Author Topic: Improved Passive Defences  (Read 1537 times)

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Offline TheBawkHawk (OP)

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Improved Passive Defences
« on: February 20, 2021, 07:57:40 PM »
While the current mechanics for defending a ship's squishy insides are perfectly adequate, I feel that they can be better. I admit, this idea came to me while I was designing missiles. I had caught myself absentmindedly putting in a perfect square for the warhead strength, as I always do. Anything other than a perfect square for the warhead strength is a decent bit less effective than a perfect square warhead due to the way missile damage applies itself, as we all know.

I feel that simply having some numbers be outright better than others is less interesting than it should be. There's not many interesting design considerations to be had when one set of options is "good" and the other set is "bad". Instead of having a single point of damage destroy a single block of armour as it is now, what if each block of armour had a chance to absorb a point of damage instead of being destroyed? All of a sudden, perfect square warheads are no longer optimal, and the warhead value now has some choices to be made. Do you keep it close to a perfect square to save space, or do you increase the damage to ensure that you get the damage through? Make the chance to absorb a researchable tech as well, to flesh out the defence tree. Start at 5% and end at 30% or so. If you want to take this to the extreme, modify the chance on the surviving neighbours of the block as well, although I feel that'd be a bit too slow to process.

As an additional item to flesh out the defence tech tree, adding in a designable component called Bulkheads. Bulkheads would have an efficiency tech, an HTK tech, and perhaps a min/max size tech as well. A bulkhead would help to protect the ship systems from internal damage, by providing a larger target for the damage to hit. A bulkhead's size would be multiplied by its efficiency for the purposes of allocating internal damage, drawing in a larger proportion of damage than another component of similar size. This would allow for the construction of ships that focus on taking and absorbing fire more effectively, or simply to add a bit of survivability past the armour layer.

TLDR:
 - Make armour have a certain percent chance to absorb a point of damage rather than being destroyed, to introduce some variability to missile warheads and also to armour in general.
 - Add the Bulkhead component, which appears larger to internal damage to protect internal components.
 - Expand the defence tech tree and make passive defences more relevant.
 
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Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: Improved Passive Defences
« Reply #1 on: February 20, 2021, 08:27:43 PM »
I think there a couple of considerations for missile damage beyond the pure theory which are missing here.

First, even though perfect squares are ideal for armor penetration, their importance is somewhat less if their armor penetration is not as great as the number of armor layers on a target. A 9-damage missile hitting a ship with 4 layers of armor is not going to penetrate on the first hit anyways, and in that case the distinction between, say, 7/8/9-damage warheads gets closer to linear - the exact details I'm unsure of and someone with more math or a program at hand can give more details, but generally the more armor the enemy has the less hitting a penetration breakpoint matters. This is especially the case if an enemy uses shields, as in this case you just need the most possible damage delivered to the target to break their shields.

On the flip side, hitting a breakpoint is not always critical compared to getting the desired speed, range, or accuracy on a missile. If you're making a size 6 missile, you might want to choose between a 9-damage "optimized" warhead versus a 6-damage warhead that offers more MSP for engine, fuel, etc. in order to deliver that damage to the target more reliably. Particularly if you have some good intel about the enemy's AMM and PD capabilities, you can determine the expected damage per missile and may find the warhead with less damage has a better overall effect. Similarly you might find at your tech level that you can fit 10 or 12 damage onto the same missile for a reduction in speed, but a net increase in damage if your enemies have poor PD - say they have bad propulsion but a lot of armor and shields.

As for the actual suggestions: the first one doesn't actually solve the breakpoint problem, it just shifts the optimal warhead size based on the %chance to absorb the damage - really all this accomplishes is a nerf to missiles which is just not needed - box launchers are the problem, not warhead damage profiles. For the second one I can't see a lot of use from it, aside from JP assaults I think most players prefer to use their ship tonnage to mount useful modules - first maximizing weapons and propulsion, then preferring armor and shields to prevent internal damage entirely rather than an extra module that only plays with probabilities and takes up valuable space to do so. Ultimately, with both of these suggestions I don't see any change over what we already see shields are used for, and as shields already exist there's not a lot of reason to duplicate the functionality for all practical purposes.
 

Offline Droll

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Re: Improved Passive Defences
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2021, 09:03:53 PM »
I think ablative armor is an interesting idea but should be a separate armor type and also be more expensive/heavier than standard armor.

