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« on: August 16, 2021, 07:40:56 PM »
Personally, I've always felt like shields should be balanced with armour and hull, but shields feel more like they represent 90% of a ship's survivability while armour and hull are a last ditch measure that vanishes in just a few seconds for anything short of a dominator.
And as much as I love the idea of unshielded ships, there's just no way to make them work, they're incredibly fragile.
At the same time though, armour and hull shouldn't be too tough, it should feel like 1000 damage does something.
So, here's some ideas:
Hull:
I think this should be on a grid, like armour.
Total health across all hull cells combined would be much greater than current hull strength.
When a hull cell has no health left, it's destroyed and weapons/engines on that cell no longer function, but the cell can continue to absorb more damage before finally breaking off completely.
Like with armour, hits would spread their damage to hull cells in a 5x5 circle.
A ship is destroyed when a certain percentage of its hull cells are destroyed, which would vary from ship to ship, probably ranging from 30% to 50%. Hull health wouldn't vary as much with tech level, but the percentage of hull destroyed the ship can survive would be tied to tech level.
The gameplay reason for this is that currently, hull damage feels very unbalanced. Too little hull, and even rather big and tough ships will die just moments after their armour is broken though. Too much hull, and it feels like a ship is barely inconvenienced by a few thousand damage.
By allowing hull cells to be outright destroyed, and giving low tech ships less of a bonus to hull health but allowing them to survive more hull destruction, all ships can survive a quite a bit of hull damage and low tech ships can survive a lot more, but dealing a lot of damage to hull always counts since you're likely to destroy a weapon mount.
The flavour reason for it is that the idea of having a third of a battleship missing while it still fights on is pretty awesome.
Armour:
There's only one kind of armour, and it often doesn't feel like it's suited for the ship it's on.
Plus, the interactions between different damage types and armour don't feel quite right either.
For starters, there could be different kinds of armour with different properties, which can also be layered; so if a ship has 100 explosive armour and 300 metal plate armour, then while the health of an armour cell is 400-101 it'll be treated as metal plate of 300-1 thickness and while the health is 100-1 it'll be treated as explosive armour of 100-1 thickness.
The different armour types would have a different hardness, and possibly have special properties.
Metal plate would be simply have a high hardness, and equivalent to current armour.
There could be advanced alloy plate which would have extreme hardness, though generally be thin.
There could be ablative armour which would be soft but generally thick.
There could be explosive armour which would be soft but if incoming damage would penetrate the layer, it's reduced by a multiple of the layer's thickness and the layer is destroyed in that place.
There could even be liquid armour, which would even itself out over a hull.
As for interaction with different damage types: Instead of the 200% 100% 50% 25% damage multiplier, and damage reduction based on thickness, damage reduction would instead be based on the damage type.
Kinetic: Damage reduction is based on thickness*hardness
HE: Damage reduction is based on hardness
Energy: No damage reduction, but low damage to armour (it's melting through it after all)
Flak: Damage reduction is based on hardness*hardness
The reason for all this is to allow armour to be useful to whatever's using it, allow you to specialise and be more strategic, and make it possible to have decent protection against all damage types even without a shield. If you're bullying Tri-Tachyon as they deserve, then ablative armour would serve you well.
Fire and repairs
Currently, cruisers and capitals can maintain a continuous frontline presence, and the above changes to hull would allow them to last longer and be riskier and still survive to fight another day.
Gameplay would be more interesting if large ships could be forced to back off, allowing destroyers to play more of a role in their absence.
So, what about fire? Taking hull damage could cause hull cells to catch fire, and while a ship would always have some firefighting capability, it can't handle fires nearly as well while in the thick of combat. If it keeps taking the occasional bit of hull damage and never takes a break from combat, it's going to be taking massive amounts of fire damage.
Frigates and destroyers would, of course, be much more easily able to back out of combat so this mechanic wouldn't affect them as much. And perhaps their smaller size could contribute to making them easier to manage fires on.
Repairs, meanwhile, would allow a ship to restore a little bit of health to non-destroyed hull cells over the course of a battle. Maybe 10-20% of its total health as a repair supplies that can be used over the course of a battle, and like firefighting is faster outside of combat? The reason is to give more tactical options for what you do when a ship is very close to death. Instead of retreating it, you might try withdraw a ship to a safe location, so that it can later either continue to fight or at least withdraw more safely.
This also means that pushing the enemy back is no longer strictly an inconvenience to you, as although it means reinforcements take longer to arrive and retreating is slower, you have more space to withdraw to for extinguishing and repairs while the enemy has less.
