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[PCCL]

that.... is not how armor works in this game

10 times the armor doesn't mean you take 1/10th of the damage. Not by a long shot

[Thaago]

For reference the formula is: [Damage Done] = [Damage] * [Per shot Damage with modifiers]/[Per shot Damage with modifiers + Armor with modifiers]

Where the modifiers are skills and damage types (Kinetic vs HE), and the caps are after the above.

Only for such high armor values as 10x standard, most of the damage will be done at the cap, so 10x armor will be something like 20x more effective health and not 100, despite the formula being nominally quadratic. Foof did a really nice post on armor with graphs: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12268.0

[FooF]

For reference the formula is: [Damage Done] = [Damage] * [Per shot Damage with modifiers]/[Per shot Damage with modifiers + Armor with modifiers]

Where the modifiers are skills and damage types (Kinetic vs HE), and the caps are after the above.

Only for such high armor values as 10x standard, most of the damage will be done at the cap, so 10x armor will be something like 20x more effective health and not 100, despite the formula being nominally quadratic. Foof did a really nice post on armor with graphs: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12268.0

Correct. Doing damage at the cap really favors raw DPS and limits what weapons are effective because if they're slow firing with heavy damage (typically what you want to use against armor), they become significantly less effective once they are capped off. Since you can't reduce hull armor, the same weapon used to get through the armor proper becomes much less efficient when it begins to hit the hull, which is pretty counter-intuitive.

Turning the hull armor type from .05 to .5, makes something like a Heavy Armored Dominator have a permanent 900 armor. The damage mitigation of 900 armor is huge, though still relative to the weapon being used against it but the vast majority of rapid-fire weapons would never get beyond the damage cap. This makes a lot of weapons very flux inefficient and since armor costs no flux to maintain, it gives heavily-armored ships a massive flux advantage.

[Megas]

The problem with strike ships is they do not have the endurance to fight in endurance battles that the player will inevitably fight in the endgame.  The classic strike ship, Afflictor, has its uses (like killing Paragon when player does not have a capital to fight it), but it general, it is better to have multipurpose ships that can do a variety of things well for a while.

Making ships tougher to kill without powering up missiles does not make missiles an asset, it just makes ships tougher to kill.  Even missiles other than Reapers are not that impressive at killing things.  If I need missiles, once again, fighters do a better job at being missiles than missiles - by not running out of ammo after one or two shots.  (Ammo-using fighters can reload.)  Now if missiles were more like 0.7.2 era Atropos, then missiles might be worthy as a super move.  Currently, they are not, unless spammed by multiple ships in unison.

[Mr. Nobody]

Haven't yet tried but this does seem to indirectly "buff" missiles because, since time to kill is increased and the.CR is untouched, breaking armor fast is more important than before since the sooner you break armor, the sooner you can kill the ship and the sooner you can start the snowballing.
This is obviously just a extrapolation since, i reiterate, i haven't tried it yet

[intrinsic_parity]

With this change, you don't ever properly break armor though...

[Megas]

Not all missiles are big armor breakers.  And those that are, are somewhat unreliable aside from Daggers/Tridents from an Astral.  Harpoons are a bit slow and easy to defend against.  Atropos is a slightly faster and tougher Harpoon with less range.  Torpedoes have that arming delay that prevents easy point-blank hits.

[FooF]

Let it not be said I didn't try the change.

It does make fights a whole lot longer, though not as long as I feared. I think my main beef is that "low-caliber" weapons become wildly flux inefficient against heavy armor. My very flux-efficient Aurora nearly maxed itself out trying to kill a Dominator that couldn't fire back. The other piece of this is that standard armor is minimalized relative to how long battles last. It gets blown off but then you're pounding on hull for 75% of the time. In addition, it delays the inevitable quite a bit. There were times where a ship was as good as dead but because I was doing half the damage, I just couldn't finish it off. Windows of vulnerability are much less punishing.

There is one possible takeaway from all this that I might advocate. If it's not this way already, increasing the hull armor value for the player ship on "Easy" would give a little more room for error. I noticed that even frigates lasted quite a bit longer and that might help a new player that doesn't quite know how to manage shields, flux, etc. I don't know if I'd go as high as 50% but a significant boost would be helpful for the first part of that steep learning curve. Just make sure you tell the player that this isn't the norm!

I'm still not in favor of this kind of change but there is a definite shift in the "feel" of battles. Since I was never close to death during my testing, I never seemed to reap the benefit of the change but my enemies sure did. Maybe if I was in a tight fight I might appreciate the extra effective HP but for the vast majority of my testing, I was just shooting away at ships that were dead but didn't know it yet.

