Making armor understandable (and/or non-descriminatory)

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Song
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Right now, choosing armor ingame is an absolute mess. Because of the innate resistance curve (which very few people actually know), armor (and shields to a lesser degree) HP is directly tied to level. This means that you have 5 different armors in a shop, all with "+600%" or something on various values (which makes it a little easier to compare stuff, but looks fairly strange)....and it's really, REALLY hard to compare things across levels. This also means that guns like the X-ray laser (rare, expensive) go from "kickass" to "crappy" for basically no reason. If the people in a faction aren't ever attacked with lasers, their enemies use particle and blast weapons, why are they wasting energy on making their ships have +15,000,000% resistance against lasers? Having enemies in the lategame weak to simple stuff actually makes for some fun (Take the Luminous: the X-ray laser is one of the best guns you can use against them, because they can't make a shield that blocks lasers) and a pretty useful balancing tool. Maybe slight innate resistance to older damage types, but not the "You can't do damage to this armor. Ever." style of curve.

In a perfect world, it'd be great to have flat resistances, possibly an absorbancy curve (some DPS is soaked up per level, so early-game guns like the Turbolaser can't be used to cherry-tap a phobos)*, and then have the coding on the armor (not the level of that armor) set the % bonus or penalty against various damage types. Then just have the level setting the availability (like weapons). But a more important thing is probably to make interpreting resistances easier (like, penalties are actually penalties, rather than decreased bonuses, and LOOK like penalties). That way when Joe McNewToTheGame goes into a shop after getting owned by Sung and sees an L6 armor great against particle damage, and an L7 armor terrible against it, he'll know that the L6 is the one to get if he wants to go hunting Sung. Right now....it's probably simpler than it looks to compare armors, but it really doesn't look simple at all. It's also really hard to try to set resistance penalties to what you want them in a mod when you have to mess around trying to counteract the insane resistance the levelling is putting on the segment (I'm trying to make later-game armors vulnerable to the "simple" damage types. It's not working yet.)

In short...this would be a huge task, and take time better spent on other things, but eventually, at some point, we could really do with an armor system that doesn't cut damage types out of the game. It makes for more interesting balancing act on mods if every damage type is usable right through to the end.

But, at the very least, we could absolutely really, really do with an armor system that displays well in the shop, and/or a ingame guide (a vanilla one) on how to compare armors. More than any of my gripes about damage types (which are subjective), this is the important thing.

*That said, having more HP on higher levels of armor does exactly the same thing as an absorbancy curve, and doesn't require a spreadsheet to calculate which segment of armor is better.
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PM
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On a similar note, how about immunites for armor? When a player sees that level 6 blast plate is immune to radiation, but not level 7 heavy blast plate or any other level 7+ armor, he may think the higher level armor is vulnerable to radiation, even though the armor really is radiation immune. Until recently, I did not know level 9+ armor was EMP immune.

To Shrike: You can override damage adjustment with damageAdj. For example:

Code: Select all

damageAdj=  "laser:0; kinetic:50; particle:100; blast:200; ion:400"
An armor or shield with the above damageAdj will have immunity to laser, take half damage from kinetic, take normal damage from particle, take double damage from blast, and take quadruple damage from ion. The rest of the damage types use standard damage level curve. If you want an armor or shield to ignore damage adjustment curve and take standard damage regardless of attack, you set 100 to all sixteen damage types, which is annoying. I did this for a couple shields in my items pack mod.
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Patupi
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Interesting! I didn't know damageAdj did that. I may redo my shield systems using that. I put them at low levels because I wanted them to be vulnerable to lasers/kinetic when switched to that. With this I can override it. Thanks
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WillyTheSquid
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Thanks for the pointers, PM. I'll take it into consideration when sdw195 & I get back to working on the ArmorPack in a few weeks.
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pixelfck
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bump

The resistance which is automatically coupled to level has always bothered me. If I remember correctly, some long time ago, this wasn't the case yet.

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That was probably in the fabled time when shields were nerfed and armor was yet to be buffed, and the game was insanely hard as a result. before my time though.
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Song
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Hmm. Necromancy.
That was probably in the fabled time when shields were nerfed and armor was yet to be buffed, and the game was insanely hard as a result. before my time though.
No, that was 2010 or so. This is using something a lot closer to the modern system....current method of display, but possibly a few different numbers since then. It's still fairly valid.


One way that might work to deal with this is to remove the percentage hitpoint modifier from the armor item, but have a simple set of "resistant" and "vulnerable" labels like we used to have, then implement (on all dockscreens) an option to "view armor profile". This would display:

-Resistance percentages for all special resists
-All 'hidden' resistances
-The amount of damage a weapon needs to inflict (for each damage type, up to a sensible limit for the armor (IE: not dark matter stuff)) to remove 1 hitpoint from the armor. This gives the same thing as the current resistance screen, but in a more readable format and also lets you know what weapons you can ignore.

If this is too much info, then it can be tied back to a collectable item (Rowena's ROMs, anyone?)

....I also really think the system should be simplified because having to match damage curve and set vulnerabilities and strengths manually and then balance HP makes for tougher balancing unless you set up a spreadsheet. It's not as bad as shields but it's still a massive challenge for newer modders. But making the way the game displays stuff better would work nicely as a shorter-term thing.
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