Weapon and armour balance.

[CalenLoki]

Seeing as armour system is being worked on, I think it's good time to post my balance ideas.
I worked on 3 different things, as they are all closely connected: infantry weapons, ship weapons and ship armour.

I'll start with ship armour.

1. Ship armour system should be more tied to voxels than objects. As little invisible HP bars as possible.
   -Projectile energy: determine how many voxels get removed with each hit. Constant per projectile.
   -Calibre: determines diameter of hole. The higher, the lower penetration depth. Constant per projectile.
   
   -Armour: divides projectile energy.
   -Cohesion: increase effective calibre, thus reduce penetration (especially of small calibre projectiles)
   -Resilience: reduces negative effect of missing voxels. Allow components to still function after taking damage.
   -Structural durability, density, rarity: self explanatory
   
   
2. Simple formulas:
   Damage = Projectile energy/Armour*(1-% of missing voxels/Resilience)
   Diameter = (Calibre+Cohesion*5)^2
   Penetration = Damage/Diameter [cm]
   Store damage as a number until it can be transferred to physical voxel damage:
   a. projectile penetrates
   b. over 2000 voxels needs to be removed
   c. component is already turned into voxels, and it wouldn't affect system load anyway.
   No projectile energy should be ever wasted. Projectile looses only up to the number of remaining voxels. Rest either remain in projectile (so deeper penetration), get transferred to neighbour components (may be hard to implement) or turns into spalling.
   
   
3. Each material should be "best" at something. Otherwise nobody will ever use it.
   -Ajatite: lowest mass, cheap. Great for decorations.
   
   -Valkite: best protection for your bucks.
   -Oninum: most compact armour.
   -Charodium: single-use penetration stopper.
   -Merkerium: can take the most beating per mass.
   -Kutonium: best armour per mass.
   
   -Bastium: highest SD. best frame for bottleneck connections.
   -Tengium: highest SD per mass. For less stressed parts of the frame.

Weapons need a lot of adjustment. You'll find all those changes in the spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xniQ3EYWHXmn9oiboBZmJ9l8l6X2m7TVN9zsQCoe908/edit?usp=sharing

• Columns B-I show rating in various attributes on the scale of 1-10.
• Handling describes how small and easy to use in motion weapon is. Bigger weapons are more powerful, but require standing still/ADS.
• Columns V-AE shows how deadly each weapon is at different distances.
• All the numbers are just example, a starting point. They'd have to go through a lot of live testing to come to really decent balance.
• I included current stats (those that I knew) and TGess balance idea as comparison
• I also included weapons not currently in game, as well as one really needed (ship Gatling gun)

Notable changes from current stats:

• Non-automatic weapons get much more powerful
• Rail-cannon makes very small hole - the size of current laser cannon. But it pretty much goes straight through most ships. It shouldn't detonate fuel rods or large tanks in a single hit (otherwise there is no time to react, and no way to defend)
• Pistol and revolver are usable.

Last but not least: explosions.
IMO they should be fragment-based. So upon detonation game spawns 50-100 short range projectiles/raycasts that behave just like all the others (can be stopped by armour, has set PE and caliber, ect)

 

[Duke_Ironhelm]

This would be a lot better than the current system imo

 

[Sir Nerdbird]

Lot of interesting ideas here, especially with increasing the viability of pistols in PvP.

 

[BadNation]

Wow i'm really impressed, I would make sure that the devs see this if I were you, you could offer a lot to them

 

[CalenLoki]

I'm pretty sure they do know. Forum is quiet enough that you can easily follow all new messages.

But... @VilleFB could we get current hidden weapon statistics, like accuracy (min and max), how much it drops in motion, recoil, projectile velocity and diameter of bullet holes?

 

[Sir Nerdbird]

Projectile velocity is already available for most weapons on the Starbase Wiki. Diameter of bullet holes can also be *roughly* calculated by using the damage calculations detailed here (although I would also appreciate more info being available from the devs). But how would you even begin to measure recoil?

 

[CalenLoki]

I have velocity, ROF and endo damage in the chart already.
You're right about calculating projectile energy and calibre. Although dunno if those formulas are still up to date.

Recoil and accuracy can be tested by just shooting at something. But that's a lot of work to test all of them. So would be great to get precise numbers straight from the source.