So, this whole armor thing

[Toranth]

There is literally no difference between percentage based armor and the same percentage increase in HP.

Until Armor Piercing shows up 

Personally, I'm coming around to the viewpoint that armor should be fixed value, straight damage reduction, large on the fleetship scale, and RARE.  As in, of 100 bonus ship types, maybe 10 or so should have armor.  The Space Tank and Armor Ship, for example, would have 4000-5000 armor per mark.  Fighters, bombers, frigates?  No armor.
Armor Piercing should be rolled into Forcefield Immunity for weapons, and should be assigned to a particular ammo-type, like Dark Matter.

Why?  The armor system should be deterministic, be simple, obvious, and easy to display, and be effective where it is used.  Fixed value damage reduction easily meets these criteria.
Percentage based systems are equal to HP increase in the absence of Armor piercing, plus they get silly:  Why would a Fighter's armor be just as good (20%) against another fighter as against an Artillery Golem?

Making armor rare mitigates the need to have special rules to handle the high ROF/low damage cases.  It greatly simplifies the balance issues.  And it means that, being rare, it can be balanced to be a special ability, and thus more effective in general.

[Diazo]

As much as I do favor reworking everything to a ammo type vs. hull type with sizes system (as per upthread, can't find the quote) that is a huge overhaul that is probably not happening any time soon.

So, on the level of something that might actually get implemented, I'm leaning towards the percentage system.

However, rather then just coming at it from the standpoint of armor, incorporate the tiers of ships (fleet/starship/superweapons) as mentioned earlier.

All fleet ships default to 0% armor and 0% armor-piercing
All starships default to 20% armor and 20% armor-piercing
All superweapons default to 40% armor and 40% armor-piercing
Then modify as appropriate, the bomber getting extra armor piercing, etc.

Then to balance, as you go up the size scale, ROF drops and damage goes up.

The idea being that a starship weapon should not even notice a fleet ships armor due to its size, but it trades off a much slower ROF in exchange for that firepower.

IE: Against unarmored targets, fleet ships should have the highest DPS by quite a substantial amount.
But everything in the game larger then a fleet ship is armored to some degree, so for hitting a hard target the bigger weapons, with their armor piercing, have a higher effective DPS.

The trade off being because those big weapons have such slow ROF, they can be swarmed by fleet ships. Sure, the fleet ships get one-shot, but the slow ROF means that the swarm survives long enough to be meaningful in combat.

Yes, this would involve a balance pass on every unit in the game, but it does not actually re-work the game like changing damage bonuses to work on ammo type does.

And nothing smaller then a balance pass on all units is going to be a big enough change to improve the armor situation.

D.

[Draco18s]

There is literally no difference between percentage based armor and the same percentage increase in HP.

Until Armor Piercing shows up 

Which does odd things, when taken into account.  Likewise armor rotting.
For AP it essentially comes down to a bonus damage against specific targets.  Armor rotting is "Hey guys, damage bonus against this guy!"

Personally, I'm coming around to the viewpoint that armor should be fixed value, straight damage reduction, large on the fleetship scale, and RARE.  As in, of 100 bonus ship types, maybe 10 or so should have armor.  The Space Tank and Armor Ship, for example, would have 4000-5000 armor per mark.  Fighters, bombers, frigates?  No armor.

Honestly, this is the only side I can come down on.  Anything that isn't flat--or at least non-percentage--is the only thing that makes sense as to why it isn't removed all together and turned into bonus health.
And it should also NOT come in the extremes.  I.e. "effectively 0" and "effectively infinite."  That's one of the biggest problems right now is that armor comes in two values: "might as well be 0" (e.g. 100 per mark, when damage values tend to be 1000+) or "might as well be infinite" (999,999,999).  There are so few values in between.

Armor Piercing should be rolled into Forcefield Immunity for weapons, and should be assigned to a particular ammo-type, like Dark Matter.

Not sure about this, TBH.
Also not sure how common armor piercing should be, either...

