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Author Topic: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it  (Read 11005 times)

Warnoise

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There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« on: October 08, 2020, 08:47:52 PM »

Currently the armor stat isn't useful to be honest. It all takes 1 harpoon salvo to destroy the hardest armor (onslaught).

Also, there are so many tools that make armor kind of useless (this is why low tech ships are least popular)

I feel that armor should be higher overall on ships that have poor shielding (for example Onslaught armor up to 4k?) That way, even without shield, it still can eat many shots before crumbling.

Also armor related hullmods should be better imo. A +% based armor mod instead of flat bonus in armor would be a great asset for ships that are naturally armored.

Some mods added an amazing function for armor, and that is a detacheable armor, like a sort of independent module attached to the ship that needs to be destroyed before it reaches the ship's armor.

So what do you guys think about the current armor system?

« Last Edit: October 08, 2020, 09:28:26 PM by Warnoise »
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SonnaBanana

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2020, 08:50:09 PM »

Hmm, I believe the Heavy Armor hullmod should be cheaper or add more armor.
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SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #2 on: October 08, 2020, 09:23:46 PM »

The problem is the 15%/10% min damage cap.  Without that armor would be fine.  And the flat +150 armor perk is ridiculously OP.

You can look at the damage curves, and high armor is basically crap because of the minimum damage cap, not to mention that a single torpedo permanently negates armor.  On the other hand, shields are extremely effective, are not negated by a single Sabot, and regenerate very quickly.  I've never even considered Heavy Armor - unlike Hardened Shields, it has a huge detriment, yet only a temporary bonus - and it's a very minor bonus because high armor levels don't actually help you due to the 15% rule.  Hardened Shields help you permanently.  Heavy Armor is more of a hindrance than anything.
« Last Edit: October 08, 2020, 09:31:11 PM by SaberCherry »
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Retry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #3 on: October 08, 2020, 09:56:22 PM »

The damage multiplier to armor is calculated as follows:
Damage multiplier = weapon damage/(armor + weapon damage)

Damage, naturally, would be calculated by the following formula:
Damage Inflicted = Damage Multiplier * Weapon Damage
(I believe weapon damage is calculated after damage bonuses from weapon types (frag/HE/kinetic) are applied, but don't quote me on that)

Harpoons vs fresh Onslaught armor, the specs are:
weapon damage = 750 HE -> 1500 effective (same as a Hellbore btw)
armor = 1750

Damage multiplier = 1500/(1500+1750)=.462
Damage Inflicted = .462*1500=692, Armor remaining (at that location) = 1058 (about Eagle level)

A single harpoon softens a base Onslaught pretty good in one location, but there's still a lot of work to do.


Against an XIV Onslaught (+100 flat) with both Armored Weapon Mounts (+10% base) and Heavy Armor (+400), the calculation is as follows:
Armor = 1750*1.1+100+400=2425
Damage multiplier =1500/(1500+2425)=.382
Damage Inflicted = 573, Armor remaining (at that location) = 1852.

Despite a quite hefty 1500 point hit, the up-armored Onslaught has more armor remaining than the stock version does when pristine.

If the base armor was 4k, as you suggest, it would look something like this:
Armor = 4000
Damage multiplier =1500/(1500+4000)=0.273
Damage Inflicted = 410, Armor remaining (at that location) = 3590

Yikes.  Hope you have either have a couple dozen Reapers lying around or tons of Harpoons.  If not, you may as well walk home.



Well, there's two thoughts I have.

The first is that Shields, Armor, and PD are multiple layers of an overall defense system.  PD attempts to intercept what are usually the most immediately dangerous munitions before they can inflict damage (missiles and torpedos), shields intercept dangerous, often HE-based projectiles and missiles that either get past or can't be intercepted by the PD layer (and also help resist ion weapons which can disable the PD layer), and armor is used to tank shots that would unnecessarily strain the shield layer (kinetics) as well as act as the last line of defense for the ship's squishy interior.  Ideally, no layer should be a complete replacement for the other layers; the (correct) answer to the problem of enemies having and using extremely capable armor crackers should not be piling on yet more armor.

