Ok, my uni ISP peeps have got the blacklisting undone...so I can post again. I'm avoiding quotes and instead going straight to points.
Extra issues with the spreadsheet:
This is the important stuff, before getting into the nitpicking (which is most here because I'm catching up on things). The big one: George's spreadsheet doesn't show his working, or the armor base stats that are generating these values. Condensing everything to a single number is all well and good, but I can't see what's causing that and without that...I can't trust the algorithm. When I did my graphs of WMD damage to kickstart the 1.7 rebalancing, I had
everything on that sheet, including all my working. I strongly urge George to take this approach, rather than to have an opaque algorithm in the background spitting out single numbers that have meanings that are unclear. At the very least, the algorithm itself should be fully documented.
(This isn't to say I think the algorithm doesn't, or won't work. It's that
I can't tell from what is being shown, and I can't easily work back from it to see individual issues. This may be a bit forward since such a sheet will be needed more for the next phase)
Things that we need to consider when looking at armor:
This is just a raw list, not all-inclusive. It missed the obvious questions about damage adjustment and stuff
-What is the purpose of the armor? (By which I mean, why is this segment being made by a factory, instead of something else.)
-Who uses it?
-What is likely to be fired at it?
-What weapons cannot reliably damage it?
-What weapons can destroy it rapidly?
-What overlap is there between these three things?(What shoots, what can kill quickly, what cannot kill)
-How long does this armor take to kill under normal circumstances (I would go for levelled damage without modifers, all damage types, and measure as average seconds to failure, using a correction for the average firerateadj of foes of around that part of the game)
-How long does this armor take to kill under extreme circumstances (a weapon or enemy that would have previously been noted as being able to rapidly destroy an armor segment)
-If it's an armor that playerships may start with, can it survive an accidental hit by a plot NPC (eg. Anton Nasser)? (Generally speaking, playerships should not be capable of being killed by single hits by mission NPCs unless that's actually the
point. Multiple shells is more reasonable)
-Where can we repair it? Does this cause us particular issues? (Heck, you can probably use script to map this: See which parts of the game you can repair each segment in)
-Is the armor specialised against damage, or status effects, or both?
-Can we find it reliably?
-Is it military? (and if so, can we get a military ROM by the point it shows up reliably?
-Will using the armor slow us down (not literally, but acceleration and turn time. May become literal if George fixes the speed adjust code and starts using it, which I strongly advise)
And finally and most importantly:
Why would a player or in-universe buyer use this armor over something else?
Several of these questions are qualitative: they can't be answered by numbers. They're still damned important though.
Damage dropoff and obsolete types: Yes, enemies use obsolete damage types (eg. miners) however there's two things that make "upgrade the weapons" problematic: 1: Damage type upgrades aren't necessarily..um..necessary. For example: In Shrike's Mines and Missiles, I give borers upgraded mining lasers at higher levels. These are extremely dangerous weapons, but still use laser damage. Laser and kinetic are ubiquitous civilian weapons, so having them appear across a wide spread is fine. The second thing is that George has expressed interest in, eventually, making the obsolescence of damage types less absurdly steep. This would make these weapons more effective at higher levels. Generally speaking it is good to have more damage types in use rather than less: it promotes diverse strategies and weapon design. It also allows for themes (eg. pirate use of turbolasers) which a basic weapon upgrade tends to lose (I've had this issue trying to upgrade the marauders for SM&M++)
And yes, George has said it's intentional. However I think his experience with my own experiments in late-game laser weaponry has opened him up to wider use of 'low tech' weapons in the later game. Things in this game change, and just because something is intentional doesn't mean it's always the best system (cough: the original WMD system).
Reflect: I'm not sure how Watson thought I was advocating removal. I'm not: I want
more control over it. Right now, it's very inconsistent. 98% reflect when at full health means you can ignore everything..but once you start taking damage, that goes away rapidly and at low health it's basically useless. All I'd want is making it a bit more consistent (or even a customisable percentage). That can either be a fixed percentage or a reduced spread across the health of the armor. Immunity must be kept separate because making it an intrinsic function of reflect reduces options...but armors using reflect should definitely have immunity be considered as an option if that's what's wanted. I've done quite a lot of experiments with reflect, and it's generally too annoying to balance because of the current hardcoding.
PM wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2017 3:02 am
It can happen, but it is not likely since the same item getting ionized again via ion disruptor (due to slow fire rate) while ionized is remote.
At any rate, Ventari destroyers need to be more difficult to kite if device disruption is intended to be a threat. Taking damage from them at all is fairly optional right now.
They should still be a threat or else people would not complain about device damage back in the day.
Stacked ionising occurs more often the fewer devices you have (or the most shots that land on you), so some ships are more vulnerable than others. In vanilla it usually occurs when a player is EMP'd by a ventari colony, then fired at by the destroyers. This situation is usually fatal though, so even then it's not that common. But it is a thing, and device disrupt is still held back by being a bit too strong. As PM says, ionising is still a serious threat. Kiting is an
AI issue, not an armor issue and should not be considered for armor balance.