Why?  The armor system should be deterministic, be simple, obvious, and easy to display, and be effective where it is used.  Fixed value damage reduction easily meets these criteria.

Agreed.

[Diazo]

Personally, I'm coming around to the viewpoint that armor should be fixed value, straight damage reduction, large on the fleetship scale, and RARE.  As in, of 100 bonus ship types, maybe 10 or so should have armor.  The Space Tank and Armor Ship, for example, would have 4000-5000 armor per mark.  Fighters, bombers, frigates?  No armor.

Honestly, this is the only side I can come down on.  Anything that isn't flat--or at least non-percentage--is the only thing that makes sense as to why it isn't removed all together and turned into bonus health.
And it should also NOT come in the extremes.  I.e. "effectively 0" and "effectively infinite."  That's one of the biggest problems right now is that armor comes in two values: "might as well be 0" (e.g. 100 per mark, when damage values tend to be 1000+) or "might as well be infinite" (999,999,999).  There are so few values in between.

The problem with a numeric armor value is how do you handle Mark levels?

Do you set it mark vs. mark? Then cross-mark fights are out of wack.

Do you set it the same across all marks? Then you either have to set it at the Mk I level (and have it mean nothing in the late game), or the Mk 5 level (and have it screw up the early game). Remember that damage scales with mark after all.

The fact that armor currently is set mark vs. mark and scales with mark is one of the reasons armor is so WTF headache inducing at the moment.

D.

[LaughingThesaurus]

You know what I would do to eliminate the problem of percentage armor also affecting superweapons in a weird way? I'd vote superweapons get a lot of armor piercing because they're freaking superweapons. That way, armor at the sensible level of ships can actually be balanced with respect to ships at the same tier and superweapons just don't care about lower ships at all. It'd definitely be something to set them apart. Once you're firing artillery shells for several million damage each, I think you've got a gun that just doesn't care about armor. I'd say the same for stuff like, say, Orbital Mass Drivers. There's armor piercing, but then there's just flat-out armor shattering munitions that turn small ships into dust.

[Draco18s]

The fact that armor currently is set mark vs. mark and scales with mark is one of the reasons armor is so WTF headache inducing at the moment.

And now you know why I'm not even entering this sector.

I posted my opinion, you're free to debate it, but I want nothing to do with the argument one way or the other.

[Tridus]

Percentages make sense, provided they (and armor piercing) are used sparingly. I'd argue that with armor as that kind of mechanic, most fleetships shouldn't have any armor at all (as Diazo said). Ships intended to be tougher should have some, and stuff like space tanks and armor ships should have significant amounts as their special ability is supposed to be toughness. Starships by default having armor is good, as it gives armor piercing/rotting ships something to still be useful against even if space tanks aren't in play.

It has the upside of being easy to understand.

The other fun is what does the Planetary Armor Booster do (since I'd assume the inhibitor wouldn't change, and man would that be devastating against the wrong ships!)?

At its simplest, you could have it add 25 to whatever the armor value already is (capping out at 90 or something). So if it's got 0 armor, it now has 25. If it's got 20, it's got 45, etc. That would favor ships that already have armor over those that don't, but the existing booster already does that. It would also be a significant boost to any planet that has one.

[Diazo]

And that leads us into the balance question.

Regardless of whichever system gets implemented, should a super-armor ship (such as the Armored Golem) be immune (or almost immune) to a ship without armor piercing?

Or put another way, should the armor mechanic be strong enough it is a fight decider or make only interesting so that it will not change the outcome of fights, just how many ships survive?

D.

[Tridus]

Well, right now it caps out at 80%. If you gave the Armored golem 80% armor in the new system, the result is the same as it is right now.

IMO that cap should go more towards 90%, but fundamentally the Armored Golem already doesn't take much damage from ships without armor piercing. It also doesn't kill very many ships very quickly, so giant piles of ships can beat it. I don't see much changing there.