(I suppose you could consider things like speed and maneuverability to be yet another layer, but let's not make this more complicated than it already is, eh?)

The second is increasing armor has a superlinear effect due to the formula; Doubling armor doesn't just mean your armor hitpoints are doubled, it also means you're taking significantly less damage from the same types of strikes.  As such, the armor performance of a ~4k armor Onslaught will be much, much much much higher than "just" 2x that of a ~2k armor Onslaught, especially if you didn't bring enough Reapers to go around, and that's assuming said Reapers don't just get sucked up by shield flickering or Dual Flak PD.

I'm not claiming the Onslaught is the most fantastic Battleship performance-wise, but I really don't think piling on more armor until even dedicated armor-crackers are struggling to do their jobs is the answer to any perceived issues.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #4 on: October 08, 2020, 10:05:22 PM »

Removing the 15% cap would make armor super OP. A pulse laser would do 5 damage to an onslaught. Small ships would be totally unable to do any non-trivial to high armor ships. I could see an argument for a reduction in the armor cap to ~10/7%, but you have to be super careful messing with that, especially when you consider how the balance works with skills. Full armor skills are super strong.

The strong part of armor is that you can absorb damage without increasing your own flux, which lets you win the flux war easily. Selectively block high damage shots with shields and kinetic/low damage with armor is very strong. The whole point of armor is selectively avoiding damage on shields to win individual fights and gain an advantage in the overall fleet battle, and extra armor definitely helps do that. Battles only take a finite amount of time, and you're trying to maximize your performance in that time, not over an arbitrarily long time. If you use your armor to kill the first 30% of the enemy fleet, then you can often steamroll the rest of the fight because you have a numerical advantage.

I think HE torpedos that wreck armor are balanced by their susceptibility to PD and their limited ammo. I also think they need to be very effective against armor because other weapons are completely shut down by high armor. I don't think that is a problem. Armor is very effective against a large portion of weapons, and you can choose to use your shields to stop high damage HE stuff.

I would also argue that a salvo of sabots does negate shields when it overloads you.

The maneuverability penalty on heavy armor is too much though, I agree with that. The extra armor is definitely never bad, it basically just increases the amount of time you get to spend taking 15% damage from most weapons, which is significant.

TBH, I think the armor and flux mechanics are the most well designed part of the game. Maybe some numbers can get tweaked here or there, but overall, the balance is very close IMO.
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SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #5 on: October 08, 2020, 10:37:13 PM »

Removing the 15% cap would make armor super OP. A pulse laser would do 5 damage to an onslaught.
The 15% cap does not need to be removed, but it could be a graduated soft-cap.  Right now, a pulse laser does 15 damage versus 1000 armor, and 15 damage versus 1300 armor.  So heavy armor gives you a slight increase in effective HP and a permanent reduction in maneuverability, which is pretty crucial for heavy-armor ships with no backside defenses.  When would I take heavy armor on an Onslaught?  Never.  But that goes for all other ships too (aside from perhaps phase ships, if they had sufficient OP).
Quote
I would also argue that a salvo of sabots does negate shields when it overloads you.
Yes, absolutely.  It does.  Temporarily.  Then, if the target can retreat behind the line of battle, it doesn't matter anymore.  Not so with armor - if you get nailed with a torpedo, heavy armor or not, you are permanently disabled and can never recover, but you keep all of the downsides.  If you can survive, you're still screwed as even Talons can kill you.  If you survive an overflux, your hardened shields are still 100% useful and have no disadvantage.
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RustyCabbage

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #6 on: October 08, 2020, 11:03:46 PM »

This sounds more like an issue with the Heavy Armor hullmod (which I agree is usually worse than Hardened Shields whenever both are viable choices), rather than the armor mechanics which by-and-large are nicely designed and quite effective at high numbers, as Retry's post illustrates.

Warnoise

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #7 on: October 08, 2020, 11:20:24 PM »

Spoiler
Removing the 15% cap would make armor super OP. A pulse laser would do 5 damage to an onslaught. Small ships would be totally unable to do any non-trivial to high armor ships. I could see an argument for a reduction in the armor cap to ~10/7%, but you have to be super careful messing with that, especially when you consider how the balance works with skills. Full armor skills are super strong.