I also think that ablative armors should be more effective against certain weapons and less effective against others. So the chance of reflecting say, a laser could be very high but very low against a railgun (or the other way I'm just giving an example).

Considering the criticism above, I agree that this is not a good way to nerf missiles - especially since it is implied that interaction with other weapon types seems to on the backburner which is not good design.

However as far as ablative armor is concerned one minor change that makes them very useful would be to scale the % of absorbing damage based on the size of the hit, ergo a single large hit is less likely to be fully/partially absorbed vs a small hit.
This would mean that AMMs would no longer be offensively viable against ablative armor, also since this is heavier, larger ships will potentially have the ability to become incredibly resistant to small hits as opposed to smaller ships which can't have the same no. of ablative layers.

As far as implementation, it would be best if armor would become a designable component, with parameters for ablative rating that modifies size and how much damage can be reliable absorbed as well as the material being used. It would also need to be accompanied with some sort of player control for choosing the armor profile of a ship beyond just how many layers it has.
The tech tree now has an ablative rating techline under defence.


This effectively creates a choice, ablative armor becomes more efficient at blocking many small hits at the cost of being more vulnerable to a few large hits. Standard armor still has it's place since it is easier to fit on small ships and even on larger ships is useful for tanking more large hits overall.
 

Offline serger

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Re: Improved Passive Defences
« Reply #3 on: February 21, 2021, 12:53:38 AM »
From the Probabilities side:
OP's suggestion WILL be effective to negate (not completely, still drastically) quadratic pikes of warhead strength effectiveness. Most of the cases effective warhead strength of the same warheads will be distributed around it's strict value, so really much less disbelievable effect.
As for the shift of general missile effectiveness - it's very easy to negate, Steve can just decrease mean value of warhead strength per MSP with reversed multiplier of armour chance to deflect damage.

Though it can be done quite easier: instead of rolling against armor on each armour block, Steve can add some random dispersion of warhead strength at the moment of detonation.
 

Offline serger

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Re: Improved Passive Defences
« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2021, 01:07:29 AM »
Another way to negate these quadratic pikes - is to remake armour model more drastically. Currently we have another irritable feature: small crafts and ships with weak armour have too "big" discrete blocks. Some fighters' armour consist of 1 or 2 blocks, still covering all of their hull. That's completely disbelievable. It's obviously a legacy of the past board games, where players have has to calc those penetration profiles manually.

The best way to change it with scanty value of recoding, I think - is to make ANY ship to have, say, 1000 armour blocks, but damage value of each block will depend on ship's armour HS and tech, and any incoming damage may roll against this value.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Improved Passive Defences
« Reply #5 on: February 21, 2021, 06:28:25 AM »
You always can read what changes that Steve contemplated for his Newtonian Aurora when he was thinking about that. Armour would be able to absorb a certain amount of energy per block and type of armour. If the energy was not enough to destroy the block no damage would be done.

Shields also worked differently against different weapons and often would not just completely stop incoming weapons but some damage would leak through.

In combination of this both shields and armour would have a combined quite nice effect of blunting damage.

Railgun shots also could go straight through a ship... so it would punch through the armour and tear through the hull and then punch a hole on the other side of the ships armour on its way out.  ;)

I think that Steve have thought of most thing we suggest but don't do allot because it upset the balance in a way it takes time to investigate how to best implement things, and time is probably the biggest hurdle I guess.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2021, 08:56:34 AM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline liveware

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Re: Improved Passive Defences
« Reply #6 on: March 03, 2021, 05:09:10 PM »
You always can read what changes that Steve contemplated for his Newtonian Aurora when he was thinking about that. Armour would be able to absorb a certain amount of energy per block and type of armour. If the energy was not enough to destroy the block no damage would be done.

Shields also worked differently against different weapons and often would not just completely stop incoming weapons but some damage would leak through.

In combination of this both shields and armour would have a combined quite nice effect of blunting damage.

Railgun shots also could go straight through a ship... so it would punch through the armour and tear through the hull and then punch a hole on the other side of the ships armour on its way out.  ;)

I think that Steve have thought of most thing we suggest but don't do allot because it upset the balance in a way it takes time to investigate how to best implement things, and time is probably the biggest hurdle I guess.

I really like all of this... Especially the minimum energy threshold for armor damage.

Open the pod-bay doors HAL...