[intrinsic_parity]

according to my calculations, it would take 31 harpoons to kill a standard (no additional armor or armor related skills) dominator, and 60 to kill an onslaught....



60



even a weapon that is supposed to do significant alpha damage vs armor is pretty ineffectual... and this is if every single harpoon hit on the same location. In reality onslaughts have shields and a lot of point defense.

a couple more weapons for reference vs an onslaught:

570 heavy mauler shots (4.75 minutes for two heavy maulers to kill onslaught)
8 reapers
60 hellbore shots (meaning a dominator with two hellbores firing into an onslaught would take 1.5 minutes to kill it and thats only firing into hull/armor, not even counting time shooting shields)
118 heavy blaster shots (thats 85000 flux worth, more than 3x the paragons flux capacity, and still over a minute of continuous firing for two heavy blasters)
41 plasma cannon shots (61500 flux, and I think 55 seconds, not sure if I did the time calculation correctly)

and then weapons that aren't high alpha damage

pulse laser 2075 shots that means a medusa or aurora with two pulse lasers would take 5+ minutes to kill an onslaught just firing into hull/armor... 1028 shots to kill a dominator is 2.85 minutes for 2 pulse lasers and 14080 flux

970 autopulse laser shots, meaning firing only at the burst rate of fire, it would take 45 seconds of continuously firing into an onslaught to kill it... this is a large energy weapon... and the ammo regeneration rate is 2 per second, so effectively 970/2/60=8.03 minutes roughly firing every shot as it regenerates.............


every weapon I listed above is a medium or large weapon. These are supposed to be at least moderately effective against large ships, but they are borderline useless. Don't even think about kinetics vs hull...

this just doesn't make any sense balance wise. high armor ships are virtually un-killable using normal weapons

this also throws off the tech balance, consider aurora vs dominator. A dominator with two hellbores takes 27 seconds to kill the aurora but the aurora with three pulse lasers takes 1.9 minutes... and the dominator can still equip 3 medium missile pods and two medium kinetics as well as small weapons, the aurora can get a couple small missiles and a couple small energy weapons.


edit: harpoons are just trash, dominator can tank 20 in the current game and onslaught 30, but still doubling the number is pretty bad

it seems like compared to vanilla
missile generally need 2x hits for large ships, more on par with vanilla for small ships
most high explosive weapons needed 3x hits
medium and some large energy needed 4x or more hits
kinetics and small energy were like 100s of times more hits, for reference, ir pulse laser need 300000 hits to kill dominator. yes three hundred thousand

I think maybe if these ttks were brought more into line with vanilla, the concept of needing big weapons to damage big ships is interesting. The ttks are just a bit ridiculous and the energy weapon balance is definitely off, they are already underpowered. The balance is also significantly better amongst smaller ships, its just when you start getting into high armor ships that things get crazy.

[Algro]

Interesting, I brushed armor aside because high tech shields outperform its role as protection.
Shields are the real beasts, they have infinite damage reduction potential only hindered by a flux pool. This problem can be handled with abilities, ship-mods and skilled play so it is interesting.

In my opinion, armor is somewhat effective against small arms and can take on some larger caliber weapons on its own BUT it is not sustainable. High armor ships have low speed and maneuverability making them sitting ducks when out maneuvered and out gunned. Therefore highly armored ships demand a good fleet composition or at least good support to keep its relevance in a fleet.

I play quite a lot of Heavy Tanks in World of tanks so I understand how armor can be fun if it can block everything that cannot penetrate it. But the way Starsector uses armor as a buffer between the damage and the hull makes armor loses value in engagement and it comes with many disadvantages such as agility and fuel consumption makes it unreliable.

I understand the idea that if only large weapons could penetrate an Onslaught, then it can potentially be a game breaker. So it shouldn't completely be a damage blocker, but it should at least feel like armor and not HP.

That being said, I think armor should be used to mitigate low damage weapons and could be only taken down reliably by high burst damage weapons like missiles and dedicated medium/large weapons.

the concept of needing big weapons to damage big ships is interesting.

I very much like this concept.

[Tartiflette]

According to my ingame tests, a default Lasher with harpoons take out an Onslaught in 1 min 45' with 6 harpoons, while without missiles but better flux and weapons it took 2min 10'. A Rocket pod version did it in 1 min 5'

So just 6 missiles shaved 20sec of TTK against the best armor in the game for a frigate, and rockets halved it. Even the SO version of that frigate that didn't had to vent only matched the TTK of the Harpoon equipped variant.

So as mentioned multiple times already: missiles can be a damage multiplier, a support weapon or a finisher, but they rarely are a main damage dealer and it is pointless to compare them as such.

