Armor, Shields and Damage (FAQ) - Page 2

Tomgs · #11 February 5th, 2001, 11:45 PM

You did mention about attacking a normal shield ship with phased weapons and normal weapons. But it seems stranger than what you stated. The phased damage will be transfered to the shields by the first hit of a non phased weapon. The destroyed components inside will not be restored but the damage points from inside will be transfered to the shield. It seems that more damage points than just the "leftover" damage is transfered. It actually looks like the damage to the ship is "healed" and this damage transfered to the shields. However this healing is only cosmetic and will not restore destroyed components.

Also another questain about organic armor. You state that destroyed armor does not regenerate but what about when you have 10 pieces of armor and 3 are destroyed. It seems then that the 3 pieces do contribute to the regeneration but I could have been decieved by the effect of storage of regeneration that I did not know before.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 February 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 February 2001).]

Zanthis · #12 February 6th, 2001, 12:24 AM

Tomgs wrote:

quote:
You did mention about attacking a normal shield ship with phased weapons and normal weapons. But it seems stranger than what you stated. The phased damage will be transfered to the shields by the first hit of a non phased weapon. The destroyed components inside will not be restored but the damage points from inside will be transfered to the shield. It seems that more damage points than just the "leftover" damage is transfered. It actually looks like the damage to the ship is "healed" and this damage transfered to the shields. However this healing is only cosmetic and will not restore destroyed components.

The damage listed when you right-click on a ship, and it says 120/1150 or whatever, is a total of two values: The first is the damage resistance of all destroyed components. I have *never* seen it fall below that value (I've figured it out by hand many times). The second is the extra damage on the ship. This is the value that can frequently be reduced via strange shield interactions. So, if you see 120/1150 and you're using organic armor, all 120 is likely to be extra damage, and subject to loss against shields. If you only have Armor III, it probably means 3 Armor III components have been destroyed, and no amount of funky shield stuff is gonna get the damage "undone."

quote:
Also another questain about organic armor. You state that destroyed armor does not regenerate but what about when you have 10 pieces of armor and 3 are destroyed. It seems then that the 3 pieces do contribute to the regeneration but I could have been decieved by the effect of storage of regeneration that I did not know before.

If you have 10 pieces and 3 are destroyed, 7 are still helping you regenerate. If they are OA-III, they are building up 210 points per turn. So, if you lose 3 OA in one shot, and next turn all 3 are fine, you're using up stockpiled regeneration. If only one or two are repaired, you've run out of extra regeneration. However, as long as you have at least five, you will get one OA repaired every turn. If you got reduced to only one OA-III, it would take five turns to repair one OA.

The easiest way to see that damaged components don't contribute is when all of your OA is destroyed. Do it enough times and eventually it just won't come back.

Baron Munchausen · #13 February 6th, 2001, 01:58 AM

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 · #14 February 6th, 2001, 04:47 AM

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 · #15 February 6th, 2001, 08:43 AM

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 · #16 February 6th, 2001, 05:49 PM

How about each component having hit points.

Drake · #17 February 6th, 2001, 06:16 PM

quote:
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.

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 · #18 February 6th, 2001, 07:26 PM

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 · #19 February 6th, 2001, 07:52 PM

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

Nyx · #20 February 6th, 2001, 08:05 PM

Why not just have "extra damage to armor" and "extra damage to internals" as fields to store the info and extra damage is never aplied to shields (as it should never be from what I can tell)? Organic armor wouldn't regenerate at all until damage was taken and then it would only regenerate against the "extra damage to armor" value. The above would also break the CA weirdness as extra damage to armor would pile up and tear down the CA like I presume it is supposed to.

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