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[TJJ]

Hear me out on this one:

Damage types are definitely neat, but it recently dawned on me that they significantly constrain design space.

If shield/armour/hull damage were defined on a per weapon basis, it'd allow for greater flexibility and variety in weapon design.

Admittedly I've not fully thought through this idea, it just popped into my fron while on my way to work; feel free to shoot it down.

Would the added flexibility create depth, or just make it overly complex?

[Igncom1]

I defiantly feel like the current damage types are a little too restricting, particularly energy weapons, I do also feel like making too many additional types would take away from the easy to remember advantages/disadvantages of the current selection.

I feel like more could be done with the types. But I don't know what.

[Techhead]

There's still design space left for additional damage types, but I agree that removing the types altogether would have "wait, what's this weapon good at?" issues.

[Midnight Kitsune]

There's still design space left for additional damage types, but I agree that removing the types altogether would have "wait, what's this weapon good at?" issues.

And especially with mods tossed into the mix

[TaLaR]

There are already some modded weapons with effectively non-standard damage types.
Like Blackrock shard guns that do kinetic + chance of energy on armor/hull hit (but not shield).
Or Scy miniguns with combined frag + energy.

For cases like these, having tooltips present secondary/conditional damage in better way than just text description would be nice.

[Thaago]

I mean... on the one hand yes, you could do a lot more things, but on the other hand the damage types are easily understandable and have clear gameplay roles/mechanics which skills build on.

Games are inherently a limitation of a design space, so does having weapon categories make the game more fun/interesting? I think so, because the choice between different damage types is meaningful.

[AxleMC131]

The ability to do custom damage types appeals to me, from a modding standpoint at least. Perhaps one could have a config file somewhere that defines a new damage type, with tags for damage modifiers versus shields, armour, and hull; that does sound intriguing.

However, I definitely don't hold with removing them entirely. Damage types are there to illustrate, in a very basic but clear way, what a particular weapon is good at doing damage to. If you removed damage types and made it all weapon-specific, it becomes much more tedious to decide on weapons for your ship, and in my opinion that's just one more piece of boring micromanagement that the game doesn't need.

[intrinsic_parity]

Also, the further you get from distinct damage types, the harder it is to determine which weapons can go in which mounts.

[Tartiflette]

Way worse that choosing a weapon for a mount: in combat you can't know if you need to take a shot on shields or armor or hull unless you know every unique damage ratio for every weapon in the game, including mods.

[AxleMC131]

Way worse that choosing a weapon for a mount: in combat you can't know if you need to take a shot on shields or armor or hull unless you know every unique damage ratio for every weapon in the game, including mods.

That's a really good point actually. Totally agreed.

[TJJ]

Way worse that choosing a weapon for a mount: in combat you can't know if you need to take a shot on shields or armor or hull unless you know every unique damage ratio for every weapon in the game, including mods.

True enough, though knowing what type of damage is dealt by an enemy's weapon is still something you have to learn, even now.
There are of course hints given from the projectile color, visual & audio effects, etc, but these soft guides could (and should) still exist without explicit damage types.

The only really explicit place that damage types are shown, where 3 damage values wouldn't be feasible, is in the "selected target" hud element.

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However this is an extremely small and obscure hud element that I'm not convinced is used very much. (and could probably be stripped away if the hud is ever decluttered)

I think the primary means by which we learn weapon characteristics is by either owning & using it in the simulator, or getting shredded by it and then looking it up in the codex.

In that respect, I'm not convinced there's a significant difference in learning curve between each weapon having a damage type, vs each weapon having 3 explicit damage values Vs Hull/Armour/Shields.
e.g.

1) wow, that gun shredded my armour in a single shot!
2) look up mauler in the codex.
3a) find that it deals explosive damage, and see immediately beneath (or remember from the tutorial) what damage %'s that translates into
Vs
3b) find that it deals (some%) to armour, (some%) to shields, and (some%) to hull.

5) Learn & remember that a maulers primary role is to shred armour

In summary, I don't think the 'damage type' abstraction really gains us very much, yet sacrifices a significant amount of weapon design freedom.

I think it's worth noting that this lack of weapon design freedom is already somewhat evident in vanilla's fragmentation weapons, and the way their DPS have been inflated in a rather 'cludge fixy' way to keep them relevant.
As others have mentioned there's also the issue with EMP completely sidestepping the damage type mechanics, and providing a damage value along a completely invisible axis - though that lack of transparency is a separate issue.

What we have now:

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A terrible mockup, but IMO no more mechanically complex:

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[Igncom1]

And all that is before some weapons that don't even behave the same way while in the same type.

The difference between blaster energy weapons and beam energy weapons is enough that I'm not sure you can even count them in the same category.

[Histidine]

Short answer: No.

• The proposal implies that a) modiverse weapon design space is close to exhaustion, and b) damage types are the main limiting factor on this. Neither claim has been demonstrated.
• Mapping each weapon to one of four damage types (a task aided by the fact that most weapons are clearly associated with their damage types) is not even remotely in the same region of cognitive load as memorizing 3 values * number of weapons, which is what the player will have to do if variations in damage mults proliferate.
  (If most weapons use standardized sets of damage mults, what was the point of the exercise?)
• As TaLaR said: Mods already have some tools to implement custom damage types for specific weapons if needed.

...Is there an actual issue this is attempting to solve? Like, what weapons would we want to add that become possible with this when they were not before, and — more importantly — is there a reason such weapons are worth the changes required to implement them?

[xenoargh]

Well, let's see.

Dedicated Shield-killers that are utterly worthless vs. Hull / Armor.  

High-velocity Kinetics that are good against Shields and Armor but are worthless against Hull (IRL, a tank round passing through a vacuum-filled space station would destroy anything it hit directly, just like a micro-meteoroid, and little else).

Those are just a couple of things.  The shield-killer can work via code, but the end-user won't see it in the UI, because it doesn't support that.  Same with the Kinetic example.

The better way might be to simply allow weapons to override the DPS value in the UI via a value in their JSON... so that it accurately reflects the reality, for modded weapons that <do something weird>.  I don't mind so much that people have to code it to make it happen so much as I mind that the current system limits what end-users can perceive (and no, they won't read the flavor texts explaining what actually happens).

[xenoargh]

However this is an extremely small and obscure hud element that I'm not convinced is used very much. (and could probably be stripped away if the hud is ever decluttered)

I would really like that to go away, lol. 

I'd rather that, if we want to see the stats on a ship in combat, there was a way to do that on the Tactical UI.