Well, hrmm.
I know there are a few things that can crack that kind of armor; even with a level-zero character, I can kill a single Annihilator with a Conquest, no real problems, and an Annihilator has 6500 Armor.
I agree that part of the issue is how Armor interacts with hits; part of the issue is that Armor damage negation can result in zero damage (unlike Shields, where it's locked down, I think, to some low-but-meaningful minimum). I found that out when I developed Neutronium Plating; you can create ships that are
invulnerable if their "natural" rating is high enough.
But that shouldn't be happening here, so what's going on is Armor regen rates going above the levels required to ever defeat them.
But that doesn't make sense. Let's do the math, here:
maxArmorDamageReduction is 0.85, so we're talking 85% damage reduction on a "fresh" armor cell.
Then add in Heavy Armor, 50% reduction.
Then add in the Glaug's version of Armor Regeneration, so that's 35% damage.
So... 1 * 0.15 * 0.5 * 0.35 = 0.02625 of normal damage, or roughly 3%. Nowhere near zero, but low.
If we fire a Plasma Blaster at that armor, then we're doing (base value, no Hull Mods) 1750 damage to that cell.
If we have 3000 Armor overall, and each cell is 1/15th that value, we have 200 Armor in the cell after that hit. 1750 * 0.02625 = 45.9375, after all the reductions.
At
max, a Cruiser like a Crusher would be repairing 60 Armor / second. So it can and would defeat a single Plasma Blaster at that point. Makes sense, and that's more-or-less how it should work; it should defeat a lot of Armor attacks.
But it doesn't work that way, when I test it out; I'm obviously missing something here about how the reduction works.
Higher armor cell values clearly have a larger benefit than lighter ones do; this is why the
Cleaver, when it had Neutronium Plating, was disproportionately harder to kill than any other Destroyers.
So there must be an additional issue here. If we're taking hits from a HIL, that's 4500(!) damage / second. Well over the 60 Armor / second regeneration rate, which is a flat rate. Yet you're showing ships taking
zero damage from HILs there. I presume there's another factor here- probably you have the Combat skill that reduces damage taken. If yes, then that would explain what's going on; I know that that reduction can be a bit problematic, because it's on top of the rest of the bonus tree and tends to cross that line where certain things that were fine are suddenly not-fine.
But before I get concerned about that, I'll go test a HIL vs. a Glaug ship in the sim with a zero-level character and make sure that yes, it can do damage like it should. If not, then there's something else wrong here, but if yes, then I just need to drop that final skill-based bonus vs. damage, because it's breaking stuff very badly- it probably also makes Neutronium Plating basically invulnerable, too.
<tests>
Double-hmm.
One HIL (118 Armor damage / second, with the above as our guide) can't
ever quite break a Glaug carrier's defense, which is regenerating, at maximum, 65 Armor / second. It's not doing zero damage; damage figures are piling up, and they're consistent with the theory. So... erm... there must be more to it than that. Other cells around it must also be reducing the damage.
Soooo, that must be the formula laid out quite long ago, which we still don't have real numbers for:
It's a little involved. Don't have the code in front of me, but each armor "cell" has roughly 1/8th of the armor rating worth of hitpoints. Damage reduction is based on a contribution from nearby cells - not just adjacent, a bit farther than that, though the farther off cells contibute less. What armor rating means is how much damage to armor you need to do (after reducton), shooting at a single point, before any damage at all gets through to the hull.
The actual formula is:
actual damage = base damage * base damage / (armor value + base damage)
The actual damage is then applied to armor cells contributing to the armor value, so subsequent hits to the same spot do more damage.
So a hit for 200 points of damage vs armor 200 will be reduced by 50%, and apply 100 points of damage to the armor. The next 200 point hit to the same cell will be reduced by 33% - 200 * 200 / (200 + 100).
So the amount of reduction from all of the other cells must reduce the damage below the regen rate.
This must be why bigger ships, with more cells, are effectively invulnerable with Armor Regeneration on, while with smaller ships, a heavy weapon hit hurts them quite easily.
How to address that? Kind of hard, without having something a little more solid to work with; Alex's answer on that is pretty vague.
Probably what I should do is get the number of cells and process the regen based on that, so that ship size doesn't change how effective Armor Regeneration really is per cell relative to incoming damage. I think that's a large part of this mess; Armor values don't just serve as buffer hitpoints, they also reduce damage according to a formula we don't know.
Oh, and as for the philosophical stuff... the issue here isn't whether it's cool to have Heroic elements where we can buff ships up and be Chuck Norris in a spacecraft. The issue is making sure that it never ever quite reaches the point where you're complacently devastating whole fleets of the AI without a care. I don't actually think it's quite like that atm, but it depends on which Faction you're fighting and what ship you're flying.
It's not really working right, though; what I've found in my practical testing is that there's a world of difference between putting Armor Regeneration on, say, an Enforcer with the 50% Armor bonus from Tech + player buffs vs. putting it on a zero-level Frigate. For one of these ships, it may provide a way to regenerate if you escape without getting insta-slaughtered... for the other one, it's basically invulnerability vs. anything up to the heaviest weapons in the game. So clearly I need to debuff it based on the number of armor cells, but I'm not quite sure what formula will arrive at a reasonable value; I know what targets I want to hit, in terms of regen vs. damage taken, but I'm not quite sure how to achieve them without either ending up with regen that's basically worthless, because it's letting too much damage through, vs. something that's comically OP. I'll look further into this when I have more time.