[Aeson]

Just saying, I dislike percentage armor. Half inch thick armor plate will go a long ways towards making you immune to 0.30-cal rifles, but it's not going to do anything significant against 15" naval cannon. Percentage armor says that your armor plate has the same magnitude effect on both, and I simply don't feel that that is reasonable. Armor should have the most effect on the lightest attacks, and that doesn't work out to 25% less damage from all sources. Moreover, the proposed X% armor penetration, where you'd reduce the Y% armor to (Y - X)% armor also works out strangely. I don't care if you put armor penetrating bullets in your 0.30-cal rifles, they aren't that likely to do that much better against my half-inch armor plate than the non-armor piercing bullets are, and the 15" naval shells would have blown through in any case. Neither one should work out to a (X + 100 - Y)/(100 - Y) damage bonus in the general case (yes, for specific levels of armor against certain strength attacks, it could be reasonable, but not for all powers of attack against a specific level of defense).

@Tridus: giving the Armored Golem 80% Armor in a percentage system is very different from the current system, under the proposed armor-penetration model, unless you happen to be talking about the things which have significant amounts of armor penetration. It boosts the Armored Golem's durability against anything that deals more than 125,000 damage per shot, because the 100,000 armor of the Armored Golem only applies as an 80% reduction to anything under that (which, granted, is most stuff), and an armor penetration which reduces the armor to 75% instead of 80% is probably not the same as armor penetration which reduces the armor from 100,000 to 95,000. Going from 80% armor to 75% armor represents a 25% damage increase for anything with that 5% armor penetration. Going from 100,000 armor to 95,000 armor in the current system is nothing of the sort against most ships; for that matter, going from 100,000 armor to 95,000 armor in the current system only makes a difference for those ships with more than 118,750 damage per shot, as anything below that is still going to suffer an 80% damage reduction against 95,000 armor, same as it would against 100,000 armor, which makes the armor penetration a 0% bonus for sufficiently weak weapons, and of varied significance for more powerful weapons. Something with exactly 125,000 damage per shot? 5000 armor penetration gives you a 20% damage bonus. Effective damage bonus forms a curve maximized at the point where you'd have 80% damage reduction from armor for no armor penetration.

It is unreasonable to me that a ship armed with light armor-penetrating weapons should gain as much from its armor penetration as a ship armed with heavy armor-penetrating weapons given that the armor-penetration value is the same.

[Tridus]

Just saying, I dislike percentage armor. Half inch thick armor plate will go a long ways towards making you immune to 0.30-cal rifles, but it's not going to do anything significant against 15" naval cannon. Percentage armor says that your armor plate has the same magnitude effect on both, and I simply don't feel that that is reasonable. Armor should have the most effect on the lightest attacks, and that doesn't work out to 25% less damage from all sources. Moreover, the proposed X% armor penetration, where you'd reduce the Y% armor to (Y - X)% armor also works out strangely. I don't care if you put armor penetrating bullets in your 0.30-cal rifles, they aren't that likely to do that much better against my half-inch armor plate than the non-armor piercing bullets are, and the 15" naval shells would have blown through in any case. Neither one should work out to a (X + 100 - Y)/(100 - Y) damage bonus in the general case (yes, for specific levels of armor against certain strength attacks, it could be reasonable, but not for all powers of attack against a specific level of defense).

I don't think anybody is going to say percentage armor is in any way realistic.

The upside to it is that given how complicated AI War is, it's more elegant than the flat numbers. There's other posts in this thread with the problems the flat numbers cause in terms of code ugliness and scaling with different game modes and such. You could do something by giving armor penetration to ammo types instead of to specific ships which is kind of what you're describing, but I'm not sure how that'd work out either.

