Do you have some final (or near final) numbers you can post for us to look at or do you want to keep it under wraps until we've played it to get un-tainted gameplay feedback?
The last actual numbers you posted are from quite a while ago so I'm interested in what's actually going to go into the game.
Part of the reason I've not implemented it yet is I haven't had time to sit down and work out the numbers because I don't want to just implement the mechanic and leave the numbers as-is for future balancing (as we did basically when switching the mechanic from "shields" to "armor") because that just makes a total dog's-breakfast of balance
Not that it won't be a bit of wild ride at first anyway.
Right now I'm thinking of:
A) Change the internal "apply armor to incoming damage" calculation according to step 1 of my earlier post:
1) Calculate Defender_Armor_Percent, starting from zero:
1.a) Add the defender's base armor rating.
1.b) Subtract armor rotter damage
1.c) Multiply according to armor boosting (or zero out if there's one of those armor-negaters around).
- We may also have armor boosting add some base amount to help that mechanic work on armorless ships, but that's not core to this.
1.d) Set to 1000/(1000+number_computed_thus_far) to yield a number between 0 and 1.
- A simple change would be to let armor rot exceed armor by some margin, making this actually able to yield a number somewhat larger than 1.
B) Change the display of armor to the percentage value corresponding to (1000/1000+armor), and probably not show the internal value.
C) Change existing armor values something like:
- For fleet ships, things with armor typically have something from 150*mk through 750*mk (by steps of 150). I think the armored ship is an outlier. Anyway, I'll just change that to 5% through 25%. Or perhaps 10% through 50%. Obviously the internal numbers are different (10% is about 112, 20% is about 250, 30% is about 429, etc).
-- Not scaling up by marks, of course.
- For other stuff basically just playing it by ear; thankfully it's fairly intuitive to know if something "makes sense" as unarmored, lightly armored (10-15%), moderately armored (20-35%) or heavily armored (40+%) or whatisgoingonmyshotsarenotdoinganything (90%).
D) Change the armor piercing calculation according to steps 2 and 3 of my earlier post (a few changes since the above) :
2) Calculate Attacker_ArmorPiercing_Percent, starting from zero:
2.a) Add the attacker's base armor piercing rating (this is just the literal number like you see it now, but fewer ships would have this and it would effectively be some number between 0 and 1)
2.b) Add someFunction(markI_damage_per_shot), which returns some number between 0 and 1
- Note that markI_damage_per_shot is literally the base attack power per shot (for the mark I variant of that ship), so something firing 10 shots per salvo doing 1,000 per shot is very different than something firing 1 shot per salvo doing 10,000 per shot.
2.c) If greater than Defender_Armor_Percent, set to Defender_Armor_Percent
3) Calculate Effective_Armor_Multiplier, starting from One:
3.a) Subtract (1-Defender_Armor_Percent)
3.b) Add Attacker_ArmorPiercing_Percent
3.c) If < 0.1, set to 0.1 (the minimum 10% damage rule)
For "someFunction" I'll probably just pick one of the ones already in this thread, and see what kind of numbers that produces.
E) Change armor piercing display to just show the effective percent-subtractor.
F) Change existing armor piercing values to... something reasonable
Fleet ships right now are also more like 150*mk, 300*mk, etc, and I'll probably convert that on a similar scale as I am the armor values themselves. A lot of ships will probably have their explicit armor piercing values reduced or removed because now they're getting the implicit bonus from damage-per-shot.
G) Change the math behind the polarizer's damage modifier to fit the new armor values.
H) Adjust armor rotting values to be lower since armor values will be lower, otherwise this mechanic stays the same.
