Each level of armor gives it 10% resistance to damage, with level 10 giving it 100% resistance to all damage. Each level of Armor penetration is subtracted from the Armor value to determine how what percentage of damage it does.
Pumpkin: In Wingflier's proposed system, Armor is no longer a flat reduction, but instead a percent reduction, which makes the rate of fire not very important. "Fighter has 0.8 vs Bomber" means that Fighters do 80% of their normal damage to bombers, ie, 5 armor - 3 armor pen = 2 effective armor, which is 20% damage reduction. In AI War Classic, the equivalent would be to take away everyone's armor and then give fighters a 0.8 hull bonus vs polycrystal.
Rate of fire matters for overkill; an arty golem can be overwhelmed by bombers, for example. But to make that have a significant effect on the balance of triangle ships would require the triangle ships to have wildly different ship caps. That's historically been problematic.
suddenly we can have giant laser beams of death shooting at you
The closest equivalent of that in AI War Classic is the Wrath Lance. Certainly a unit that mixes up the gameplay... but also an insanely frustrating unit, and one that interacts *very poorly* with gravity effects and engine damage. If I was going to pick a single unit to not return in AI War 2... I'd probably pick the Wrath Lance. I really hate those things. If everyone else loves them, or if they can be made less frustrating, then I'd be fine with them, though.
there are just flat out "worst ever" ship types in the game, and some things are just insanely good and useful
Can you give some specific examples? Ideally, three of each? I will give mine.
In the patch notes up to Destroyer of Worlds, the units that seem to get a lot of buff mentions are the Laser Gatling and the Autocannon Minipod. Gatling lacks a strategic niche; it's just okay vs everything and terrible vs missile frigates. That doesn't feel good. Minipods lack a niche also (what unit or situation do they hard counter? I can't think of any) and are outclasses at their schtick by armor rotters, or by actual armor piercing units. Acid Sprayers have a niche, and I don't think they're underpowered or one-trick ponies, they're just sharing that niche with reprocessors.
So that just says, make sure every ship has it's own distinct niche. IE, when you think of a ship type, you should immediately be able to imagine a situation where that ship type would be awesome, and then it needs to actually *be* awesome, so awesome that you use it over jsut throwing the fleet ball.
The insanely good and useful ships I can think of are: LTFs, Sentinel Frigates, NCCs, Maws, and Protector Starships.
Quick, for each of those, what triangle ship counters them? How good are those ships at killing their triangle counter? How good are those ships at killing their ideal target vs killing stuff in general?
Those ships tend to be countered by starships or teleporters. Neither of those is common. They tend to be bad at attacking guard posts, but guard posts don't counter them because guard posts can't chase them down and kill them. OMDs work, but those are even heavier-handed than ion, and like guard posts they don't chase you out of the system.
Ships need their niche to be *distinct*, in that it isn't just good vs almost everything, and ships need to have weaknesses so that there's counterplay.
For those niches to matter, you need to be able to really clearly distinguish between 'is being used correctly and is awesome', 'isn't being countered and is okay', and 'is being countered and is getting wrecked'. I think that third case tends to be presented inconsistently; high cap ships will always be the first to report that they're being countered, AND they report that by dying like flies rather than having health bars go down. I think that contributes a lot to their unpopularity, along with the extra micro required to rebuild reinforcements rather than repairing low health ships.
you could move your fleets like formations
The units are carefully balanced to produce formation-like effects naturally. There's a reason fighters are faster and shorter-ranged than bombers: so they charge out in front, to die gloriously soaking alpha for the cause. There's a reason laser gatlings are slower and longer-ranted than fighters OR bombers: so they stay behind both and offer fire support without getting blown away. None of that applies if you just group move ships around, of course. And when the SF charges over, the fighters get so far ahead of the bombers and the missile frigates so far behind that you just defeat each blob in detail. But in theory, there's some amount of formation-like effects that you can get organically, which I think is kind of cool. Perfectly open to seeing a more sophisticated system here, though.