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.
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)
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=18474.0This is the mod adding the option of permanently disabling shields in exchange of more flux dissipation
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=11018.0Hmm, 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
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.
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.