So, this whole armor thing

[tadrinth]

I can only think of three ships that are really defined by their relationship to the armor system:  Armor Ships, Anti-armor, and the Spire armor rotter.  I think the simplest solution is going to be pulling out armor completely, compensating units, and giving those three units gimmicks.

Compensation would just involve boosting HP of stuff that used to have armor, boosting the damage bonuses of stuff that used to have armor piercing, and maybe adding a damage-reduction ability to some of the things that have ridiculously high armor. 

Armor Ships could just get a flat % damage reduction, I can't think of anything else that scales reasonably.  Maybe they can only be hit by a few shots per second, and the number of shots scales with cap? 

Anti-armor: ignores % reduction on whatever has that, and/or has even bigger bonuses vs armored stuff.

Armor rotter: increases damage taken by the target and/or reduces % reduction.

Also, it's slightly weird that anti-armor ships seem like they should be good against fortresses, but in fact Space Tanks are what you use against forts.  Anti-armor ships do have the niche of being able to kill Force Fields guarded by Laser Guard posts, but that's not even using their armor pen, just their structural bonus and hull type.  Maybe this could be solved with giving some units % damage reduction vs particular ammo types?

[LaughingThesaurus]

I can only think of three ships that are really defined by their relationship to the armor system:  Armor Ships, Anti-armor, and the Spire armor rotter.  I think the simplest solution is going to be pulling out armor completely, compensating units, and giving those three units gimmicks.

Compensation would just involve boosting HP of stuff that used to have armor, boosting the damage bonuses of stuff that used to have armor piercing, and maybe adding a damage-reduction ability to some of the things that have ridiculously high armor. 

Armor Ships could just get a flat % damage reduction, I can't think of anything else that scales reasonably.  Maybe they can only be hit by a few shots per second, and the number of shots scales with cap? 

Anti-armor: ignores % reduction on whatever has that, and/or has even bigger bonuses vs armored stuff.

Armor rotter: increases damage taken by the target and/or reduces % reduction.

Also, it's slightly weird that anti-armor ships seem like they should be good against fortresses, but in fact Space Tanks are what you use against forts.  Anti-armor ships do have the niche of being able to kill Force Fields guarded by Laser Guard posts, but that's not even using their armor pen, just their structural bonus and hull type.  Maybe this could be solved with giving some units % damage reduction vs particular ammo types?

I was about to say something like this. Remove armor entirely as a category or some kind of global mechanic, and instead turn anything armor-like into either an HP buff or some kind of gimmick mechanic. If you're going to have shields, you can give a ship type or two that ability. If you want a 'blocks first x damage' you can give something that ability. Armor piercing, if it remains in, could just be a more generic ability that negates armor-like abilities. So, for instance, in game the abilities might look something like this.

Armor-like: Takes 1000 less damage
Armor-like: 20% damage reduction.
Armor-like: 35% chance to take no damage from shots.
and...
Negates Armor-like Abilities

[LordSloth]

I'm just going to throw an off the wall idea out there that doesn't really address -any- of the issues that people have raised recently. I'm aware of that, and I'd like to address those issues, but I don't have any way of going about it intelligently ATM. I'll just keep this suggestion narrow in scope, then.

Proposal
Armor reduces hull-type multipliers. Armor as the Un-Triangle.

I'm currently wondering if armor is even relevant compared to the main counter triangle, putting aside all superweapons. Reducing those multipliers and hard counters has come up from time to time, but approaching it from a different avenue...

What if Space Tanks were -armored- bombers? Reduce their health (and possibly their own multipliers), and while they'd be relatively more vulnerable to blobbing tactics and even missile frigates, they'd be that much better at approaching Missile and Laser Guard Posts. Instead of taking 6x more damage from fighters, they'd only take 3x or 1x as much damage, depending on how far you wanted to go?

Bulletproof fighters might be purposed away from immunity to shells and towards a role specialized in taking down medium guardians covered by MLRS guard posts, for instance.

When it comes to starships, I'd strip armor from every primary combat starship, add it to Flagships, Decloakers, and I'm not sure what I'd do with Raid Starships.

