Armor, Shields and Damage (FAQ)

[Baron Munchausen]

This is fascinating stuff. I thought that organic armor was a bit screwy in combining its regeneration for all armor in the ship, but if it really works the way you've described, building up "credit" even while not damaged it's positively bizarre. I could live with a single regeneration total for the whole ship. It makes a sort of sense given that the "armor belt" on an organic ship would be a single organism. But the "credit" makes an organic armored ship more deadly as combat progresses! Just wait a while to come into combat range. 10 turns X your total armor regeneration in a battlecruiser with say 10 components of organic armor? 3000 "credit" in regeneration?Yikes! Unless you could destroy ALL of it in one round or had armor skipping weapons you'd be unable to damage the ship at all! This is not a 'feature' -- this is a bug! I finally see what's been happening with crystalline armor and shields, too. Gah! Something has got to be altered in the damage bookkeeping for these special armors, and shield skipping weapons need to be accounted seperately from non-shield skipping weapons.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 06 February 2001).]

[Drake]

Wow. Great work checking out the guts of combat, Zanthis. I really hope they can change things so that partial component damage is remembered specific to what initally got hit. That would take away a lot of this screwball behavior.

-Drake

[Zanthis]

Yes Drake. If they tracked individual component damage, things would work very well. It would be important to note, however, that if you had ten Organic Armor III's and got hit ten times for 100 damage each, with individual tracking it would be possible that each hit applied to a different piece of armor, meaning *none* of them would be destroyed despite taking 1000 damage.

The other option would be to a) stop adding extra damage to weapon damage before applying the damage to shields, and b) track two extra damages: "armor damage" and "internal damage". Most hits that passed shields would add to "armor damage" while armor-skipping weapons could add to "internal damage". Once you lost all your armor, the two could be combined. Only odd thing with this method, is if you lost all your organic armor forcing "armor damage" and "internal damage" to combine, when it regenerated, damage previously done to armor would have sneaked to internal systems.

Lots of possible solutions, I just really hope MM fixes it somehow. I haven't mailed this (my original post) to them because I'm not even sure how to explain it. I wrote this for other players. I'm sure Aaron knows how his game works, so most of the info would be unnecessary. I'm just not sure if he is aware of all the funky interactions.

[SunDevil]

How about each component having hit points.

[Drake]

quote:

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Originally posted by Zanthis:
It would be important to note, however, that if you had ten Organic Armor III's and got hit ten times for 100 damage each, with individual tracking it would be possible that each hit applied to a different piece of armor, meaning *none* of them would be destroyed despite taking 1000 damage.

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I wonder if that's really a problem. It'd certainly make sense if you can't direct general damage to specific components. If you want to avoid that situation though, just have the combat engine apply damage to partially damaged components before it starts damaging other components.

Of course, then it'd have to make sure that rule only applies to components the weapon is supposed to damage...

-Drake

[Zanthis]

SunDevil:
Well, they do each have hit points right now. At least, they have a maximum hit points. They *don't* have a current hit points because they cannot be damaged, only destroyed.

This is most likely a programming choice for two reasons. First, it is easier (less code to write) to just not track individual component damage. Second, it requires less space (memory). Every component would get bigger by at least 2 bytes. How many components have you seen in tactical combat? Not that many right? But guess what, it would increase the size of every components in game, not just in combat. So, how many components have you seen anywhere in the game at one time (remember to include fighters, troops, mines and platforms)?

The only way to avoid that memory waste would be to make two Versions of the component structure, one with current hit points, one without. Then, in tactical combat, use the former, otherwise, use the latter. Lots of programming and doubles the work required whenever code changes are made to the components structure (since you have to change both Versions).

Drake:
Another possibility is to have two "this is the component we are trying to kill" pointers. One for normal attacks, which will typically be pointing to a piece of your armor, and one for armor-skipping attacks which would be pointing to something other than armor.

I said in the FAQ that I thought they already did this (using only one pointer) so it shouldn't be a problem to implement two.

[This message has been edited by Zanthis (edited 06 February 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Zanthis (edited 06 February 2001).]

[Seawolf]

Kudoes to Z for getting that information but I think no one has pointed out is that if we go to this damaged but not destroyed system for components what impact wil it have on the game? If they perform at normal levels then there is little point to keeping track of damage. Damage control could be fixing them while combat is ongoing to account for needing to reach the threshold to destroy it.

Also the entire repair system would have to be converted to a point system rather than a component systems. How much work that would intail I don't know but would guess alot as well as increase exponentially the memeory requirements. While making the game more realistic I don't think that the benefit received outweighs the cost involved.

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Seawolf on the prowl