Armor damage adjustment and internals

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george moromisato
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In previous versions, damage was adjusted based on armor resistance even if armor had 0 hp.. This meant that damage to internal compartments was always adjusted for armor resistance, even though the armor was gone.

I've fixed this in the upcoming 1.8 Alpha 1, but it probably means that internal compartments are now under-leveled. We may need to increase HP for them.

Try it out once the release comes out and let me know what you think.

See: https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=56852
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 Actually, I already have high hopes for this. As it currently stands, most capships are harder to crack than most stations, and this sounds like a good step toward fixing that.
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JohnBWatson
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This makes it even more efficient to conserve WMD munitions until the HP hits 50%, given that it's now viable to use cheaper early ammo with high WMD but a weak damagetype.

This makes sense logically in part 1, assuming internal structure is all made of the same material regardless of power, though it may or may not benefit gameplay. I'd still say something like layered armor would be a better system for WMD, with damage partially 'soaking through' to the next layer based on WMD. The inconsistency between hull and armor has been made more clear to new players with the interface improvements, but it still feels strange that the optimal strategy to destroy a capital ship involves taking down its armor with a weapon that intuitively seems completely inappropriate for fighting anything larger than a gunship before bringing out the anticapital weapons.
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JohnBWatson wrote:I'd still say something like layered armor would be a better system for WMD, with damage partially 'soaking through' to the next layer based on WMD.
I actually can't disagree with the basics of that idea, having basically implemented something much like it (with judicious use of Tlisp) for one line of weapons in TBR. The overall effect is the same, damage bleeding through to internal HP (and less than before, now that I have that particular bug fixed), and it feels right. Running into ships fielding the ones I made while piloting a cap ship is properly terrifying; I'd rather run into a Ranx dreadnought than a handful of gunships fitted with these things. @.@;
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Something that occurs to me regarding compartments / internal HP is that, at least when the player is attacking warships, what's in all those compartments they're destroying? I would expect relatively little space on a warship to be dedicated to nonessential systems like crew housing; most of it would be stuff like reactors, engines, shields, weapons, etc. So shouldn't the warship's capabilities get steadily degraded as it takes internal damage? Right now it's possible to damage ships' systems through internal damage, but it's pretty rare. Maybe it should be more common. Some kind of indication that the ship's been damaged might also be welcome -- a small debris explosion or something.

Of course, a warship should have redundant systems, so I'm not proposing that the first compartment you hit immediately cripple the ship. :) But unless you're very carefully distributing your damage across the entire ship's hull, you really ought to start doing vital damage pretty quickly once the armor's worn through.
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