This might make the removal of the 'turret' hull-type a possibility, desirable or not. I don't think it needs to go, but there is the question of what to do with that recent armor buff to the turret lines.

If you still wanted an 'armor' that primarily affects high ROF and low damage weapons, than make that a separate trait. As it is now, aside from overkill, I'm skeptical that high ROF and low damage weapons play a significant role in current balance. I think you might get better results from a more radical overhaul to swarmers than armor tweaks. I've a few ideas on that, but nothing solid yet.

[Aeson]

@Lord Sloth:
Would you mind expanding on how you would have armor reduce the hull multipliers? E.g., would a 5-armor Polycrystal ship make incoming fire apply using a multiplier of (X/5), with X being the vs-Polycrystal multiplier of the attacking ship, or would it reduce a multiplier of X to max(1, X - 5), or something else along those lines? If it's just the X/5 version, it would be the same as a percentile armor system, while reducing a multiplier of X to max(1, X - 5) would have wildly variable degrees of effectiveness which would likely have no apparent relationship to the power or volume or rate of the incoming attacks.

As for the question of whether or not armor is worthwhile compared to the hull multiplier aspect, that depends on the multipliers of the fleetships we're talking about and whether or not we're engaging targets of a countered hull type. Fighters, Bombers, and Missile Frigates each have sufficiently high multipliers with sufficiently high base damage that the types of fleetships countered by these ships probably won't have enough armor to matter in the engagement - not many ships have enough armor to really matter against 24k-60k*Mark damage per shot, especially if armor piercing comes into play. However, for something like a Youngling Commando with a x2 multiplier and ~4k*Mark base damage, any fleetship with enough armor to matter if the multiplier didn't apply probably still has enough armor to matter when the multiplier applies. Beyond that, in the off-counter situations armor will matter to most fleetships, as even if they end up losing the engagement it still allows them more time to damage whatever they are fighting, which is important on the higher-level view of the situation as damaged AI ships are easier to deal with than healthy AI ships, and for the human player(s) it's usually cheaper to repair ships than to replace them, and more heavily armored ships will take less damage that needs to be repaired than more lightly armored ships will. Armor is also the distinguishing feature of the Hardened Forcefield, which without armor would be much worse than the standard forcefield (and against significant armor penetration still is worse than the standard forcefield).

Also, I would still rather have armor serve as something distinguishing between high and low rates or volumes of fire, and between high and low damage, than as something that affects all sources of damage equally. Fighters armed with light cannon shouldn't be much threat to my big space battleships, though my big space battleships could perhaps do with a little less ability to handle fighters on their own without something intended for countering the fighters being present.


@Dr Frankfurter:
I think that if an evasion system were to be reimplemented, it would need to be alongside an armor system rather than in place of an armor system, and that the highest evasion chance would need to be relatively low because otherwise people would get frustrated. Then you could set things up so that one side of the system rewarded high volume of fire and high rate of fire while the other rewarded high damage per shot. Things that produce better than 50% miss rates would be too much in my opinion, while miss chances determined by a formula involving ship size (which we don't currently see) and ship speed seem questionable even if displayed in the ship information, unless we're also going to wander into 'appropriate' weapons against various target types (e.g. rapid-traverse light cannons would be more appropriate anti-fighter weapons than fixed beam lasers, and fighter-mounted weapons would be more suited to engage fast light targets than would the weapons on a heavier warship). I could see a miss chance determined by a shield strength statistic, for example 'Shields 25' meaning a 25% miss rate, or a 'Shields' special ability which grants some fixed miss rate for any ship with shields, but that adds another statistic to the already somewhat crowded ship information card or something else to check the special abilities list for. Moreover, there seems to be a strong sentiment against having a probabilistic component to ship defenses.


@LaughingThesaurus:
I would really rather not have more stuff dropped into the Special Abilities section of the ship information card. It can be hard enough to find important things in there anyways, and I'd rather not have something like "this ship takes 35% less damage from all sources" buried somewhere in there.

[chemical_art]

I don't see how as Aeson pointed out how armor can be meaningful among the various classes of ships and still have rate of fire influence things using arthritic means.

