So, this whole armor thing

[Draco18s]

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.

Your suggestion is identical to reducing the bonus multipliers on other units by an identical math.

"This is a bomber, it has polycrystal hull, it has 2 armor" means that fighters (the counter unit) instead of having a multiplier of 6 have a multiplier of 3.

Your suggestion is basically "lets reduce multipliers, but do it in a way that is not transparent to the player."

[Diazo]

Okay.

I think I'm going to have to change my vote to simply removing armor.

We have armor and armor-piercing which modifies the damage an attack does depending on which unit is attacking which unit.

We have attack bonuses which modifies the damage an attack does depending on which unit is attacking which unit.

IE: We have two systems that affect damage done simply based on unit types.

Of the two systems, the attack bonus system has priority by far. When I'm looking for units to counter something, I look to attack bonuses, I don't look at armor/armor-piercing.

Think back to your previous games, when the last time you actually went looking for a unit that had armor-piercing instead of the unit that had attack bonuses against what you wanted to kill?

Therefore instead of having two systems that affect damage that the player has to juggle and so ignores one, let's just have a single system and be done with it.

I'm not tying to argue that the attack bonus system does not have problems, but the attack bonus system is the one that matters. The armor system is pretty irrelevant when compared to the attack bonus system and so let's quit modifying damage the same way twice.

(I'm still hoping for moving to a weapon type vs hull (and hull size) type for attack bonuses at some point, but that is for the future.)

I'm open to the existence of armor in the game, but it has to do something more then just modify the amount of damage an attack does based soley on the type of units present. The attack bonuses system is what is used to do that.

D.

[TIE Viper]

I gotta agree with that analysis Diazo.  As the system is currently, hull bonuses are the make or break factor by far.  And in my opinion, armor is actually represented a third time.  By HP.  Yes hit points being higher can mean it's a bigger ship with more structural integrity, but it also directly translates into armor as well, intuitively I believe.  Let's just remove the armor system for now since we have the hull bonuses system.  Any tweaks we want/need to do can be done EASILY with HP adjustment.  It's accurate across all hull types and can be used to put bigger ships in their place compared to smaller ones, and finally the low damage high rate of fire ships attacks count EXACTLY as much as they are supposed to.

As for the niche ships:

Armor Ship - more HP for more 'armor', simple enough
Anti-Armor Ship - more/higher hull bonuses for the heavier type ships to give the 'armor piercing' ability, not structural however
Armor Rotter - instead of reducing armor, their shots can reduce max HP instead and it can recharge to max over time like armor does now

This would keep these units desired effects in gameplay just like they are now.

[TechSY730]

If we ever get a vs. size multiplier damages, I would like that to be in addition to bonuses to hull type, instead of replacing it, as it gives a way to differenciate roles within the same "tier", in ways that HP + DPS alone would not be able to. (vs. size bonuses would rarely have an impact within a tier).

However, I do think the simply removing armor would be the "simplest" solution, and Perdue some other way to add in some other way to be able to "differentiate" inter-tier interactions. (Like vs. size multipliers), but that can be for later, as that would require quite a bit more work.

This of course would require the armor based ships (including those that counter it, and notably including the raid starships and the armored golem) be massively rethought, or that armor (and related mechanics) becomes a "gimmick" exclusive to those ships.
Also, the human hardened forcefield would need to be removed, and either the existing human forcefields would need their HP doubled or their cap doubled.

P.S. I really don't care if the multipliers remain a per ship thing or moved to a per shot-type thing. I just like the idea of having two sets of multipliers, one vs "kind" and one vs "size". Seems elegant enough, and would help make some existing "size based" target type restrictions more explicit.

[TIE Viper]

Adding a size multiplyer would be easier, simpler, and accomplish the same thing as trying to reflesh out the armor system I think. That could just be another hull type so to speak and would accomplish what you are looking for.

[Draco18s]

As for the niche ships:

Armor Ship - more HP for more 'armor', simple enough
Anti-Armor Ship - more/higher hull bonuses for the heavier type ships to give the 'armor piercing' ability, not structural however
Armor Rotter - instead of reducing armor, their shots can reduce max HP instead and it can recharge to max over time like armor does now

Actually I'd run it like this:

Armor Ship - More HP (same)
Anti-Armor Ship - Implosion effect (the more health it has, the more damage it takes!) though I'd base it on max health, rather than current.
Armor Rotter - Poison / DOT effect OR "marks" (word overloading) that make other ships doing damage get bonuses against the "marked" unit.  Eg. each "mark" is worth 0.025 extra multiplier.

[TIE Viper]

That could work just as well too.

[Draco18s]

That could work just as well too.

Implosion is already there.  As-is its not ideal for an "anti-hp" ship, but it's not bad.

We just don't have any comparable system to armor rotting.  Yet.

