Improved armor model thoughts
 

I’ve been thinking how to get armor to work more in the “classic” sense where ships of a size class have armor that is hard for smaller ships to penetrate, and how this could be made to work within the SE construct.

The simple answer is to mod an internal ship component that has “emissive” ability but not name it as armor, and then match the amount of emissive ability to the size of the ship to give a roughly comparable WWII armor ability. This would allow the emissive ability to not be automatically scrubbed off on the first shot, but would (then) imbalance the armor penetrating type of weapons, so there are some problems. But this approach is really a stretch and you still have the rather unrealistic issue that if the component is hit, the armor is thereafter removed. Something of a glass jaw type of armor.

Next I thought of another approach. Armor should be basically a chunk of material that deflects (ballistic) shots without sustaining damage, or if it is penetrated it should not be entirely blasted away. An armored ship should remain armored right up to the point it is destroyed. Currently, armor can be easily scrubbed off in the game if that is the area that is the component that is randomly selected to be hit. This lead me to a second method of simulating armor: adding emissive capability to hull designs [ie: a part of the vehicle size.txt file] themselves. My concept is all hulls destroyer sized and smaller would not have any inherent emissive armor. The light cruiser would have something like emissive armor of value of 15, the Cruiser would have emissive armor of, say, 30, the battle cruiser 45, the battleship 60, and the Dreadnaught 90.. This is a more realistic approach compared to an internal component with emissive capability since the armor of the ship is matched to the size of the hull. The nice thing to this approach is that it remains all within existing game mechanics and will be AI friendly.

Has anybody tried a mod along these lines? See any balance / other issues?

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

Personally, I think this is going in the wrong direction. It makes small ships even more useless than they are in stock already. With such a system, only big ships are going to be able to do appreciable damage to other big ships, while the big ships will still be able to destroy small ships without breaking a sweat. That's my opinion, anyways.

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

As fyron said. Godzilla size balance issues.

Leaky armor is the way to go...
With a proper implementation, the leaky armor dosen't degrade very much per hit, and blocks most hits. Occasional damage to internals with the rate dependent on the amount of armor.

Also, in space, you don't sink. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
With the leaky armor, ships get disabled long before you vaporize the last slabs of armor on the burned out skeleton, leaving you with lots of twisted wrecks floating in space after a big battle http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

I've tried something similar but when I put the emissive ability on the hulls I went with Hull Size/100 for civilian ships (colony ships and transports), (HS/100)*2 for military ships, and (HS/100)*3 for bases. To help keep smaller ships useful (and for balance) I added to each ships defensive bonus ( an additional + 80 for an escort, +70 for a frigate, ect.) I then added the same amount as a to hit bonus for each ship. This makes it so that two ships of the same hull size have an average (or normal) chance to hit each other but a dreadnought has an extremely hard time hitting the escort that can pound him at will. I compounded these things with high combat move bonus for smaller ships that decreased with size.

In my play testing this system seemed to balance everything out nicely and you wind up with a lot of useful specialized ship designs of varying sizes throughout the game.

Comments?

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

Hmmh, something for SEV maybe http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif or SEVI i'd think you could also make small ships armored like hell, as in a small flying (floating?) piece of metal sith a little crew innit http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

Those things would be VERY dangerous, especially if you either
-use a Destroyer sized ship or something or
-mod in small warhead components.
The fast, tough little ships that are hard to hit can be a real threat to the massive warships as the smaller ships can dart in at a Dreadnought or something, and then ram it for a lot of damage. What you could also do is design a Frigate with one or two warheads, the command & control components, the max amount of engines and then fill it up with (emissive) armor. They could be produced in droves as a result of their small cost, and would be extremely effective defenses against orbital bomber raids, as orbital bombers tend to be big ships. Say, three Battleships with Planetary Napalm and an escort Dreadnought with anti-ship weapons (and a to-hit offense and defense penalty) enter orbit over one of your planets with these defenses. You swarm the escort DN's defenses, and completely obliterate it, leaving the orbital bombers very vulnerable to not only the ramming ships (which you could also choose to save for another fight), but also to defense stations and/or satellites and fighters.

Hmm..... gotta put this in Capship..... small kamikaze ships that are more lethal to a Dreadnought-sized ship than a COMCA, while the large capships are the only ships truly capable of attacking planetary defenses.....

But you know, the first thing that sprang to mind after reading your original post was "Leaky Armor". It'll do pretty much what you say you want.

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

You do have a point, and very good one at that. A quick way to balance things out would be to make the smaller ships cheap to build but expensive to maintain and the opposite for the larger ships (an idea that has been bandied about around here for a while now.) This would also have the added benefit of slowing down expansion at the beginning of the game, you'd have to build up your infrastructure before you could afford to expand too far.

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

I like this approach, this is going in an interesting direction.

But upon reflection on your concept I think I’d make a small change: A ship's agility should not really give it that much advantage to hit. The speed of a guns's tracking and computing / processing capability (aka: fire control system) is what gives them the ability to hit smaller / faster moving targets. With your approach the big ships would never have a chance at hitting small ships, which is actually a characteristic of their GUNS, not the hulls they are mounted on.

Alternate Solution: Give the Guns, not the hulls, the plus to hit. Give the normal, un-modded guns a large bonus to hit equal to the defensive bonus of the average small ship (frigate). Give the larger guns comparable minus to hit that you are presently using for the cruiser hull in your example (for the large guns) or Battleships (for their guns) or to Dreadnaughts (for massive guns) to represent their slower tracking and difficulty in hitting smaller ships.

I think that this would lead to more variety in capital ship design. Large guns would be good for killing other large ships, but perform poorly against small escorts. Small guns, on the other hand, would be good for dealing with escorts, but not well suited for handling the larger ships extensive ability to absorb damage (with the emissive armor).

This would lead to several interesting design considerations: You could put in only large guns on the capital ships and risk being vulnerable to smaller ships (and would probably want to have smaller escorts to deal with the smaller ships), a mix of large and small guns (the classic navy approach of main and secondary batteries) for a take-all-comers design, or you could go all small guns similar to the “flack cruisers” of WWII for a ship that is deadly to smaller ships but as much of a threat to larger ships.

Thoughts?

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

1) The AI may have some difficulty with mounts that have downsides. They will always use the last mount in the list.

2) Beware the overpowered Stock mounts.
I suggest, as a maximum, +50% damage/kt on your very largest mount.

3) In carrier battles mod, I have the weapons range from around 2kt to 50kt, with only a +50% damage/kt modifier on the biggest ones. Accuracy bonuses range from +40% to -20%
As a result, the smallest mount is good against missiles and small fighters, while the middle mounts are good general purpose, and the largest couple mounts are required for damaging shielded ships (due to the higher damage per hit vs leaky shields and armor).

Re: Improved armor model thoughts
 

AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.