If rate of fire is truly desired as a factor, I think we are looking in the wrong direction. Only a few ships have a high rate of fire, so their weapons should have unique features rather then letting it be a stumbling block for the larger issue. For example, if % damage reduction is used, ships considered to have a rate of fire could have their base damage increased, but have a larger co-efficent. So for example a high rate of fire ship may have 50% increase in base damage compared to other ships, but suffer twice the penalty in damage reduction.  This method of having rate of fire ships reacting to armor, rather then armor trying to compensate for rate of fire is a lot simpler.


This assumes that most ships won't get the damage reduction, and I think this should be so.

[Cyborg]

Why you don't all get organized and lay down some concrete data points is beyond me. All we have now is 20 people with 20 different ideas. This is extremely disorganized for a thread posturing to redo the numbers on ships. It's probably the most clever filibuster I've ever seen. You all must really like the way things are.

[chemical_art]

Why you don't all get organized and lay down some concrete data points is beyond me.

Why don't you get all organized and lay down some concrete data points?


You know, it just may be possible that we all have different opinions / ideas of:

What armor should do exactly
How pervasive armor should be
What impact is armor
What impact anti armor is

You are right there is no guidance.

You mad about it? Step it up and do it yourself. I won't, not my style.

Silly attempts of claiming filibusters and incompetence causes me to dig in my heels and, coincidentally, causes the very filibuster you claim to want to avoid.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Frankly I'm not getting organized, because I'm absolutely never organized. It just doesn't happen. I've been spending all my time trying to pitch different little ideas so maybe we'd find some middle ground discuss or agree on. The only idea there's any even slight agreement on is "remove the armor system entirely and don't replace it." If people just don't decide to compromise in any way or try to formulate some way to actually change armor for the better, we really do just need to remove it. Why? because no matter what change we make in this situation will make most of the community mad, and like two or three people happy, and I doubt it would end up benefiting the game in any way no matter what actual change was made.

[TechSY730]

Thankfully, the game has a nifty export function built in.

Of course, we would still need to go over that, try to figure out "average" and/or "typical" cases, stick those into some of the formulas suggested, and compare what goes on. That part can't really be fully automated though, unlike the above.

Also, I guess at some point we will need dev feedback about what sort of things they want out of an armor system or not, and what would be practical to implement, as ultimately, it is their decision.

[Diazo]

Organized? Well, I'll give it a shot.

Let's get back to basis, forget numbers, why do you want armor in the game?

Once we figure out what armor is supposed to do, we can figure out how later.

I'll start this off with my reasoning:

1) I want armor in the game because it provides a more gradual, themed balancing to ships that spreads them out across the spectrum starting a the lightest fleet ship on one end and to the heavy superweapons (golem) on the other.
In theory the attack bonuses system could do this, however the current implementation of the attack bonuses can not do this as ships are limited to only a few attack bonuses and there are too many armor types in the game as to use the attack bonuses to do this you would have hull types with both positive multipliers and negative multipliers.
That leaves us with armor to differentiate between the 'light' and 'heavy' ships.

2) Armor should be logical. Larger ships have more armor and ships get bonus armor (or have less armor then default) depending on their design role. A light fighter/interceptor type would have no armor while a golem would have a lot of armor.

3) To counter armor, ships get armor piercing based on their size. A larger weapon is simply more powerful after all. Then special ships, such as "heavy-assault" ships would get bonus armor piercing to reflect their role.

4) For balance purposes, 'average' dps would then be adjusted so that ships without armor piercing have more DPS against unarmored targets then ships with armor piercing. This is to avoid ships with armor-piercing always being better then ships without armor-piercing. If you are going after an armored target, you prioritize your armor piercing ships, but if you are going after an unarmored target you prioritize ships without armor piercing as they will kill the unarmored target significantly quicker then the ships with armor-piercing.

So, that is my position on why I want armor in the game. What's yours?

D.

[Histidine]

Thinking about it, I don't really want an armor system either.

Let's get back to basis, forget numbers, why do you want armor in the game?

(...)