[TIE Viper]

Either one of our suggestions would provide that window of increased vulnerability so it would keep the Armor Rotters in theme.  Their tooltip wouldn't even really need to be changed significantly.

[Draco18s]

Either one of our suggestions would provide that window of increased vulnerability so it would keep the Armor Rotters in theme.  Their tooltip wouldn't even really need to be changed significantly.

I'm pretty sure DOT has been requested/suggested on a number of occasions (though my mantis-search-fu is failing at the moment)

[Cyborg]

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

Are you pissed? :-P
Pun definitely intended.

... and I did volunteer, I just don't want to do every single expansion by myself. Maybe you are mad because I'm right; we have 20 individuals yelling out different ideas with not a single speck of coordination between you. Now it's to the point everyone's just saying to hell with the whole thing and scrap it completely without one iota of thought towards how that unbalances a huge mass of ships. In order to increase the HP, you would have to come up with a general correlation between armor and HP, and the only way to do that is with... you guessed it, data points.

If you just remove armor because you are too damned lazy to actually put down factual details, that's on you, but you will piss off people who actually want to see this done right.

[LordSloth]

To avoid beating the dead horse that is my idea... I'll move on from nitpicking with draco, especially since I would be nitpicking his interpretation rather than the main thrust of his argument. Arguing transparency is irrelevant when nobody likes the base concept anyways.

I am not opposed to throwing out armor completely OR except for a few ships. Although I came to a different conclusion, I also agree with the interpretation of the current relative weight between armor, hp, and attack boni. And, if we change topics, I can throw out a few ideas regarding a size system.

I don't see armor rotters adding a damage multiplier as being either easily estimated mentally or transparent.

On the other hand, simply by giving armored vessels more health, I forsee a tedious anti-fleet battle, especially apparent given the absence of any ways to bypass it. Like it or not, Armor piercing is currently very common and particularly useful with low damage turrets (lightning) and raid starships, and armor is quite prevalent on player turrets. Keeping a carefully hand chosen selection of armored and anti-armor units in the game according to the OP does seem like it would be simpler and quicker to balance than throwing out armor wholesale. If we don't replace with anything fundamentally 'fun' or at least meaningful, a more 'elegant' no armor solution seems a total waste of time and effort compared to the OP. I'm not opposed to a new mechanic such as size, but I currently favor the OP as mostly clearing the slate and leaving the field mostly uncluttered for future innovation, without introducing the most new headaches.  I kind of see it as a stepping stone along the path to some nebulous far future rebalance that considers 'softening' the counters, reducing the hull-type abundance, introducing some new mechanic such as a size system or other.

I just don't see the gain in rebalancing anti-armor, armor rotters, inhibitors, everything, unless we have something ready to sweep in new value.

[Diazo]

That is true, nothing I've seen in this thread is really an improvement in gameplay over the current situation.

Yes, armor is a mechanic that has issues, but it's not broken.

Perhaps when we get an overhaul of the entire damage system (attack multipliers/hull type/ammo/etc.) we can revisit this and pull out the worthwhile suggestions.

So yes, I think my vote is now "do nothing".

D.

[TechSY730]

Yea it isn't "broken". I think it could work "somewhat" if it was rebalanced with a better eye towards average damage, average HP, and intended ship roles.
The current system (subtractive) does have the downside of not scaling well if two things of different orders of magnitude (mostly ships from 2 or more tiers different from each other) interact, but other systems will have other downsides too.

I guess the role is which set of "downsides" will have the least detrimental impact in balance is what we need. (There are many different formulations of this question, like what thing to we wat to promote with armor) I think it's clear that there is not a consensus on the answer to that question in this thread, I guess the best thing for now is to take the "safe" option, "do nothing" with the current system.
(Second "safest" option would be to remove armor, thus removing the need for these questions )

[LaughingThesaurus]

I'm leaning more towards the removal of armor just because we can't really find a great solution. We've got a feature that has some problems, and is somewhat of a drag on the game, but it's not really too big of a problem. The thing is, we can't find any alternate system without any problems. It'd be kind of a Valve or Blizzard thing to just remove the weaker mechanics, and find a way to simulate that with stronger mechanics. Armor is fairly weak as mechanics go at the moment... so the idea of just removing it, and simulating armor through HP and some passive abilities (as the proposed new Armor Rotter abilities and such) would probably strengthen the game with very concrete things that can actually work mechanically and intuitively and don't have any real problems.

Although, it's like people said. Just leaving armor as is doesn't really hurt the game. It's just a bit of a drag on the overall quality I feel. I'm one of those guys who believes, if you can't commit to a mechanic and do it well, you should just not include it at all. Including a bad story in a game is more likely to make me look at the game in a negative light, as opposed to just not including a story at all.