#Make armour and AP additive

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

empty oyster
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Currently, armour stacks multiplicatively. A person wearing a SCAF suit with the helmet up, as well as a watchdog respirator, for instance, would calculate their effective piercing resistance as such:

0.55x0.95x0.95=0.4966

45% piercing resistance from the SCAF suit, 5% from the SCAF suit helmet, and 5% from the mask.

AP applies as an exponent to effective resistance, and is calculated by subtracting the AP value of the projectile from 1. Something with 0.7 AP, for instance, would result in an exponent to the resistance of 0.3. For the SCAF suit example earlier, this would be 0.4966^0.3, or around 0.8106 (around 19% resistance). This resistance applies to the damage of the projectile itself.

These systems are completely unintuitive, hard to caluclate on the fly, and fall apart completely when armour plates are added to the calculation. A plasteel plate has 75HP before it breaks. It doesn't have any resistances, do AP does not apply. A 9x19mm AP round does 7 piercing damage. An FMJ round does 24. It takes four FMJ rounds or eleven AP rounds to break a plasteel plate. That's nearly three times as long.

And even without taking plating into account, the current damage of AP rounds is so low that it doesn't even matter anyways. As seen in the photo attached, which is my manual TTK testing, of which the 9x19mm AP round has a whopping 0.9 AP, it falls behind FMJ in every single metric, taking four seconds longer to kill a person without a plate than a person WITH one, if shot by FMJs. The only situation in which I have found that AP increases TTK is with the juggernaut suit, which has 80% pierce resistance. It took 18 shots AP 9x19mm versus 22 shots FMJ 9x19mm to crit, and even then, adding a single plasteel plate brings that to 29 shots AP and 26 FMJ.

There is no reason to use AP ammo under any circumstance.

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My suggestion is to make armour additive, with AP directly reducing armour percentage. This would mean that high AP values completely ignore low armour, and reduce high armour enough that while FMJs may do chip damage, the AP is competing with a much lower resistance.

This system would be much simpler, easily explainable, and allow for on-the-fly armour calculations. Let's take the SCAF suit example from earlier. It has 45% pierce resistance on the chestplate, and 5% on the helmet for a total of 50% piercing resistance. A bullet that does 20 damage will do 10 damage. A bullet that does 10 damage at 0.5 AP will do 10 damage.

Against something with 80% resistance, the first bullet does 4 damage, while the second reduces the effective resistance down to 30% and does 7 damage.

Against something with 30% resistance, the first bullet does 14 damage while the second still does 10. The overpenetration does not add extra damage and means that against lower percentages, lesser penetrating ammo is superior.

To prevent stacking from completely blocking damage, it should be capped at 80-85%. This means that someone with like, a web vest SWAT helm and syndicate gas mask won't have 95% piercing resistance and steamroll everything.

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Plating, in its current form, leaves almost no reason to use the lower tier plates due to how more powerful the plasteel one is compared to all the others. It has 3x the HP pool of a durathread plate for 6% movement speed decrease in comparison. There's no reason to use it. There are several ways to fix this, but making the speed difference more dramatic could help. 5% for durathread, 10% for ceramic, and 20% for plasteel, or something similar. This means that taking lower level plates gives a buffer pool for HP while not hindering most movement. A plasteel plate would feel sluggish, but provide a massive EHP boost.

For how they interact with the AP system, I suggest that AP correlate to an amount of damage that ignores the plate. A 10 damage bullet with 0.5 AP, for example, would deal 5 damage to the plate and apply the remaining 5 to the armour, taking into account AP, resistance, etc.

Additionally, higher level plates should take more AP to ignore. Durathread plates would need 0.3 AP to ignore, Ceramic plates would need 0.5 AP to ignore, Plasteel plates would need 0.7 AP to ignore, etcetera. I have not tested these numbers. All of the numbers suggested are theoretical and would need testing.

Another way to balance plating would be to add AP as a multiplier to the damage plates take. A 10 damage bullet with 0.5 AP doing 15 damage to a plate, for instance, or something similar.

Both of these solutions make plating interact with the AP system instead of being a flat breakpoint that only interacts with damage.

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The main issue with the current system isn't balance, but player clarity. The current systems, as I've mentioned, are not referenced anywhere ingame. The only way for someone to find out how the AP system works is to dive into the code of the game or do manual testing. And even then, the math is so esoteric and unintuitive, as it interacts with multiplicative scaling, exponential AP scaling, and flat HP layers, that it just doesn't make sense to most people.

It's misleading, as well, as most people (including myself) thought that armour stacked additively. Why wouldn't it? I have a ballistic vest that gives me 30% and a helmet that gives me 10% for a total of 40%. It just makes sense.

The proposed changes make it so that the armour system actually aligns with what people expect from the game and makes sense. Higher AP is more effective against higher armour, while higher damage is more effective against lower armour. Higher AP is better against higher level plates, and completely ignores lower level plates.

It additionally makes balancing future content a lot easier, as the new armour system, for the most part, makes armour in 5% scalable increments which are much easier to reference. TTK is simplified, and can thus be balanced much more easily.

In its current form, the armour system is bad because the best choices are counterintuitive. AP ammo, which should be good against plating and heavy armour, is worse against both due to how the system works. With additive scaling, this goes away completely.

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Make armour and AP additive

surreal vault
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Couldn’t you get 100% resists if armor added up though?

empty oyster
surreal vault
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This system I think will just be a massive buff to low tier armor. if you want AP to be relevant then buff its raw damage

scarlet coyote
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empty oyster
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The new AP system would not touch structural

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AP would still be good against mechs

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This is solely about AP in relation to armour

surreal vault
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This will fuck balance and not solve anything

empty oyster
surreal vault
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Low tier armor becomes almost as good as high tier armor

empty oyster
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How so?

surreal vault
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Because common things like helmets and gas masks will become stronger

empty oyster
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A rebalance would involve modifying shit so that this doesn’t happen

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The helmet would be considered when balancing hardsuits

surreal vault
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So you rebalance everything then what changed?

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There is good armor and bad armor like before

empty oyster
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As mentioned in the post, armour is simplified and the AP system is less esoteric

merry flame
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i still feel like % based armor will forever be scuffed

surreal vault
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Multiplication isn’t much more complex than addition

merry flame
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it should be mixed in with either a similar system to rot or something like dermal armor

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dermal armor is the best route for heavy armors imo

empty oyster
empty oyster
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Sort of a band aid patch until we get an actually good armour system

merry flame
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yeah defo

empty oyster
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Ss14 balance has always been shit

merry flame
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% based armor feels like a statcheck

surreal vault
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Also who the fuck calculates anything on the fly?

empty oyster
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Comparing which armour is better than another

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Like, when printing something at the lathe

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That’s a good point, it really doesn’t get noticeably better between the two systems

scarlet coyote
empty oyster
merry flame
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mechs are a whole other issue lol

surreal vault
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The only thing I find to be really weird about calculations is AP calculations, but multiplicative stacking really makes the most sense

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Your armor absorbs its % of damage then the next armor absorbs its % of the remaining damage