1) I want armor in the game because it provides a more gradual, themed balancing to ships that spreads them out across the spectrum starting a the lightest fleet ship on one end and to the heavy superweapons (golem) on the other.
In theory the attack bonuses system could do this, however the current implementation of the attack bonuses can not do this as ships are limited to only a few attack bonuses and there are too many armor types in the game as to use the attack bonuses to do this you would have hull types with both positive multipliers and negative multipliers.
That leaves us with armor to differentiate between the 'light' and 'heavy' ships.

2) Armor should be logical. Larger ships have more armor and ships get bonus armor (or have less armor then default) depending on their design role. A light fighter/interceptor type would have no armor while a golem would have a lot of armor.

I agree with this... but HP already does that. As KDR said:

So what's the point of armor except allow the attribute "armor piercing"? The old shields had a clear effect: Effective ranges of enemy units were reduced. That's now pretty much covered by radar dampening. Right now HP seem to be effectively the unit's armor (...)

3) To counter armor, ships get armor piercing based on their size. A larger weapon is simply more powerful after all. ...

Going back to your previous 0/20/40% armor/AP idea, this has the effect that e.g. golems last longer against fleetships than the same amount of firepower in starships or other golems (I call it the leader-fights-leader effect). I can't see anything obviously wrong with the mechanic gameplay-wise, and it does have a certain thematic coolness to it, but it also introduces balance complications we may not want (e.g. how does one side deal with golems if it doesn't have any of its own?)

4) For balance purposes, 'average' dps would then be adjusted so that ships without armor piercing have more DPS against unarmored targets then ships with armor piercing. This is to avoid ships with armor-piercing always being better then ships without armor-piercing. If you are going after an armored target, you prioritize your armor piercing ships, but if you are going after an unarmored target you prioritize ships without armor piercing as they will kill the unarmored target significantly quicker then the ships with armor-piercing.

This is also my intended effect.
Right now, however, the single overriding concern for selecting which ships to use against which targets is hull multipliers. Armor would either be irrelevant next to it, or would present an added complication I'm not sure is desirable. I'd still support it for the purpose of differentiating bonus ships, but given that you can't really pick the bonus ships you want (even with hacking), the game has to be balanced around the triangle ships and the basic starship set.

[LordSloth]

@Lord Sloth:
Would you mind expanding on how you would have armor reduce the hull multipliers? E.g., would a 5-armor Polycrystal ship make incoming fire apply using a multiplier of (X/5), with X being the vs-Polycrystal multiplier of the attacking ship, or would it reduce a multiplier of X to max(1, X - 5), or something else along those lines? If it's just the X/5 version, it would be the same as a percentile armor system, while reducing a multiplier of X to max(1, X - 5) would have wildly variable degrees of effectiveness which would likely have no apparent relationship to the power or volume or rate of the incoming attacks.

Okay, the big difference between multiplier reduction and the previously proposed armor percentile system:
Armor would apply -only- to multipliers, instead of every shot that hits. You could almost just have a hull type armor with no multipliers at all. I didn't plan out any of the granularity in the interests of keeping it simple.

Assuming that the current equation is:damage * (1+ bonus_multiplier) - old armor
the new equation would be more or less)
damage + [damage (bonus_multiplier/armor)]

In other words, you'd always be guaranteed at least base damage against armored targets. Or... halved multipliers, whatever ended up making more sense. I'm not sure of the values, but I'd mostly aim for armor to be binary (you have it or you don't) and apply almost entirely to a few fleetships. Point is, unlike a percentile armor system... armor would actually have no effect on damage that doesn't comes in w/o a bonus.

The current armor system emphasizes the importance of hard counters - fighters with boosted armor will still be trounced by frigates. It most commonly has the biggest impact in trivial or mismatched cases such as fighters + armor booster versus fighters w/o boost. In other words, in a situation the game trains you to avoid anyways.

The armor system I'm proposing de-emphasizes the importance of hard counters in the few circumstances it occurs, reducing bonus damage by a flat half (arbitrarily chosen starting point, can certainly be adjusted as necessary). There would still be some bonus damage, but in general armored targets are designed to operate longer against their counter. In other words, the core concept is reduced (but not eliminated) weakness and the ability to operate in those awful 'overlapping' killzones guard posts sometimes create. An 'armored bomber' would still take extra damage from a laser guard post, but they'd get more shots off against the covering force field than the regular bomber.