@Tridus: giving the Armored Golem 80% Armor in a percentage system is very different from the current system, under the proposed armor-penetration model, unless you happen to be talking about the things which have significant amounts of armor penetration. It boosts the Armored Golem's durability against anything that deals more than 125,000 damage per shot, because the 100,000 armor of the Armored Golem only applies as an 80% reduction to anything under that (which, granted, is most stuff), and an armor penetration which reduces the armor to 75% instead of 80% is probably not the same as armor penetration which reduces the armor from 100,000 to 95,000. Going from 80% armor to 75% armor represents a 25% damage increase for anything with that 5% armor penetration. Going from 100,000 armor to 95,000 armor in the current system is nothing of the sort against most ships; for that matter, going from 100,000 armor to 95,000 armor in the current system only makes a difference for those ships with more than 118,750 damage per shot, as anything below that is still going to suffer an 80% damage reduction against 95,000 armor, same as it would against 100,000 armor, which makes the armor penetration a 0% bonus for sufficiently weak weapons, and of varied significance for more powerful weapons. Something with exactly 125,000 damage per shot? 5000 armor penetration gives you a 20% damage bonus. Effective damage bonus forms a curve maximized at the point where you'd have 80% damage reduction from armor for no armor penetration.

It is unreasonable to me that a ship armed with light armor-penetrating weapons should gain as much from its armor penetration as a ship armed with heavy armor-penetrating weapons given that the armor-penetration value is the same.

Huh, it really only has 100,000 armor? Go figure!

[chemical_art]

I've said it before, but the current system is NOT simple because of ship caps.

Any time a unit effected by caps interacts with a unit not effected by caps, lots of behind the curtain math happens. It is balanced for caps, bit not siimple nor elegant.

Any system not based on % will sufer this cap problem.

[LaughingThesaurus]

If you wanted a realistic system, you'd probably be giving ships two health bars anyway. It's kind of how a lot of space-y games work. Many ships have armor plates and shields before you can start damaging the hull. Presumably, you're either hitting the hull in AI War directly or those extra health bars are just looped in with the ship's regular HP.
A bit of a more realistic (but totally unnecessarily complicated) is to give a ship an armor bar. While the armor bar is there, the ship flat-out takes less damage and all the damage is taken by the armor first. Kill the armor, and the ship hull takes full damage from everything. Armor piercing becomes really rare, and just completely ignores the armor bar. So, imagine a Space Tank as having stats like this;
Health: 2,000
Armor: 230,000 (75% damage)

So, if your ship armor pierces and does any more than 2000 damage, this space tank dies immediately. However, any other ship that attacks it will do 75% damage and will only inflict damage to the ship's armor. Maybe there can be abilities such as "Ignores armor damage reduction" and "4x damage versus armor". The thing is, tracking two health bars for thousands of ships gets a bit absurd. It does however open up a lot of room to play with ship balance and the whole armor dynamic.
But this idea's super-unrefined. If you see any potential, feel free to discuss it. I feel like we've got a stalemate on the whole flat-out percentage reduction side of the debate.

[Diazo]

-snip comparison with real life stuff-

To account for this with percentages is why I suggest the increasing baseline as ships get bigger.

All fleet ships get 0% armor and 0% armor piercing.
All starships get 20% armor and 20% armor piercing.
All Superweapons get 40% armor and 40% armor piercing.
Then tweak on a per-ship basis as needed.

This keeps things logical, larger units have big guns that ignore the armor on smaller units, and the big units all have enough armor to reduce damage from units smaller then themselves while still being a percentage based system.

It still needs work, notably it should probably have 5 or 6 levels so not as many units need individual tweaking, but this is by far the cleanest system I've seen proposed, both in terms of implementing it and the system being clear in what it does.

D.

[Histidine]

I am of the view that realism and balance are... tenuously related, at best.

Anyway, allow me to plug my old idea (again), a quasi-percentage-based idea which I feel is the most flexible:

A slightly different armor system that I devised for a different game some time back goes like this:

• Ships can have armor of any (non-negative) number.
• Some units have a specific Armor Piercing value that is a positive number, others have the "default" value (say 100).
• If the unit's AP value equals or exceeds the target's armor, it does full damage. Otherwise damage = damage * AP/armor.

Chief advantage: Doesn't depend on damage-per-shot (and by extension mark level or unit cap) - unless we want it to. The math is also fairly straightforward.

I also like Diazo's idea.