View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0002283 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Jan 7, 2011 8:32 pm | Jan 7, 2011 9:11 pm | |
| Reporter | Sunshine | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Product Version | 4.062 | ||||
| Summary | 0002283: Armor and why damage penalties should be used more often | ||||
| Description | I'm sure you guys have had a discussion about this at some point, but I'd like to bring it up now that we're seeing a lot of rebalancing happening, and to have this in mind for future waves of rebalancing now that we're seeing what works. Right now, very few ships have damage penalties, and if they do have them they're usually against command grade (see snipers for example). I would like to see more damage penalties in the future to open more design space. Since the change to armor, there are only 3 ways to make ships effective - give them armor piercing, give them higher damage, or give them higher bonuses (increasing attack speed does not work for a decent number of already high attack units because of the doubling in attack speed we see from Normal combat mode). Armor piercing is the general go-to means, to keep a unit from smunching everything (damage boost) or smunching just a specific subset of units (higher bonuses). If damage penalties were being used more frequently, units could have higher base damage, meaning armor piercing won't need to be used as much as a go-to ability for making something more useful. This is because most units could have higher damages across the board while also making them explicitly bad at attacking certain sets of units, rather than making them marginally good at attacking some sets of units (through bonuses) and leaving them marginally bad at attacking everything else (unless they have ridiculous damage or high armor piercing). It would also allow bonuses to mean something more if armor piercing were not so prevalent - as it is, for ship to ship combat, armor piercing is an incredibly necessary ability to allow a ship to be versatile. Damage bonuses tend to be much lower in 4.0 than in 3.0 though, because of this to keep things from being overpowered. For future waves of balancing, increase damage across the board, remove armor piercing from many of the ships, consider adding in significant damage penalties against 1/4 of the armor types, leave half of the armor types alone, and have significant bonuses against 1/4 of the armor types, as some kind of rule of thumb. Some ships would be left versatile (like fighters). This would also give an excellent pointer at what certain ships should not attack - for instance, a damage penalty against ultra light, light, and swarmer for Bombers. Or rather than giving bombers such insanely high armor, give a decent number of ships (missile units like missile frigates, MLRS) penalties against polycrystal, heavy and ultra heavy (since I'm guessing these warheads are more like HE warheads rather than AP kinds of things, given their target groups.) Thoughts? | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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So basically, keep the relative unit effectiveness, but use hull-type penalties to help bring down the order of magnitude of the stats some? |
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We specifically avoid damage penalties at almost all costs, except for the odd edge cases that really need them. The rationale for this is long and complex, but is based on a year and a half of experience with having both damage multipliers and penalties in the old pre-hull-types period, and let's just say that the penalties were much-hated by players for a lot of good reasons. I liked them at the time, but have come around to the other way of thinking in the meantime. So: I definitely know where you're coming from, but this was a horse beaten to death in the past. ;) |
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Weird how the psychological effect plays such a big role. Even though a 1x bonus against a unit with 200 armor is equivalent to .5x bonus against 100 armor, players will complain much more about the second one (this is ignoring the effects of armor piercing) |
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The complexity also rubbed a lot of folks wrong. |
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I can get behind that reasoning. |
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Thanks -- I can see it your way, too (it was my position for a long time), but the others wore me down. ;) |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 7, 2011 8:32 pm | Sunshine | New Issue | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:33 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007813 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:34 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007814 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:34 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:34 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:34 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:37 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007815 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:38 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007818 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:11 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007837 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:11 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007838 |
