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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating  (Read 1247 times)

Brainwright

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New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« on: August 05, 2022, 07:47:04 AM »

Some of the recent discussions have got me thinking about how some of the slower ships that rely on shields have a glaring weakness in their design.  While their lower flux stats require dropping shields to dissipate hard flux, they do not have the armor to take very many hits before receiving grievous hull damage.

Frankly, shield mods are of dubious help here, as they tend to merely extend the time before the ship is overloaded.  This can be helpful in two evenly matched fleets, but against most pirate swarms, your own fleet is spread out to the point they become easy targets for roving Falcons and Eradicators delivering a sudden dose of hard flux at the wrong time.  This just gets worse against Remnant fleets, where everything is fast and assassin-ish.

So a mod that might help is placing a sizeable chunk of armor in the forward 90 degree arc.  So far as I can tell, armor is evenly distributed on most ships and it would be rather useful if you could favor certain arcs.  As it stands, there seems to be a break point where a certain amount of armor either gets shredded by a few seconds under graviton beams or it's reliably able to soak a couple of mauler vollies before folding.

Getting some of these slower ships to the point where they can feasibly stand on the front line would make things a lot less of a headache.
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Grievous69

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #1 on: August 05, 2022, 11:11:00 AM »

before receiving grievous hull damage
Please capitalize my name if you plan on mentioning it, smh rude.

But the actual suggestion sounds very interesting, wonder if the AI is already pretty much suited for that (except broadside ships).

But on the other hand, I think there's enough "tanking" hullmods in the game. And then you have skills on top of that so imo we need to be careful. Don't want to make certain ships annoyingly hard to kill.
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TaLaR

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #2 on: August 05, 2022, 11:21:59 AM »

You are not supposed to just take hits for nothing. AI often does, but this AI problem more than anything else.

As a player on low tech ship you should aim to intentionally trade armor for flux advantage, and secure the kill (otherwise the flux advantage you paid for was wasted). And use shield flickering to be selective at it too, catching most HE/big energy shots, while letting kinetics and small energy hits through.

Ships like Onslaught/etc have already enough incentive to try and keep enemies in front, adding powerful front armor mod doesn't change anything except making them stronger.
« Last Edit: August 05, 2022, 11:27:35 AM by TaLaR »
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BigBrainEnergy

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #3 on: August 05, 2022, 11:37:32 AM »

From the "frequently made suggestions" thread on the topic of directional armour:


Quote
There should be of differing armor strength on the different parts of a ships hull.

Spoiler
Hello! : )

Varying armor strength sounds like an obvious design choice, after all its only realistic. There are some compelling reasons why it is not in the game, though.
Here's the argumentation of the developer:

Quote
This idea does come up a fair bit. The reason it's not in the game, well... let's take a look at what ships would be prime candidates for it, conceptually.

Anything with lots of front-facing firepower is a decent match at first glance. So, the Dominator, the Onslaught, maybe the Hammerhead/Eagle/Falcon. Perhaps a few other ships. Note that most of these (all the ones listed, at any rate) already have front shields. Combined with frontal-focused firepower and engines being in the back, it's already a great idea to flank them.

So, gameplay wise, what would this actually change? It'd either make the ships tougher from the front (which you could easily do within the existing framework by adjusting the shield stats) or make them even more vulnerable from the back (which isn't a good thing - they're already very vulnerable.

To top it off, ships aren't exactly like tanks. They're more like, well, ships. The nature of the combat means that hits to the back are at least as likely as hits to the front in anything other than a 1-1. A ship designer would probably go through great pains to make the engine section of a front-shielded ship as durable as possible - that's the Achilles heel of a large ship, after all.

The current system serves its role - rewarding surgical fire my making repeated hits to the same area more effective. Varying armor by location... well, I'm not going to say it would flat out be a bad thing. But at the same time, I don't see what compelling gameplay it brings to the table, and it does bring complexity. All this information would have to be conveyed to the player somehow.


As a general advice: It is a good idea to use the search function (upper right corner) to see if anyone posted a similar suggestion before ;)
[close]

I think the original suggestion was about giving ships directional armour in general, maybe a hullmod would be different in Alex's eyes but I'm not so sure.
« Last Edit: August 05, 2022, 11:39:24 AM by BigBrainEnergy »
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Ruddygreat

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #4 on: August 05, 2022, 12:26:45 PM »

hmmm, this could be interesting, though it comes with (many) technical problems (that I've already run into because I tried to make effectively this exact thing :P)

as the armour system currently works, the only two ways to distribute armour like this are to increase the overall armour of the ship then reduce armour in unnafected areas (may cause ai shenanigans due to "undamaged" areas being at low armour from the start of a battle) or to make the affected area take less damage, which will definitely cause AI shenanigans.
it would also be incredibly impractical to figure out what the "front" of a given ship is (provided that the hmod is modular), there's not really a feasible one size fits all solution for vanilla- let alone the modiverse- so it would involve a lot of manually defining where the front of a ship is for a single hullmod, which is plain unreasonable.

Brainwright

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #5 on: August 05, 2022, 07:49:14 PM »

But on the other hand, I think there's enough "tanking" hullmods in the game. And then you have skills on top of that so imo we need to be careful. Don't want to make certain ships annoyingly hard to kill.

