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Original post by alnite Normally, you don't have weapons that have damage slightly above armor/durability value. Durability: 100, HP: 100, Lasers: 150 is just plain silly. Two shots, he's dead. Durability: 10, HP: 400, Lasers: 50 makes much more sense. Play around with the values, I believe you can still end up with a balanced system.

:) I was about to say the same thing. Durability should only be a fraction of structure, becuase the difference between something that can scratch you and something that can obliterate you is usually really huge. Of course you will still need rather high Structure values for ships and stuff but I don't think that's such a bad thing.

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Original post by thelurch Quote: Original post by alnite Normally, you don't have weapons that have damage slightly above armor/durability value. Durability: 100, HP: 100, Lasers: 150 is just plain silly. Two shots, he's dead. Durability: 10, HP: 400, Lasers: 50 makes much more sense. Play around with the values, I believe you can still end up with a balanced system. :) I was about to say the same thing. Durability should only be a fraction of structure, becuase the difference between something that can scratch you and something that can obliterate you is usually really huge. Of course you will still need rather high Structure values for ships and stuff but I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Thanks to both of you. I was thinking about so many random armor types and values that I put no thought into how the system should naturally balance itself. In order to do this Durability will need to be never more than some percentage of HP (maybe 25%, I'll have to muck with it.)

Ack! I can't believe the answer was sitting right in front of me! :P

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Original post by Inmate2993 If your going to have Characters with HP and then Ships with HP, perhaps you should think about using three digits on people and 6 or 7 digits on ships.

I agree with you one this. People top out around 1000 max, vehicles and small ships 10k, large ships and small stations 100k and huge facilities anything above.

What that means, unfortunately, is that as a player your HP can't keep going up forever, which affects some of the leveling you'll be able to do. But it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to keep the gameworld believable.

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As for the Structural / Durability naming scheme, thats all good stuff. Though, you may want the effect "Durability" to have be in the Multiplication/Division operations rather then Addition/Subtracton.

The only reason I want a straightforward linear relationship is so that you can make the calculations faster. (I'm going by the p&p RPG rule about adding and subtracting being preferred over multiplying and dividing.)

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Original post by DesignerGuy hmmm, be warned; I just signed up and am jumping into an already involved topic.

Most appreciated!

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Set up "state" or "status" tracking on the armours. Let's say that each item/ship has a "perfect", "scratched", "worn", "battered", "breached" and "destroyed" threshold( disregard names or particular number of stages, of course ) - for every item, it could work something like this: 100% - "perfect" 80% - "scratched" 60% - "worn" 40% - "battered" 20% - "breached" 0% - "destroyed"

I have something very much like this in mind. Armor can acquire a "Compromised x%" status, based on the type of weapon and armor. The higher the percentage, the more likely any subsequent hit with simply bypass armor and damage whatever is behind it. Also, as you note, different equipment performs differently based on how badly it's been Compromised (this is handled by a separate set of HP, called System, which is how functional any mechanical or biological entity is).

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Similarly, a plasma blast isn't going to do bloody much to a guy in an environmentally sealed suit, except to hurt the suit. However, some poor schmuck standing next to the guy is unfortunate enough to have his lungs seared out, along with any other soft tissue, even if he was wearing the best non-environmental suit around.

Good point. FWIW, I'm thinking that I'm going to be handling heat separately as well in order to do some interesting things with environmental puzzles, stealth and other sci-fi reasons. So if your armor is compromised, it lets heat in or out, which could be bad depending on the situation.


PS: To those who posted on the 18th I just wanted to say sorry for ignoring your great feedback. I somehow lost track of this post and forgot all about it.

I have to say, having played both Warcraft 3 (percentage damage reduction) and Starcraft (flat rate damage reduction) that Starcraft makes more sense. A lone marine (with an attack damage of 6) should take practically forever to take down a battlecruiser. Conversely, a battlecruiser should be able to take down another cruiser fairly quickly. I think they have a rule where if damage is reduced to 0, then there is some probability that 1 damage is inflicted no matter what, which lets zerglings take down ultralisks.

At any rate, I think it works out neatly. Many papercuts do not equal one slash with a katana.

/end rambling. leaving work. wheee!

Based on some of your other posts, most notably the concentrated fire post, I think your idea DR with low HP works fine.

Have different weapon types affect differently. Kinetic missiles would have the DR applied separately to each missile (Spoonster chaingun example). Energy/laser weapons could stack with some sort of drop off with each additional hit if they hit close enough in both time and location, like a heating/melting effect. Something like all lasers that hit in one location with in half a second stack 100%, 50% for the next half second, etc.

If you really wanted to have fun with this you could have separate DR for kinetic and laser damage. So you could coat your ship with a super conductor that would have a DR of 1000k against lasers but only a DR of 1 against physical.

i figured you should have it work just like the shields and armor does in Star Trek: TNG.

the enemy has to penetrate shields before they can hit your ship.

thoughts on the math... a little later

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Original post by Kars Based on some of your other posts, most notably the concentrated fire post, I think your idea DR with low HP works fine.

Great, thanks. Yes, I now think concentrating fire and targeted shots will help smaller groups take down larger groups naturally, which should help balance things out somewhat.

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Have different weapon types affect differently. Kinetic missiles would have the DR applied separately to each missile (Spoonster chaingun example). Energy/laser weapons could stack with some sort of drop off with each additional hit if they hit close enough in both time and location, like a heating/melting effect. Something like all lasers that hit in one location with in half a second stack 100%, 50% for the next half second, etc.

Agreed.

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If you really wanted to have fun with this you could have separate DR for kinetic and laser damage. So you could coat your ship with a super conductor that would have a DR of 1000k against lasers but only a DR of 1 against physical.

I'd actually do this if the game were more combat focused, but right now I'm trying to rein in some stats before it gets too out of hand (I don't mind them under the hood where you can't see them, but the interface has to be clean and accessible).

What I could do is reflect this sort of thing with a strategic vulnerability status effect trigger, though. Something like "Damage Versus Weapon Type X 1/2". This will be a small touch to round out armor and materials and make them different for the many different regions of the galaxy.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes i figured you should have it work just like the shields and armor does in Star Trek: TNG. the enemy has to penetrate shields before they can hit your ship.

Unfortunately, in keeping with the post apocalyptic nature of the game, you might run across enemies that have no shields (one race even has ONLY shields for their hull). So you can't count on having both.

I quite like the idea of straight damage reduction. If you have ships with excessive amounts of shielding, then two such may well be unable to hurt each other. I don't see that as a problem as part of a well designed system - a 100/100/100 ship is going to have to have one heck of a power source to fire the weaponry, and a heck of a lot of weight in armour, so is going to have all the steering of a common house-brick, meaning anything of comparable size is going to be able to dodge and outrun them even if they can't scratch them. Meanwhile the 100/100/100 is going to be unable to get out of the way of the opposing 100D/1000S/200L which will have hull space for big enough engines to catch up and flatten it. Which is not to say that ridiculously defensive ships wouldn't have their place, but generally that place is either as heavily armoured transports (relying on not running into anything that can hurt them) or as part of a fleet (providing cover and buying time for the specialist aggressive ships to blast the enemy before getting blasted themselves) and not as independent non-specialists...


As a related afterthought, you could also have some amount of damage reflection - some amount of damage either as a percentage or as a fixed maximum gets reflected back at the attacker...