suggested the tiered armor with percentages for fleet/starship/superweapons and with the current system, I think that is the best we are going to get without overhauling game mechanics at the same time.

For the other discussion that has started to come up that is talking about overhauling other game mechanics in addition to armor, I favor the method of moving attack bonuses to weapon type and then hull/armor type gets a hull size modifier added. This change has been talked about before, but with how big it is we are not looking at it happening in the near future.

Therefore, on the armor alone discussion I continue to put forward the percentage armor (and armor-piercing) based off tiers as determined by ship size.

D.

[Cyborg]

Didn't we already do bonuses for ship types three or four years ago? And then we switched to the hull/weapon system. Either way, it seems like the main complaint is the amount of units has grown to the point where it's impossible to map out a battle without studying all of the info cards. Not so bad with just starships and one bonus ship; kind of annoying with fabricators and unlocks or multiple home worlds.

We need to agree on a linear(starcraft) or logarithmic (league of legends) armor reduction. Either way is going to work. This isn't a knock on the developers, but it seems like every expansion has brought about bigger and better galactic war to the point of making some of the older stuff ridiculously obsolete. We have to have a balance fit every few months because of the new stuff. So maybe it's time to set some limits on the armor boundaries (...after first creating these boundaries), and go from there. New expansions need to be adding new mechanics and not necessarily making everything else obsolete by playing with the armor values. The only thing that might be an exception here is HP.

I would suggest organizing the discussion into expansions, in different threads. Each expansion would have a study on the upper and lower limits of all the ships in that expansion on normal caps. The end result would not be making each equal to the other but making sure that there are no crazy outliers in the spectrum within that expansion. Come up with a list of quantifiable graphs(with the amount of ships being y) for each expansion such as:

armor range
DPS/caps
HP
force field
radar dampening amount
resource cost (metal, crystal, metal + crystal)

Compare these graphs against each expansion and go from there. Figure out the boundaries that you want each to have. They don't have to be the same. Zenith could be great armor on many ships, crappy force fields, so on and so forth. But we need to have some actual graph data here in their respective threads and then combine our knowledge. And when we are done, we make those the boundaries for the game design for the foreseeable future.

[Vacuity]

Reading some posts following Diazo's use of the term tier, it seems some of them only make sense when "Tier" is being used to denote "Mark".  If Diazo will forgive me for repeating (and expanding on) what he wrote earlier, and others will forgive me for pointing out the obvious, I understand he meant that the existing ships would be assigned to a tier something like:

Tier 1: Fleetships
Tier 2: Starships
Tier 3: Superweapons

Or in a system with an expanded degree of tiers, something like:
Tier 1: Small fleetships
Tier 2: Heavy fleetships
Tier 3: Light Starships
Tier 4: Heavy Starships
Tier 5: Spirecraft
Tier 6: Golems

Each nominal tier of ship would have a rough baseline armour value.  The example given by Diazo was 0/20/40%, but there's no reason it has to be those exact numbers.

How many tiers there would be, and which ships get assigned to which category would obviously require further thought, but ships assigned to the small fleetship tier (for example fighters) would have the same percentage armour value regardless of Mark.  I.e. MkI fighters would have the exact same armour as MkV fighters.

One of the advantages of this is that armour and armour piercing values scale perfectly across MkI-V ships, different Cap options, different combat speed options and between ships with scalable caps and those without.  There's no other system suggested that fulfils this as far as I understand them (except for "No armour system at all", obviously).  This also means armour has no particular effect on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of MkI ships in the late game.

If realism is an issue, the name could be changed?  Phase shields?  Energy barriers?

[Draco18s]

The more I think about it, the don't want armor at all.

+1

The more I think about it there does not exist a system that is both transparent to the player and meaningful.

The 0%/20%/40% system may be transparent, but it's not meaningful.  The 20% on the starships just means that starship vs. starship they might as well have neither, starship vs. fleetship, again almost meaningless (the starship lives longer, but this can be simulated by increasing its health).  And golems end up being golems.  They ignore all armor ever (cough, 40% armor piercing, which is only matched by the armor of another golem) and have so much health and armor that fleetships aren't a danger to them (were they ever?)

"Armor ship" vs. "Laser Gatling" is still going to be a 0% on 0% fight, which doesn't...make sense.

[Tridus]

"Armor ship" vs. "Laser Gatling" is still going to be a 0% on 0% fight, which doesn't...make sense.

Well no, the armor ship would have armor. That's it's bonus ability and the reason it exists.

[Ranakastrasz]

@chemical_art
@Draco18s

Exactly. Armor, before, literally meant high health. Hence Wormhole guard posts being called armored. Hence armor ship being high health. Space tanks, they were SHIELDED, not armored.
Etc.