The strong part of armor is that you can absorb damage without increasing your own flux, which lets you win the flux war easily. Selectively block high damage shots with shields and kinetic/low damage with armor is very strong. The whole point of armor is selectively avoiding damage on shields to win individual fights and gain an advantage in the overall fleet battle, and extra armor definitely helps do that. Battles only take a finite amount of time, and you're trying to maximize your performance in that time, not over an arbitrarily long time. If you use your armor to kill the first 30% of the enemy fleet, then you can often steamroll the rest of the fight because you have a numerical advantage.

I think HE torpedos that wreck armor are balanced by their susceptibility to PD and their limited ammo. I also think they need to be very effective against armor because other weapons are completely shut down by high armor. I don't think that is a problem. Armor is very effective against a large portion of weapons, and you can choose to use your shields to stop high damage HE stuff.

I would also argue that a salvo of sabots does negate shields when it overloads you.

The maneuverability penalty on heavy armor is too much though, I agree with that. The extra armor is definitely never bad, it basically just increases the amount of time you get to spend taking 15% damage from most weapons, which is significant.

TBH, I think the armor and flux mechanics are the most well designed part of the game. Maybe some numbers can get tweaked here or there, but overall, the balance is very close IMO.
[close]
[/spoiler]

Ok 4k might be a little too much, but isn't that what the onslaught supposed to be? With its low flux and obvious weakness to flanking, isn't it supposed to have very high armor on the front to encourage smaller ships to flank? 
Especially ships like onslaught who spend 80% of the time fighting at max flux due to its *** flux stats.

While on paper it sounds op, remember that armor, unlike shields, it doesn't regenerate. Damage piles up pretty quickly (especially by anti armor weapons) So 2k armor gets "consumed" pretty fast in battles. And we all know once armor reaches 0, it is a quick death in most late game battles.

While speed is part of defense, in the current meta, fast ships die way less than armored ships. Because fast ships do their jobs properly whereas ships that are supposed to eat shots, just die without doing much since their armor doesn't protect them from the various anti armor shenanigans that the game has.

This is why players in general prefer high/mid tech ships more than low tech ships. The latter have stats that allow them to do what they are supposed to do.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #8 on: October 08, 2020, 11:48:19 PM »

Quote
I would also argue that a salvo of sabots does negate shields when it overloads you.
Yes, absolutely.  It does.  Temporarily.  Then, if the target can retreat behind the line of battle, it doesn't matter anymore.  Not so with armor - if you get nailed with a torpedo, heavy armor or not, you are permanently disabled and can never recover, but you keep all of the downsides.  If you can survive, you're still screwed as even Talons can kill you.  If you survive an overflux, your hardened shields are still 100% useful and have no disadvantage.
Obviously if you waste the opportunity you create using the sabot by not doing any damage, then the sabot didn't do anything. The whole point of temporary bonuses is that you have to take advantage of the opportunities they create... Sure if you lose your armor and don't achieve anything while doing it, then it was pointless/weak, but you should be killing things while your armor is being depleted, so that when your armor runs out, you've effectively won the fight, or gained a significant advantage. Thats the strength of armor, you get to spend all your flux firing your guns while your enemy has to spend their flux blocking your damage, and that lets you win a bunch of 1v1s, hopefully enough to win the fight. Same with sabots: you create a window of opportunity to cripple or kill your opponent, and you should be able to utilize that to win the fight. If you fail to kill or significantly damage the enemy when they overload, then you've wasted your sabots.

Armor is not a substitute for shields, and it should not be one either. It's a limited resource you get to spend to gain advantages in duels. I think most ships have a little bit less base armor than they could because armor skills are so strong, but skills are getting reworked, so we will have to re-evaluate all that in the next release anyway. 2k armor with a full armor skill officer will definitely last a long while though.