The intent is to use this on ships like the Sunder or Colossus Mk II, that neither have great shields nor decent armor.

From the "frequently made suggestions" thread on the topic of directional armour:


Quote
There should be of differing armor strength on the different parts of a ships hull.

Spoiler
Hello! : )

Varying armor strength sounds like an obvious design choice, after all its only realistic. There are some compelling reasons why it is not in the game, though.
Here's the argumentation of the developer:

Quote
This idea does come up a fair bit. The reason it's not in the game, well... let's take a look at what ships would be prime candidates for it, conceptually.

Anything with lots of front-facing firepower is a decent match at first glance. So, the Dominator, the Onslaught, maybe the Hammerhead/Eagle/Falcon. Perhaps a few other ships. Note that most of these (all the ones listed, at any rate) already have front shields. Combined with frontal-focused firepower and engines being in the back, it's already a great idea to flank them.

So, gameplay wise, what would this actually change? It'd either make the ships tougher from the front (which you could easily do within the existing framework by adjusting the shield stats) or make them even more vulnerable from the back (which isn't a good thing - they're already very vulnerable.

To top it off, ships aren't exactly like tanks. They're more like, well, ships. The nature of the combat means that hits to the back are at least as likely as hits to the front in anything other than a 1-1. A ship designer would probably go through great pains to make the engine section of a front-shielded ship as durable as possible - that's the Achilles heel of a large ship, after all.

The current system serves its role - rewarding surgical fire my making repeated hits to the same area more effective. Varying armor by location... well, I'm not going to say it would flat out be a bad thing. But at the same time, I don't see what compelling gameplay it brings to the table, and it does bring complexity. All this information would have to be conveyed to the player somehow.


As a general advice: It is a good idea to use the search function (upper right corner) to see if anyone posted a similar suggestion before ;)
[close]

I think the original suggestion was about giving ships directional armour in general, maybe a hullmod would be different in Alex's eyes but I'm not so sure.

There are shield tanks and there are armor tanks, but then there are ships that are neither.  The Falcon is an obvious shield tank, but that's because it's fast enough to disengage ships of its class (a core feature of shield tanks, flux stats aren't the primary focus).  The Eagle, however, suffers from being almost one or the other.  Honestly, it doesn't need a mod like this to be effective, but a mod like this would make it better able to dig in to a fight and retreat. 

An overload doesn't usually give a ship a chance to really lose flux, so it has to soak hits on armor before it gets to that.  This gets so much worse on things like the Mule or Gemini.

Really, adding forward armor with less OP and no maneuverability penalty is more useful than the Heavy Armor mod.  The all around increased armor doesn't translate to better survivability, since their armor is so poor.  Rather than dump OP into something that's supposed to make good armor or shield ships great, you need something that works on ships without good armor or good shields.

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Grievous69

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #6 on: August 05, 2022, 11:45:10 PM »

Not every ship needs to be good at handling damage. The whole point of the Sunder is that it's a glass cannon.
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Brainwright

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #7 on: August 06, 2022, 07:32:05 AM »

You're not even talking to me.

I'm talking about not folding as soon as you drop shields.  Buying a few extra seconds in combat.
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SCC

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #8 on: August 06, 2022, 07:46:13 AM »

I think that a better question is, do these slow, shield-tanking ships need a buff? Do Sunders and Colossuses Mk II need to be better? Do Apogees?

Brainwright

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #9 on: August 06, 2022, 08:19:34 AM »

I think that a better question is, do these slow, shield-tanking ships need a buff? Do Sunders and Colossuses Mk II need to be better? Do Apogees?

The best question is : does the current suite of mods address how these ships actually work?  The answer is no.
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Drazan

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #10 on: August 07, 2022, 10:57:29 AM »

I kinda have the feeling that nowadays threads spiral into bashing Eagle instead of Conqueror :D
« Last Edit: August 07, 2022, 12:35:47 PM by Drazan »
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Igncom1

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #11 on: August 07, 2022, 11:18:39 AM »

If I was to make a suggestion based on Armour it would be to make repairing a ships armour after a battle, free. Bringing limited armour to a battle closer to the role that shields play in preventing damage to the hull.

And then to make repairing a ships hull the main cost after battles.
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Retry

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Re: New Mod : Heavy Forward Plating
« Reply #12 on: August 07, 2022, 01:47:41 PM »

Initially I thought the OP was referring to the Paragon, and I was a bit confused, as that Cap still has pretty solid armor despite being an obvious (and slow) shield tank.

Seeing Sunders & Colossus IIs called out specifically, I think there's a lack of understanding on them fundamentally.  Neither of them are "shield tanks" and in fact have pretty poor shields for their type: Sunders have one of the worst shield efficiencies in the game at 1.2 flux/damage, and the Colossus II just has too poor flux stats (both dissipation and capacity) to be tanking anything.  Neither of these rely heavily on shielding to survive (not like a shield tank does, at least), rather they both use heavy firepower (and in Sunder's case, range) to kill or at least ward off other things before they die.  Since Sunders have, or can acquire, a considerable range advantage over most other destroyers (Beam loadout), they can accomplish this more easily than Colossus IIs.  Of course, a Sunder can't surprise you with 20 Hammers to the rear arc, either.
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