@Tridus

Incorrect. It has/had Massive health for it's cost, which was it's reason to exist. Armor doesn't enter into it.

[Tridus]

Incorrect. It has/had Massive health for it's cost, which was it's reason to exist. Armor doesn't enter into it.

That's silly, an "armor" ship without armor makes no sense.

If that's how its going to be, then yeah having an armor system at all is pointless.

[Diazo]

The more I think about it, the don't want armor at all.

+1

The more I think about it there does not exist a system that is both transparent to the player and meaningful.

I think the percentage tier system I'm advocating is meaningful however.

Take a Beam Starship. Both a Fighter and an Armored Golem attack it. It makes sense that the fighter's attack is reduced while the Golems attack does full damage and armor is the mechanic AI War uses to that effect.

Therefore I think Armor has a place in the game.

I say that because there is currently no other method of differentiating between a 'heavy' fleet ship and a 'light' fleet ship. Attack bonuses could do this if the number of hull types was reduced so that every ship had bonuses (or penalties) against every ship in the game, but with the current implementation there are too many hull types for that so we are back to armor as what defines a 'heavy' or 'light' ship.

The 0%/20%/40% system may be transparent, but it's not meaningful.  The 20% on the starships just means that starship vs. starship they might as well have neither, starship vs. fleetship, again almost meaningless (the starship lives longer, but this can be simulated by increasing its health).  And golems end up being golems.  They ignore all armor ever (cough, 40% armor piercing, which is only matched by the armor of another golem) and have so much health and armor that fleetships aren't a danger to them (were they ever?)

"Armor ship" vs. "Laser Gatling" is still going to be a 0% on 0% fight, which doesn't...make sense.

Going back to the percentage tier system, having thought on it for a night I would refine it like this:

Fleet Ships (Tier I): 0% to 25% Armor/Armor Piercing.
Starships (Tier II): 20% to 45% Armor/Armor Piercing.
Superweapons (Tier III): 40 to 65% Armor/Armor Piercing.

(The suggesting up-thread about adding teirs has value, but keeping it at 3 for now to demonstrate my point.)

That way, most ships in a tier have the lowest Armor/AP for their tier but ships that deserve more, such as the bomber (a 'heavy' fleet ship) get a little bit higher. And then ships like the Armor ship get enough that their Armor is actually effective against the next tier up.

(Ships could be tweaked outside their tier of course, something like the Leech Starship would probably have 0% AP and the 20% starship armor.)

Does this mean that a higher tier simply ignore armor of lower tiers most of the time? Yes, but again that makes sense to me. A golem is firing a weapon that is probably larger then the fleet ship it is being fired at, any armor on the fleet ship is not going to do anything.

Is this an ideal fix? No. But it's the best fix I can think of that only affect armor and does not get into tweaking attack bonuses/hull types/hull sizes.

D.

edit:

Incorrect. It has/had Massive health for it's cost, which was it's reason to exist. Armor doesn't enter into it.

That's silly, an "armor" ship without armor makes no sense.

If that's how its going to be, then yeah having an armor system at all is pointless.

This is an artifact of the armor system being broken. Because of the high-damage weapons in the game and subtractive armor, the only way to get the survivability implied by the 'Armor' name was to give it high health. Giving it high armor did not grant any survivability (well, a tiny little bit that does not affect gameplay) when things like guard posts have the high damage they do.

[Vacuity]

Ships like the armour ship and the anti-armour ship (and others) can comfortably have armour and AP values outside the typical range for their approximate tier: it's their gimmick.  If they're then under- or overpowered, they can be tweaked accordingly.

Changing the armour system or removing it will likely require a few balance passes to achieve something reasonable in any case: writing off one or another ship type as useless beforehand seems a little premature.

[Draco18s]

Not getting involved.
Not getting involved.
Not getting involved.

I have to remember this.

I have my opinion, not going to try and debate the merits or flaws of any given system.

[Vacuity]

Not getting involved.
Not getting involved.
Not getting involved.

I have to confess, I wonder if I'd have been better staying with this attitude.

Good luck maintaining your (non-)stance!

[TechSY730]

Yea, I'm staying out of most of this too.

I will say that any system that is decided upon, (possibly including the current system, but rebalanced, or no system at all), I would like it to be deterministic and not relying on "hidden" information like "magic constants" per tier or mark or per-ship data not available to the user in game (aka, transparent). Obviously, the system would also need to make sense (like it wouldn't make sense to have increasing armor values reduce damage for a bit, but if it gets too high relative to the incoming damage, it would increase damage taken.  )

Beyond that, I'll let others hash out the exact math.

Again, it is worth pointing out that one perfectly viable choice is to make an armor system that would have a limited distribution thing rather than a stat every ship has.

