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Author Topic: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it  (Read 11013 times)

SCC

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #45 on: October 09, 2020, 03:58:26 PM »

Increasing armour with hullmods already increases the residual armour (5% of a bigger number is bigger, too).

This currently does not happen effectively, since mitigation is inherently low and once armor is stripped, effectively zero on low-armor ships.
If it weren't for Impact Mitigation 1, armour would be pretty important even after getting it stripped completely. Currently, low-tech ships can effectively have 2-3 times as much HP against lower damage attacks, but the issue is that AI doesn't really know how to exploit it well and it just drags the fight on.

SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #46 on: October 09, 2020, 04:05:19 PM »

Could be radical, but why even have armour be reduced when taking damage? Onslaughts might be invulnerable to all but the biggest HE weapons, but that could be cool. Like the "paragon" of armour tanking.
I half-agree, and I think my "lossy armor" suggestion serves the spirit of that without the downside of armor boats becoming invincible.  Currently high armor gives armor*6.66 HP in damage absorption, while low armor gives more like armor*1 HP.  With lossy armor, all armor would be useful and extra armor for high-armor ships - which is currently mediocre - would actually become useful.  And for low-armor ships, increasing armor would actually increase damage mitigation, which it currently does not do, effectively.

It's critical for armor to be reduced when hit, so eliminating that mechanic is a no-go.  But the rest is negotiable.

That's actually a really good approach and it's got me thinking.

What if we raise the residual armor value to a stock 10% and expensive armor retrofits like Heavy armor actually increase both armor and residual armor percentage?

If the detriment were removed and Heavy Armor made cheaper, plus HA increasing residual armor fraction, I'd definitely take it sometimes.  Except for the fact that Impact Mitigation 1 makes residual armor completely irrelevant for any ship with a captain.  Armor is still slightly useful on ships without captains, but those are the ships you don't care about.
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Arcagnello

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #47 on: October 09, 2020, 04:16:02 PM »

Spoiler
If the detriment were removed and Heavy Armor made cheaper, plus HA increasing residual armor fraction, I'd definitely take it sometimes.  Except for the fact that Impact Mitigation 1 makes residual armor completely irrelevant for any ship with a captain.  Armor is still slightly useful on ships without captains, but those are the ships you don't care about.
[close]

Armor-related skills truly need a revamp as they either don't make sense or make the already iffy armor modspecs redundant. Not even my 35k HP 50FP flagship that's able to defeat a quad lance paragon without a shield uses heavy armor and that's saying something.

Also, I did a pretty sizeable edit to the post you quoted, it's a bad habit of mine to think up more stuff to say after I post a comment, sorry  :-\
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SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #48 on: October 09, 2020, 04:27:53 PM »

Spoiler
If the detriment were removed and Heavy Armor made cheaper, plus HA increasing residual armor fraction, I'd definitely take it sometimes.  Except for the fact that Impact Mitigation 1 makes residual armor completely irrelevant for any ship with a captain.  Armor is still slightly useful on ships without captains, but those are the ships you don't care about.
[close]

Armor-related skills truly need a revamp as they either don't make sense or make the already iffy armor modspecs redundant. Not even my 35k HP 50FP flagship that's able to defeat a quad lance paragon without a shield uses heavy armor and that's saying something.

Also, I did a pretty sizeable edit to the post you quoted, it's a bad habit of mine to think up more stuff to say after I post a comment, sorry  :-\
No problem, I post and then edit frequently until I'm satisfied, so quotes rarely reflect the final state anyway.  I'm happy as long as people read it.  Your posts are worth reading, BTW.
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Arcagnello

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #49 on: October 09, 2020, 04:35:54 PM »

Spoiler
Spoiler
If the detriment were removed and Heavy Armor made cheaper, plus HA increasing residual armor fraction, I'd definitely take it sometimes.  Except for the fact that Impact Mitigation 1 makes residual armor completely irrelevant for any ship with a captain.  Armor is still slightly useful on ships without captains, but those are the ships you don't care about.
[close]

Armor-related skills truly need a revamp as they either don't make sense or make the already iffy armor modspecs redundant. Not even my 35k HP 50FP flagship that's able to defeat a quad lance paragon without a shield uses heavy armor and that's saying something.

