[Trachmyr]

One of the games I really enjoied playing/customizing was Dark Reign. They used a Damage.txt file to allow diffrent weapons to affect diffrent armor(+shields in SE4), well... diffrently.

It would work like this... each armor would have a type (i.e., 1 or Standard, etc.), as would each type of shields. Each weapon would have a diffrent type of damage. When damage is then allocated to a ship, it looks at the Damage.txt file and sees that "Particle" weapons do only 50% damage to "phased" shields, or that "Dense" weapons do 200% damage to "standard" armor, or that "shield depleters" do 100% to all shields but 0% to all armor and componets. Additionally componets could be given a type (i.e., Normal, Engines, Weapons, Computers, Etc.), this way the old damage types can be completely removed in favor of this new system. Also a value of "X" means that the damage skips that componet, thus allowing for shield/armor skipping weapons. The only special types that need remain are warp/tractor weapos. (You could even have an entry for Planets, allowing some weapons to be good for planetary assault... while others pitiful at best)

What do you think?