Just because the onslaught has lots of armor and is also a bit weak, doesn't mean that armor is weak... I think the onslaught is generally a bit underpowered, but it would still be at max flux all the time if it had more armor because the TPC's suck up all the dissipation and the AI fires them constantly. That will not be fixed by any change in armor. I don't think low tech is generally worse than other techs. The only systemic problem for low tech is the high fuel cost. The dominator and mora are both very well balanced with other cruisers IMO, and I prefer AI dominator to AI aurora most of the time (aurora is a much better player ship though). The enforce has a similar problem as the onslaught: terrible flux stats, but giving it more armor still won't fix that. The legion only suffers because the carrier AI makes it not utilize its weapons properly.

BTW, your onslaught/dominator should never be eating torpedos unless it has overloaded. Flak+vulcans will create a totally impenetrable PD wall, and selective shielding can stop anything else. If you're not heavily utilizing PD on armor heavy ships, you're making a mistake IMO.

Also, I agreed that the maneuverability penalty on heavy armor was too much? Not sure why that is being argued about.
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Goumindong

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #9 on: October 09, 2020, 02:20:57 AM »

Armor is kind of fine and armor tanking as a primary defense on ships designed for it (and, ideally, with officers) is quite strong.

E.G.  here is me destroying 548 deployment points of ships in a single engagement with an Onslaught without putting my shields up. (Well OK I caught a few reapers on shields,  but as you can see I took like 9k unmodified dmg to shields and 224,000 unmodified dmg to armor and hull (which includes a reaper I ate into armor)

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18810.msg294242#msg294242

I think that the actual problem with armor tanking is that

1) armor tanking ships tend to have front shields and the AI isn’t as good at flickering as it used to be: this means that ships with high armor that would like to take some hits on the armor cannot as easily select which hits to not take on armor. As a result, rather than utilizing their armor to generate a flux advantage they waste their shield until they have no flux advantage and then turn their shield off or overload to die. The issue here is not armor tanking being bad, it’s ships not doing it.

The solution is omni-shields and a more aggressive flux threshold to get the AI to lower shields if the amount of dmg to armor would not be substantial.

This is almost a core design issue because high tech ships get the more advanced “omni shields” while low tech ships get fixed shields. But giving the low tech the omni as makes sense for an armor tanker (just thin and inefficient) leaves few “front shield” ships around.

A couple of secondary solutions here are to make the shield bypass hullmod official. Though maybe have it grant a different bonus compared to what it does now, like capacity or vent speed or a cooldown to a ships active system(boost to ammo recovery). And/or reduce the cost of the omni-Shield conversion. And/or give armor tanking ships very thin omni-shields and give high tech ships more big 360 degree shields that they can omni if they want. If you did it this way you could make the AI Shield tanking vary based on the shield type (omni shields only block high penetration dmg unless flux is very low while front shields stay on unless the ship will overload)

2) you really need ARU and AWM (and IPDAI) in order to keep weapons firing when you’re taking armor/hull damage. If you don’t have these then when you do take armor damage your guns shut off... and then tanking with armor is pointless. This means that armor tanking well is pretty well hid behind a couple of hull mods you may not have. This particularly hurts the small armor tanking ships in the early game since you don’t have time to acquire those mods before the armor on those ships become obsolete.

The solution is maybe to reduce non-ion weapon damage to mounts or make this scale with the amount of armor that is left so that your guns are very unlikely to shut off until your armor is stripped but then about as likely as now.

« Last Edit: October 09, 2020, 02:49:43 AM by Goumindong »
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Arcagnello

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #10 on: October 09, 2020, 02:56:13 AM »

Currently the armor stat isn't useful to be honest. It all takes 1 harpoon salvo to destroy the hardest armor (onslaught).

Also, there are so many tools that make armor kind of useless (this is why low tech ships are least popular)

I feel that armor should be higher overall on ships that have poor shielding (for example Onslaught armor up to 4k?) That way, even without shield, it still can eat many shots before crumbling.

Also armor related hullmods should be better imo. A +% based armor mod instead of flat bonus in armor would be a great asset for ships that are naturally armored.