EDIT: Something I would like to keep is the distinction between high-ROF, low damage per shot and low-ROF, high damage per shot type stuff that armor systems give, but I am willing to "give" on that if the huge range that this game offers makes this too hard to balance. (The old system where it distinguished between firing close and firing far away, but with a modification to make it deterministic, seems intriguing)

[Draco18s]

Just as a note:

The games I have that use an armor damage-reduction mechanic have been:

1) Armor is direct 1:1 damage reduction with a 1 damage minimum (RPG game where exact stats are hidden from the player, but damage taken and dealt are visible, with a 100% deterministic system: while the player is unlikely to ever determine their exact stats, the point is they should know "about" how many hits it takes to kill a given mob based on what they do know)

2) Armor is direct 1:1 damage reduction with a 5% damage minimum (game is loosely based on AI War's mechanics, but with procedurally generated units).  The 5% minimum makes armor have more impact than it does in AI War, along with substantially lower damage and hitpoint ratings (I think the beefiest a unit can get is about 500 HP and damage tops out at around 40.  Units with Armor Piercing got it at a 2:1 ratio with damage they didn't have, which is what made them so great against armored units--they might only be doing 3 damage a shot the same high rate of fire as an 8 damage unit, but they got a whopping 10 armor piercing--max possible was somewhere around 20, so a high enough armor unit could be largely immune to AP units, but that meant it was vulnerable to a different unit classification).

[DrFranknfurter]

(my thoughts)
Currently we have these ships with significant armor:
Armor Ship - Fleet-ship 1.5-7.5k armor
Space Tank - Fleet-ship 1.5-7.5k armor
Generic Starship - Starship - 1-5k armor
Raid starship - Starship - 90k armor ?? (They seem to die almost instantly for me, perhaps low base HP, low-damage, high speed, low cohesion with fleet and the fact that it often absorbs the alpha strike is responsible for that... and poor micro on my part)
Armored Golem - Superweapon - 100k armor

Armor neesds to be:
Significant, turn the tide of battles and require thought to counter.
Simple, visible in-game with a mouse-over, little metagame knowledge required
Balanced, scales with changes to ship caps
More complex, perhaps paradoxically it needs to do what HP, hull-types and damage multipliers can't do and so must be a little bit more complex than just modifying HP,

My question is, what counters do you actually want? What to boost, what to nerf?

Armor Type: Old Shields, with range and to hit mechanics
Armor Counters: Long-range kiting
Countered by: Attacks at close range (nerf to turrets, long range ships, buff to... swarmers/fighters?).
Problem: Probability and range based, not clear or intuitive

Armor Type: Heavy Armor that Negates first x damage
Armor Counters: Swarms/high-rof low-damage ships
Countered by: Big weapons, glass cannons. (plasma siege, spire destroyers etc.)
Problem: Doesn't scale well with damage, caps, multipliers etc.

Armor Type: Armor simply increases effective HP by % damage reduction
Armor Counters: Nothing
Countered by: (anti-armor)
Problem: Requires no strategy to kill.
(unless you unlock a bonus ship type... simply lasts a bit longer but probably has a lower base HP so no effective change. Perhaps useful as a buff for starships against heavy hitters but otherwise dull, uninteresting, needlessly complicated and silly as HP already covers survivability of this sort, as does hull type).

Armor Type: Deflection or Evasion. Blocks x% of shots
Armor Counters: Glass cannons, heavy hitters, low cap ships.
Countered by: High RoF ships, Swarms of ships.
Problem: Probability based, people seem to hate their super weapons being ineffective against swarms or missing with that 10M damage shot.

For it to be more significant it would need to affect more ships. So perhaps if ship size/speed was more important.
Armor changed to Deflection,
Evasion =  Ship speed/Ship size + Deflection (max 95%)

Small+fast ships have ~30% base evasion (speed 120/Size 40) + 0 deflection
Capital ships have ~10% evasion (Speed 60/Size 400) + 10% Deflection
Space Tanks ~80+% evasion (Speed/size + high deflection)

It would be a boost to all fleet ship against things like spire ships, capital ships and turrets. A nerf to large ships and heavy hitters by reducing their effective damage by a significant amount. Small ships would still have high losses, but would be more likely to be replaced rather than repaired while the big ships take heavy damage (and have high HP) and need time being repaired after big battles.

Personally, I like the idea of a very high chance of deflecting shots for a single special ship type (like the space tank or armor ships evading 19/20 shots). A large flat damage reduction makes sense only for the armored golem to give it a nice gimmick "Ignores the first (say) 10000 points of damage inflicted by any weapon".
A % damage reduction for every other ship to tweak their survivability when the stats are all reduced back to sensible levels could help... but it is already covered by HP and the hull and weapon types so I'd rather not waste the effort on it.

Whatever is done, I think it needs to be playtested to really get the feel of the new mechanics.