Also, I did a pretty sizeable edit to the post you quoted, it's a bad habit of mine to think up more stuff to say after I post a comment, sorry  :-\
No problem, I post and then edit frequently until I'm satisfied, so quotes rarely reflect the final state anyway.  I'm happy as long as people read it.  Your posts are worth reading, BTW.
[/quote
[close]
It's mostly due to me writing from a phone really, I see so little of the entirety of the post I write at a time that I assume everything I say is complete and self sufficient while in actuality what I have written only partly replies to what I'm quoting or what I want to talk about  :o

Thank you for the compliment by the way!

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Alex

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #50 on: October 09, 2020, 05:35:10 PM »

Generally speaking, those kinds of committed decisions are hard for the AI to do well (you have to reliably predict that not only will you "win" the next few seconds, but that you'll also be able to capitalize on it!), and I think are usually best left in the hands of the player.

Well no, I don’t think this is the case. ...

It shouldn’t be that hard to get close. For any incoming projectile a check is made to see if the damage inflicted upon armor would be higher than the base 15% minimum armor damage. If it would be then shields are raised to deal with that projectile, overriding other projectiles which would suggest lowering shields. There is another override check on whether or not hull damage would be taken (raise shields) and whether or not the fight was overwhelming (raise shields) and overriding all of that would be the current behavior at high flux.

Consider how that might play out in a fairly typical engagement where a weaker high-tech ship will dart in, trade, and back out when its flux is high, vs a low-tech target.

And the “lowering shields in the face of underwhelming firepower” is also the wrong action like always so this exacerbates things*.

*the reason it’s wrong is because if incoming dmg is weak and the enemy is overwhelmed then shields have little to zero cost of being raised.

It *vents* in the face of of underwhelming firepower. It doesn't lower shields because of it. If you want to vent, keeping shields up has the cost of, uh, not venting :)

It’s also why ships will accidentally turn their shields off right before an enemy ship explodes, causing them to eat the explosion damage.

(That's entirely unrelated, btw. There was an issue with estimating the blast radius.)
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Warnoise

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #51 on: October 09, 2020, 05:54:25 PM »

(for example Onslaught armor up to 4k?)
Ok 4k might be a little too much, but isn't that what the onslaught supposed to be?
For example on an onslaught you need:

I'm beginning to see a bit of a pattern.  Is this really about armor, or is this about the Onslaught's performance specifically?

Uhhh I am using onslaught as an example because it is the only vanilla ship designed as an armor tank?
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Linnis

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #52 on: October 09, 2020, 06:12:33 PM »

Like Intrinsic_ said earlier in the topic. Armour tanking when used by players is overpowered. Toggling shield only for a fraction of a second to stop a heavy mauler shot or torpedoes means you will win the flux war every time. The problem is armour is not useful in AI hands as they don't use it to its full potential.

That's why that hullmod from a mod that removes shields from ships is overpowered when put on AI ships.

I feel like this whole thread can be simplified into either (A) AI don't use armour to its advantage thus armour sucks. (B) Armor should stack better when going into extreme values, though only really applicable to onslaught or stations.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #53 on: October 09, 2020, 06:15:48 PM »

@Goumindong
RE: discussion of armor and the flux war

I will comment that a key assumption of the flux battle analysis was that ships fight to the death always. That guarantees that spending armor will result in a flux advantage and eventually a kill. The concern when that assumption breaks is that the AI will spend armor to gain an advantage in the flux war, but then the enemy will escape/vent and the armor will be wasted. A perfect AI actually needs to identify situations where it can successfully spend armor to win the flux war and deal damage/kill. I think I understand Alex's reasoning: this is actually a very difficult judgement, and making the AI use armor as a defensive resource when flux is high ensures that the armor will get some value in allowing for a retreat/escape or extended engagement. Maybe a better solution still exists, but you definitely don't want the AI wasting all it's armor when it can't get much benefit either. I think you do definitely want the AI to use shields at lower flux to avoid slowly getting armor chipped down while never achieving anything.

