[Zanthis]

Again, individual component damage would be ideal in combat. But it introduces several considerations. Suppose you have two pieces of Armor III. You get hit for 20 damage and the first piece is selected (randomly). Now you take another 20 damage. Does the program a) randomly select between the two pieces b) pick the damaged piece automatically.

If b, there are easier ways to duplicate that effect without tracking component damage.

If a, you will be changing how ships take damage. With 10 pieces of organic armor, ignoring the regeneration, you could take 1490 damage and not have lost a single component! Basically, ships will get tougher.

Also, it is quite likely that the same code that handles components outside tactical combat is used in tactical combat. Making changes to the tactical code's component class means maintaining two different pieces of code. This makes bugs more likely and is generally a hassle. The other methods involve creating an entirely separate system for tracking component damage outside of the component objects. Messy and quite a bit of work.

All in all, I don't think it is necessary. With a few fixes to the current model, we'd have something that worked exactly like we expect it to. Those changes would be:

1) Stop adding "extra damage" to weapon damage. Instead, add weapon damage to extra damage.
2) Switch to two "extra damage" values. One for "extra armor damage" and one for "extra internal damage."
3) OPTIONAL. Keep track of which armor component is currently being beat on (but not yet destroyed). Also, keep track of which internal component is being beat on.

Of course, all of this isn't very useful because, in the end, the fix will be whatever Aaron decides and will likely be based on information we have no way of knowing.

As long as everything acts like its supposed to, I'll be quite happy. I consider Crystalline Armor to be the biggest offender, followed by pulling damage out to strike shields (which is part of CA's problem anyway) and OA Last. I say OA Last only because changing it without making it worthless is going to be difficult.