Anyways, my vision doesn't stretch comfortably to encompass starships and superweapons, but I feel it could make the fleetship role more interesting. I wouldn't object to something different for the bigger ships. In fact I would rather see something different implemented for starships and superweapons. Making fighters suddenly take six times as long to take down starship with 54 million health isn't a desired goal. I'm really just aiming for fleet versus fleet and fleet versus guard posts battles here. You could rationalize that only those bigger ships have the power system to do whatever it is that fleetships can't (some form of advanced ECM?).

If the argument about realism returns again - you're NOT preventing normal damage, you're just protecting structural weaknesses. Under the old system, a polycrystal hull doesn't magically make incoming fighter fire six times more powerful. What it does is make the bomber six times more vulnerable, which is a key logic difference, not that it matters to me.

When it comes down to distinguishing high and low rates and volumes of fire, I'm thinking of actually separating that from the armor mechanic entirely, and perhaps focusing on size, but I haven't thought out anywhere near enough of the details to put something forward.

If you ask what I'd like to see out of the armor system? It'd be moving certain ship somewhat outside of the normal counter triangle. There's always been calls for significantly less of a hard counter focus to the combat system - instead of sweeping changes to multipliers across the board, just have about a half dozen bonus fleetships or so on each side moved into a soft counter system, barring special abilities such as armor boosters and inhibitors.

[Tridus]

Why you don't all get organized and lay down some concrete data points is beyond me. All we have now is 20 people with 20 different ideas. This is extremely disorganized for a thread posturing to redo the numbers on ships. It's probably the most clever filibuster I've ever seen. You all must really like the way things are.

Why?

Nobody agrees on what role in the game armor is even supposed to serve. If there's no agreement on what it's conceptually meant to do, then numbers for a specific implementation have no meaning.

The only conclusion that can be drawn right now is that having something called "armor" seems like a reasonably popular idea, but what that something should look like or accomplish has no agreement whatsoever.

[Draco18s]

Proposal
Armor reduces hull-type multipliers. Armor as the Un-Triangle.

Wat.

Just....wat.

No.

Makes no sense.

in general armored targets are designed to operate longer against their counter.

A mechanic that is fundamentally "I ignore my counter" is going to be bad for this game.

I know I want the game to be less hard-counter-y, but this isn't the way to go.

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.

Damn it.

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

[LordSloth]

Anyways, I'm going to dive out of this conversation if there is no interest.

I'm not radically opposed to simplifying things by the original proposal,  but there's plenty of that out there.

I'd ask Draco18s to clarify his opposition, but I'll have the small mercy of letting him escape without getting drawn in... and I'll take the opportunity to escape as well unless someone is actually interested in my idea. If someone is interested and wants clarity, I'll explain. If explaining would just make my position clearer but no more attractive, than I'll let it pass into the cold cold night.

One small point: it isn't designed to -ignore- counters. The initial balance point I'm aiming for is 50% of the bonus multiplier, which is a FAR cry from an  across the board 80% damage reduction. More damage, in fact. I'm having a little mild trouble accessing the wiki through google or the main arcen website, so the folllowing is only a very rough illustration... Assume a Fighter-Type A normally does 1 Arbitrary Unit of Damage. Thanks to a bonus of around six, it deals 6 AUD of damage against a polycrystal hull. Against an armored unit under my proposal it would deal 3 AUD. Against an armored polycrystal unit under the original proposal I believe it would do 1.2 AUD?

Going back to the original post:
I have no opposition to the original proposal. Armor is not one of my major existing concerns or strategic considerations. I don't mind simplifying things as proposed and than participating in balance testing. I also don't have the time to fully comprehend the arguments for and against. I'm mostly of the neutral position for 'whatever is simplest'. In other words, if I don't care about armor, I'm for the path of least community resistance and least developer effort if those two happen to overlap. It is also has the nicest 'carry it forward' simplicity. Whatever works, works. I proposed my idea just to try approaching things from a different angle, it doesn't seem that it helped.