I actually think the current AI behavior can be good at exploiting itself too. If you put an aggressive AI in a dominator, it will lets its flux get very high, then drop shields. The enemy AI will think that it has a big flux advantage because your flux is high and try to push in for a kill, but it's actually just dumping damage into armor while the dominator is getting its hits in as well. Maybe it would work if the flux level required to drop shields was lower when armor was higher. Like if the armor is nearly full, then drop shields at 60% flux instead of 95% flux.

Personally, I think Onslaughts are OK.  It's armor mechanics and heavy armor that I have problems with.  Onslaught is a useful illustrative example, though, because it has extremely high armor and bad shields.  And even for Onslaught, a single tier-1 skill will totally eclipse its stripped armor performance, making it worse than the stripped armor mitigation of a Kite with a level-1 Captain.
This isn't really accurate though. Stripped armor performance is a multiplier on hull HP and the onslaught has waaaay more hull, so the stripped armor on the un-officered onslaught will still provide waaaaay more effective HP than the officered kites stripped armor. The onslaught gets an additional ~10000 HP vs a 100 dmg weapon from its 87.5 residual armor while the kite gets an additional 276 HP from its 165 residual armor with IM1. There's no comparison, the kite takes an extra 3 pulse laser shots to kill while the onslaught takes an extra 100+ pulse laser shots to kill beyond the number of shots to kill the bare hull on each ship. Residual armor works fine.

Uhhh I am using onslaught as an example because it is the only vanilla ship designed as an armor tank?
The dominator exists. I think it is an excellent example of a ship that is fairly balanced against other ships of its size while relying on high armor for a significant portion of its defense. The mora is also a decent example, and maybe the legion if it didn't play like a terrified carrier all the time.
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SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #54 on: October 09, 2020, 06:20:32 PM »

I feel like this whole thread can be simplified into either (A) AI don't use armour to its advantage thus armour sucks. (B) Armor should stack better when going into extreme values, though only really applicable to onslaught or stations.
You forgot (C) Heavy Armor is bad because it has a huge disadvantage and a temporary advantage for a big OP cost while Hardened Shields and Reinforced Bulkheads are both better, cheaper, and strictly positive.
and
(D) Armor-tanking shuts down your weapons, so you need a bunch of hullmods to mitigate that.
and
...well, whatever, you're ignoring the thread.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #55 on: October 09, 2020, 07:29:43 PM »

Armor is great already. High Armor is already massively better than low armor due to the 5% rule.
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SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #56 on: October 09, 2020, 08:38:16 PM »

Armor is great already. High Armor is already massively better than low armor due to the 5% rule.
...unless you have Impact Mitigation 1, which makes it irrelevant.  But I agree that armor (on un-captained ships) is most relevant once it's been stripped, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
« Last Edit: October 09, 2020, 08:40:08 PM by SaberCherry »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #57 on: October 09, 2020, 09:36:10 PM »

Armor is great already. High Armor is already massively better than low armor due to the 5% rule.
...unless you have Impact Mitigation 1, which makes it irrelevant.  But I agree that armor (on un-captained ships) is most relevant once it's been stripped, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
This is a significant exaggeration. For a pulse laser, onslaught armor takes 102 shots to penetrate, and then the hull with 5% armor takes an additional 375 shots penetrate. The hull without 5% armor would take 200 shots to penetrate so the onslaught base armor is worth about ~27700 hit points vs a pulse laser. If you add IM1, armor takes 109 shots to penetrate, and the hull takes a total of 675 shots to penetrate (475 more than straight hull). So with IM1, the armor is worth ~58400 hit points. That means IM1 approximately doubles the effective HP due to armor of an onslaught vs a pulse laser. That hardly means the base armor is irrelevant.

IM1 is definitely very powerful (possibly overpowered), but base armor is still very significant.
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SaberCherry

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #58 on: October 09, 2020, 10:02:12 PM »

Base armor is very significant on the ship with the highest armor in the game, for which IM1 is least relevant, and even then IM1 is what decides damage once armor is stripped, rather than base armor.  On other ships with less armor, IM1 is even more important.
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SCC

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Re: There should be some ways to make having high armor worth it
« Reply #59 on: October 10, 2020, 01:20:11 AM »

It's worth noting that IM1 replaces stripped armour value, instead of adding to it.
For the time being, I hope Alex considers removing manoeuvrability penalty from Heavy Armour. Maybe cut the OP cost a bit, too.
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