Some mods added an amazing function for armor, and that is a detacheable armor, like a sort of independent module attached to the ship that needs to be destroyed before it reaches the ship's armor.

So what do you guys think about the current armor system?

I respectfully disagree.

Armor is a vital addition to anything bigger than a destroyer and in some cases will make a difference between being able to survive an emergency venting or an unexpected overload or not. If a Paragon's overloaded it's most likely in its death throes, if a XIV Onslaught is overloaded it's just tuesday  ::)

Seriously speaking tough, it does not seem like anyone else said this but 5% of the armor value remains on the hull even after all of it is stripped away. You'd be surprised at how many weapons basically deal 0 damage when you have 75 armor blocking them, even the ones dealing HE damage.
Spoiler
[close]

The main problem with armor is that AI controlled ships are really dumb at using their shield, there is no way for you to instruct ships that have disgustingly good armor to only raise their shields when there are missiles inbound (or if you have very good AA) only when there's high explosive damage on the way, and the only way to truly use the benefits of armor at their fullest was to find a mod that disabled shields for 50% better base flux dissipation. Pretty good on some ships.

There is also a mod wich adds a few extra modspecs and among them is "Integrated Armor" wich raises this leftover armor value from 5 to 10%, up to 200 armor on capitals. It's basically how I am butchering capital after capital in a mod ship (wich is basically an onslaught with an extra large mount and worth 10 more FP, let'z be honest) that litterally has the shield disabled, has 2k armor, retains 200 of it once it's gone and has 35.000 Hullpoints. The ship would never be able to achieve anything close to that with its pathetic, 1.2 ratio, front fixed shield

Spoiler
This is a pair of no shield Prophets (one got disabled along the way) roughly dealing with 15-18 capital ships during a three stage battle


One of them is able to deal with 120 Fleet Points worth of cruisers under AI Control


It also defeats 100 fleet points worth of carriers


Prevails against double Astral


And takes down two Onslaughts out of three at the same time!


And can even barely defeat the strongest ship in the game (the 4 tach lance Paragon) given it's got a good aggressive officer (it unlike the paragon has no 1 hit KO lasers and no 2000 unit range, it's quite bad against long range lasers usually, even with solar shielding)


[close]

Things like fighter craft spam, wich is renowned to be absolutely disgusting against anything that solely relies on shields, can easily be thwarted by a couple of souped up capitals with high armor and point defence AI.

You might feel like armor and maybe even missiles are worse than shields and say, effective long range weapons since they're both finite and have clear drawbacks, but the amount of effort the enemy has to put in to even start dealing damage to you and the ease with wich you can deal davastating damage back using missiles easily closes the power gap. It's just a matter of the AI not handling different kind of ships differently that skews a lot more builds, including armor centric ones.


Edit: This is the mod adding a lot more interesting hullmods, including integrated armor https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18474.0

This is the mod adding the option of permanently disabling shields in exchange of more flux dissipation https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=11018.0


Hmm, I believe the Heavy Armor hullmod should be cheaper or add more armor.

Heavy armor is fine where it is (40 OP) on capitals, but I could see it being made cheaper on things like cruisers, destroyers and frigades since the bonus you're getting from it gets lower and lower the less base armor a ship has.


The problem is the 15%/10% min damage cap.  Without that armor would be fine.  And the flat +150 armor perk is ridiculously OP.

You can look at the damage curves, and high armor is basically crap because of the minimum damage cap, not to mention that a single torpedo permanently negates armor.  On the other hand, shields are extremely effective, are not negated by a single Sabot, and regenerate very quickly.  I've never even considered Heavy Armor - unlike Hardened Shields, it has a huge detriment, yet only a temporary bonus - and it's a very minor bonus because high armor levels don't actually help you due to the 15% rule.  Hardened Shields help you permanently.  Heavy Armor is more of a hindrance than anything.

This I also partly agree with, the damage reduction due to armor should be 10% and there should be no officer skills trasforming something from utterly useless to potentially disgusting like that. The problem with shields is that the AI will litterally eat anything with them, including sabots. Shields might "regenerate" as you say but an overload is a lot more dangerous than having your armor stripped away, not to mention heavy armor + automated repair unit + that one hullmod increasing emp resistance/vent speed is many times more effective at dealing with sabot/bomber/safety ovveride ships spam than any hardened shields could even dream of.