[Thaago]

@Algro

I agree that shields are a superior defense because you can just keep venting, effectively taking no damage. But the downside of filling up the flux pool with the enemies weapons rather than your own means that its a defense that costs your offense some. You said you brushed aside armor so I'm not sure if you've tried playing with the combat skills that boost armor - they are very very powerful.

I find that its worth taking a little damage in order to kill things faster. The best example of this is taking kinetic rounds on the armor rather than on the shields whenever possible. Sure you are taking real damage, but not too much, and the flux advantage lets you win fights that would otherwise be impossible. When I go nuts and use an SO Lasher early game, taking kinetic hits on the hull means that I tear through everything instead of being pushed back.

I consider 1 rank in combat to be incredibly powerful early game because of Advanced Countermeasures and Impact Mitigation 1. As an example with the starting Wolf: without those skills a railgun hit does 12.5 damage when you are at full armor - so it only take a few to break through, and the damage keeps increasing. With those 2 skills it does 3.75 damage per hit (might do 7.5 if the armor cap happens after the skill, which I don't think it does but I'm unsure and can't test right now). A stray light assault gun round will do 17 instead of 28.

[Megas]

Low tech is great not because they have armor.  They are great because they use ballistics, which have superior shot range and better flux efficiency.  Many high-tech ships are underwhelming because energy weapons have terrible shot range (or hard countered by shields in case of beams) and generally terrible flux efficiency.  Since AI plays cowardly, and mobility weakened for gunships, high-tech ships (aside from stuff like Hyperion) have trouble outmaneuvering ships enough to avoid getting shot back without help, although they are good at running away and stalling (which is only good for the enemy AI that does not care about resources).

Before 0.8.x, low-tech bigger than frigates were the best kite-and-snipers, but today with less skill power, low-tech is more sluggish and midline are probably the best snipers, but low-tech is no slouch.

Armor is good when taking damage is unavoidable (or alternative is worse than eating some damage).

It does make fights a whole lot longer, though not as long as I feared. I think my main beef is that "low-caliber" weapons become wildly flux inefficient against heavy armor. My very flux-efficient Aurora nearly maxed itself out trying to kill a Dominator that couldn't fire back. The other piece of this is that standard armor is minimalized relative to how long battles last. It gets blown off but then you're pounding on hull for 75% of the time. In addition, it delays the inevitable quite a bit. There were times where a ship was as good as dead but because I was doing half the damage, I just couldn't finish it off. Windows of vulnerability are much less punishing.

There is one possible takeaway from all this that I might advocate. If it's not this way already, increasing the hull armor value for the player ship on "Easy" would give a little more room for error. I noticed that even frigates lasted quite a bit longer and that might help a new player that doesn't quite know how to manage shields, flux, etc. I don't know if I'd go as high as 50% but a significant boost would be helpful for the first part of that steep learning curve. Just make sure you tell the player that this isn't the norm!

I'm still not in favor of this kind of change but there is a definite shift in the "feel" of battles. Since I was never close to death during my testing, I never seemed to reap the benefit of the change but my enemies sure did. Maybe if I was in a tight fight I might appreciate the extra effective HP but for the vast majority of my testing, I was just shooting away at ships that were dead but didn't know it yet.

Fights are already long enough with cowardly AI.  I would not want ships harder to kill unless AI gets their spine back and charge in with guns blazing like they used to.

[intrinsic_parity]

According to my ingame tests, a default Lasher with harpoons take out an Onslaught in 1 min 45' with 6 harpoons, while without missiles but better flux and weapons it took 2min 10'. A Rocket pod version did it in 1 min 5'

So just 6 missiles shaved 20sec of TTK against the best armor in the game for a frigate, and rockets halved it. Even the SO version of that frigate that didn't had to vent only matched the TTK of the Harpoon equipped variant.

So as mentioned multiple times already: missiles can be a damage multiplier, a support weapon or a finisher, but they rarely are a main damage dealer and it is pointless to compare them as such.

the purpose of the post wasn't to trash missiles... it was to emphasize the ridiculousness of the proposal to massively increase minimum armor by pointing out that even missiles see a significant reduction in effectiveness with such crazy armor values. 90% of what I talked about had nothing to do with missiles. I use missiles all the time, I was against that other thread suggesting that they cost 0 op, I just think harpoons are noticeably underpowered compared to other missiles, but that is besides the point.

[Megas]

I just think harpoons are noticeably underpowered compared to other missiles, but that is besides the point.

Harpoon seem fairly easy to stop, only good against target that is overloaded or has terrible defenses.  I like to see Harpoons upgraded to current Atropos, and Atropos restored to their "finger-of-death" incarnation in 0.7.2.  Atropos from 0.7.2 was almost perfect (then ruined in 0.8.x for the sake of Dagger spam from Astral).