Ship damage system rework

[CalenLoki]

As we know, current armour system is flawed. It greatly rewards using multiple layers of thin decorative plates over equivalent thickness of standard plates. And I'm talking about 3x higher resistance to penetration.

It's all caused by AV - an invisible number that reduces projectile energy before dealing voxel damage.
I guess it was introduced to help performance: less voxel damage caused by infantry spray weapons like antigel.

I know armour is being reworked already, and I'd love to know how it gonna work. Could devs explain it, similar to how current model? @VilleFB ?


In the meantime here's how I'd do it:
Simple to understand for players, easy to judge plate/component condition by looking at it, while still performance friendly (low calibre weapons leave no holes, unless you focus fire single plate):

AV is used to divide projectile energy.
Each hit calculates how many voxels it can remove (voxel damage). [ VD = PE / AV ]
Voxels get physically removed only if VD>200. So holes smaller than 200 voxels just won't show.
VD that wasn't used for removing voxels is stored as a number, and removes voxels once it accumulate more than 200.
I.e. weapon that deals 40 VD with each hit (PE=AV*10) will create visible hole every 5th hit.
AV is proportional to the amount of remaining voxels. So plate that lost half of it's voxels, has it's initial AV reduced by half.

Example numbers, to keep roughly current weapon balance:
Bastium: AV 1000
LC: PE 16 000k, Calibre 24
LC hit can remove 16k bastium voxels, so almost 3 layers of standard plates, leaving 24cm diameter hole. Same as now.
Assault rifle: PE 100k, C 5
Single AR hit won't show, second will remove 200 voxels, hole 10cm deep and 5cm diameter.
Rail rifle: PE 1 500k, C 5
RR hit will go through 6 layers of bastium, leaving tiny 5cm diameter hole.

Oninium: AV 7000
LC leaves 5cm deep hole, 24cm diameter (2300 voxels removed)
RR Pen=10cm, 5cm diam (215 voxels)

Ideas to make materials more varied (rather than just being better or worse):

1. Cohesion: adds to projectile calibre (hole diameter) thus reduce penetration depth. High for ceramic-like materials, low for structural ones.
I.e. plate with cohesion 5 makes LC penetrate 70% depth (29cm diameter, instead of 25cm) and RR 25% only depth (10cm diameter, instead of 5cm)

2. Resilience: changes how loosing voxels affects loosing AV. At resistance=1 AV is proportional to amount of voxels. At R=2, AV drops 2x slower (min 50% AV). At R=0.5 AV drops to 0 when plate still has 50% of voxels left. Ceramic and glass will usually be brittle, while composite plates resilient.

3. Hardness: changes minimal amount of damage required to leave visible hole. Low for glass and internal components. High for plating, beams and other commonly used parts. Would would allow glass to be visibly damaged much easier, without being easier to penetrate. Low hardness components would affect performance more (more tiny holes from hand weapons), but they aren't used as much, so the impact shouldn't be that big. But players look at them more, so it's worth the sacrafice.

EDIT:
Quick spreadsheet with example numbers: both for weapons and materials.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...oBZmJ9l8l6X2m7TVN9zsQCoe908/edit#gid=47563609

 

[Recatek]

less voxel damage caused by infantry spray weapons like antigel

Not every infantry weapon necessarily needs to penetrate all plate materials. I would personally have no issue if light weapons like antigel did nothing to plates with a certain density or higher.

I do agree with armor value being an issue. So long as it exists as essentially a hidden "shield" value above and beyond the voxel damage a plate can withstand, it find it hard to see any alternative to degenerate many-tiny-plates armoring strategies. I dislike this strategy for many reasons, not least of which being the amount of bolting it requires and the amount of lag it generates both in the SSC and out.

 

[XenoCow]

I like how this damage model leads to a slow weakening of armor rather than a damage limit that once exceeded then takes damage in a different way.

 

[VilleFB]

The upcoming damage model update focuses on adding thickness of material to mix. This is mainly to balance out very thin decorative plates being way too powerful. And to increase incentive to use the opposite end of decorative plates, that are much thicker than your standard 12cm thick basic plates. Angle of impact will also have effect as depth of potential penetration will be calculated on hit for projectiles. Basically thickness of object during impact gives multiplier to Projectile Energy to make penetration easier or harder against Armor Value.

Damage formula also sees update to increase the rate which Armor Value is degraded. Now Density of material has very high factor to Armor Value Degrade. Transformability stat is also removed from equation for now so only way of making materials to endure Armor Value loss is to use larger volume plates (high voxel volume will decrease armor degrade rate).

Transformability stat as part of damage model will likely make return once I take a look how voxel damage depth calculations are done and how to improve them based on caliber and weapon type used. Currently I'm playing with idea that basic armor materials are split into two effective categories; dense high Armor Value materials and lighter "composite" materials that are more suited to absorb raw voxel damage rather than stopping the projectile through high Armor Value. And this does not include addition of Heat status effect and what it could bring with it to the table.

So all in all the update to damage model is not all encompassing "rework", but first step to better system.

 

[Recatek]

Damage formula also sees update to increase the rate which Armor Value is degraded. Now Density of material has very high factor to Armor Value Degrade. Transformability stat is also removed from equation for now so only way of making materials to endure Armor Value loss is to use larger volume plates (high voxel volume will decrease armor degrade rate).

Does this mean that larger plates are going to be (or at least intended to be) stronger than having lots of smaller ones in the same area? Would certainly save me a lot of bolting if so, so I'd welcome that change for sure!

 

[VilleFB]

That is the intention indeed. I don't think the result is yet perfect right now, but idea is that larger plates are better. How penetration depth is going to work, it is better to have large plates as there is less "seams" between plates to sneak in shots through that come in bad angles.