There's also the fact 5% of the original armor value sticks to the hull after it's stripped away, I would honestly buff that up to 7.5% since only a very small amount of ships gain actual benefit from that but it's a good base to fall back to nonetheless.


I Had to put the very vital information you wrote in a spoiler Retry, this text wall of mine is way too long already  :P
Spoiler
The damage multiplier to armor is calculated as follows:
Damage multiplier = weapon damage/(armor + weapon damage)

Damage, naturally, would be calculated by the following formula:
Damage Inflicted = Damage Multiplier * Weapon Damage
(I believe weapon damage is calculated after damage bonuses from weapon types (frag/HE/kinetic) are applied, but don't quote me on that)

Harpoons vs fresh Onslaught armor, the specs are:
weapon damage = 750 HE -> 1500 effective (same as a Hellbore btw)
armor = 1750

Damage multiplier = 1500/(1500+1750)=.462
Damage Inflicted = .462*1500=692, Armor remaining (at that location) = 1058 (about Eagle level)

A single harpoon softens a base Onslaught pretty good in one location, but there's still a lot of work to do.


Against an XIV Onslaught (+100 flat) with both Armored Weapon Mounts (+10% base) and Heavy Armor (+400), the calculation is as follows:
Armor = 1750*1.1+100+400=2425
Damage multiplier =1500/(1500+2425)=.382
Damage Inflicted = 573, Armor remaining (at that location) = 1852.

Despite a quite hefty 1500 point hit, the up-armored Onslaught has more armor remaining than the stock version does when pristine.

If the base armor was 4k, as you suggest, it would look something like this:
Armor = 4000
Damage multiplier =1500/(1500+4000)=0.273
Damage Inflicted = 410, Armor remaining (at that location) = 3590

Yikes.  Hope you have either have a couple dozen Reapers lying around or tons of Harpoons.  If not, you may as well walk home.



Well, there's two thoughts I have.

The first is that Shields, Armor, and PD are multiple layers of an overall defense system.  PD attempts to intercept what are usually the most immediately dangerous munitions before they can inflict damage (missiles and torpedos), shields intercept dangerous, often HE-based projectiles and missiles that either get past or can't be intercepted by the PD layer (and also help resist ion weapons which can disable the PD layer), and armor is used to tank shots that would unnecessarily strain the shield layer (kinetics) as well as act as the last line of defense for the ship's squishy interior.  Ideally, no layer should be a complete replacement for the other layers; the (correct) answer to the problem of enemies having and using extremely capable armor crackers should not be piling on yet more armor.

(I suppose you could consider things like speed and maneuverability to be yet another layer, but let's not make this more complicated than it already is, eh?)

The second is increasing armor has a superlinear effect due to the formula; Doubling armor doesn't just mean your armor hitpoints are doubled, it also means you're taking significantly less damage from the same types of strikes.  As such, the armor performance of a ~4k armor Onslaught will be much, much much much higher than "just" 2x that of a ~2k armor Onslaught, especially if you didn't bring enough Reapers to go around, and that's assuming said Reapers don't just get sucked up by shield flickering or Dual Flak PD.

I'm not claiming the Onslaught is the most fantastic Battleship performance-wise, but I really don't think piling on more armor until even dedicated armor-crackers are struggling to do their jobs is the answer to any perceived issues.
[close]

I've always hated the Onslaught for a number of reasons, mainly because of its fanboys saying it's better than everything else, but it can't be denied that its high armor is by far the best thing about it and makes it just live thru things anything but a Paragon could not survive thru.

As you say, devs better be careful when making heavy armor/no shield builds actually possible (under AI control) in vanilla. Trust me when I tell people that you do NOT want enemy ships with over 2k armor. It can get real ridicolous real quick.


This sounds more like an issue with the Heavy Armor hullmod (which I agree is usually worse than Hardened Shields whenever both are viable choices), rather than the armor mechanics which by-and-large are nicely designed and quite effective at high numbers, as Retry's post illustrates.

I've said this before in another eply but yes, the heavy armor hullmod is not even to be considered in 95% of ships, while hardened shields is universally viable. I do still believe it's more of an issue with the ship AI that will NOT use its trong armor to tank kinetic damage as opposed to always keeping its shield up tough.


« Last Edit: October 09, 2020, 03:00:20 AM by Arcagnello »
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Tartiflette

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #11 on: October 09, 2020, 03:07:42 AM »

I think Armor would be more or less fine if it also added a linear EMP damage reduction. Then you could lower your shield and dish out some damage more consistently, without getting all your offensive firepower immediately negated by a lone ion cannon.

And since it would be a linear defense, high tech ships would be naturally more susceptible to EMP which would fit thematically, and Sabots wouldn't be so overwhelmingly good against low tech.
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Arcagnello

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #12 on: October 09, 2020, 03:12:02 AM »

I think Armor would be more or less fine if it also added a linear EMP damage reduction. Then you could lower your shield and dish out some damage more consistently, without getting all your offensive firepower immediately negated by a lone ion cannon.

And since it would be a linear defense, high tech ships would be naturally more susceptible to EMP which would fit thematically, and Sabots wouldn't be so overwhelmingly good against low tech.

That's something I would get behind, but I would achieve that by raising midline-high tech EMP damage taken by ships (even fighters/bombers maybe? hmm) rather than lowering low tech EMP damage, it could run into balance problems.

You can not only install modspecs massively reducing EMP damage, things like automated repair unit, armored weapon mounts and insulated engine assembly if combined already achieve very impressive results on armor-centric builds, and they're all very cheap too!

Edit: Nice signature by the way, heh.
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Arranging holidays in an embrace with the Starsector is priceless.
The therapist removed my F5 key.

Goumindong

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #13 on: October 09, 2020, 03:19:52 AM »

Damage multiplier = 1500/(1500+1750)=.462
Damage Inflicted = .462*1500=692, Armor remaining (at that location) = 1058 (about Eagle level)

Not quite. (I think)

So you’re generally correct the trick is that each bit of armor is an individual location and when damage is done to a section of armor it isn’t actually done to a section of armor alone.

The point hit takes 50% of the damage and the remaining damage is spread to the surrounding sections (pretty sure this happens after DR is calculated).

So a Hellbore would land for 346 on the immediate section and then spread the remaining 346 around to surrounding sections. Leaving 1404 armor on the relevant section.

I am unsure but it may be the case that explosions (Rather than point dmg sources) do their damage to armor multiple times because they effectively “hit” more than one base section at a time. This is how I think things go simply because harpoons seem to be generally more dangerous than point dmg sources like hellbore and HIL and tachyon lances. Not tonnes since the explosion is small but enough to matter. This is also why a reaper ends up taking away a larger radius when it impacts than a harpoon or Hellbore.  If the first point got 4k of 8 and the surrounding armor got 4 then the surrounding armor would only take 800 dmg and rather there is a huge hole made when impacted by a reaper that is larger across than when armor is penetrated by successive hellbores
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Goumindong

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #14 on: October 09, 2020, 03:28:06 AM »

I think Armor would be more or less fine if it also added a linear EMP damage reduction. Then you could lower your shield and dish out some damage more consistently, without getting all your offensive firepower immediately negated by a lone ion cannon.

And since it would be a linear defense, high tech ships would be naturally more susceptible to EMP which would fit thematically, and Sabots wouldn't be so overwhelmingly good against low tech.

If armor reduced dmg from EMP then it would not help and it would neuter the value of EMP. Weapons are more often shut down by normal damage than EMP on armored ships so this is the more important angle to attack.

Additionally EMP damage, if it could only be effectively applied when a ship was already dead, would lose its purpose. If you already did 1k+ dmg to the weapon mounts as you went through the armor the ability to just now shut the weapons off with your EMP is not terribly valuable. They would already be off and you would be killing the ship
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