How blocks handle damage

[gn_leugim]

Hi there again (after a long break).

 

In the past few days I have been developing this set of ideas that revolve around block damage. There are three different concepts here , but all revolve around how damaged a block is:

 

1 - Visual indication

 

First, maybe easiest to apply, blocks that had take damage should show just that.  If you imagine the (unlikely and possible) scenario where all the exterior blocks of the ship had taken damage to get its Hp to just one, the whole ship exterior would be one sneeze away from shattering into dust. Yet, it all looks pristine.

 

My suggestion would be to add masks of different types of damage to the blocks, that vary in number/type/density with how low in HP that particular block is. We could have cracks in the plating, scorched stains, missing plates and ambers/fires underneath the surface. Here are some examples of damage on ship surface that could serve as inspiration:

 

 

If someone could resize these images I would thank you :) )

 

 

 

 

 

This way we could tell which blocks are more damaged and, more importantly, I believe it would lead to an increase in the visual appealing of the game.

 

2 - Decreased performance with damage

 

If you attack an engine block and it takes damage, it is almost safe to assume its integrity has been compromised. If so, its effectiveness (in thrusting the ship forward) is also compromised. This is an example that may apply to most blocks. I would suggest to make the effect of some blocks proportional to their health. Which ones? well, pretty much all functional blocks with exception of cargo blocks maybe. if it is 50% of hp, it enacts half its effect.

 

Furthermore, this could be further refined to a separate stat of the block, separating its functionality as a separate "hp". Why? because this way some weapons could have different effects on blocks. for example those that have bonus damage to shields (plasma weapons for example) would damage the block hp for 100% of its damage, and for, say,  150% its functional, making it possible to disable blocks and not destroying them. this is handy if you want to board ships for example, or to stop them in place.

 

3 - Blocks "volatility"

 

The third part of my suggestion is in adding a block property, "instability" or "volatility". In a simple way, when a block that is volatile explodes, it would damage nearby blocks by a percentage of its HP. there could be different levels, for example "lightly volatile", "volatile" and "highly volatile", which would deal, say, 50%, 100% and 150% of its HP in damage to surrounding blocks when exploding. 

 

Energy containers and generators would be for example highly volatile, engines volatile and integrity gen lightly volatile.

 

In my opinion, these three changes could make the make more appealing visually, would make ship design more interesting and challenging and add new strategic elements and options to the war faring shipmen in the game. fell free to add your suggestions and comments :)

[FuryoftheStars]

Offhand, this idea sounds kind of nice.

 

To add to it, I wonder if it’d be nice to change armor into an expendable block that adds nothing (other than weight) to the ship, but also won’t send any damage received to the ship’s HP pool.

[Vis]

Something I have always hated about this game is that, 'players are punished for designing cool ships.' The most effective ships are basically flying bricks because sloped and corner blocks have less HP than a full cube shaped block piece. What I would like to see is the damage for at least all the physical type weapons be reduced based on the angle they impact a block at. So if they hit the flat side of a ship dead on they do 100% of their damage, but if they impact a ship's block at a 45 degree angle the shot only does 50% of it's damage.

In short. sloped armor should be a thing in this game. ;D

[gn_leugim]

Offhand, this idea sounds kind of nice.

 

To add to it, I wonder if it’d be nice to change armor into an expendable block that adds nothing (other than weight) to the ship, but also won’t send any damage received to the ship’s HP pool.

 

Never thought of that concept, it could be useful in some particular situations maybe. but at the same time it defeats the purpose of the armour blocks.

 

Something I have always hated about this game is that, 'players are punished for designing cool ships.' The most effective ships are basically flying bricks because sloped and corner blocks have less HP than a full cube shaped block piece. What I would like to see is the damage for at least all the physical type weapons be reduced based on the angle they impact a block at. So if they hit the flat side of a ship dead on they do 100% of their damage, but if they impact a ship's block at a 45 degree angle the shot only does 50% of it's damage.

In short. sloped armor should be a thing in this game. ;D

 

I believe I have seen that request being discussed before, and I agree with it. yes, would be nice to have such feature, although I dunno if it would be useful. after all, space is not a 2 dimensional plane, and more often than not, I find myself being shot from above/below than from the front, or from multiple sides instead of one side only.

[Vis]

I believe I have seen that request being discussed before, and I agree with it. yes, would be nice to have such feature, although I dunno if it would be useful. after all, space is not a 2 dimensional plane, and more often than not, I find myself being shot from above/below than from the front, or from multiple sides instead of one side only.

Well, you just have to design your ships with sloped armor all around and try to minimize all the large flat surfaces that you can. But that is part of the fun when it comes to designing ships. :)

[DivineEvil]

Something I have always hated about this game is that players are punished for designing cool ships.' The most effective ships are basically flying bricks because sloped and corner blocks have less HP than a full cube-shaped block piece. What I would like to see is the damage for at least all the physical type weapons be reduced based on the angle they impact a block at. So if they hit the flat side of a ship dead on they do 100% of their damage, but if they impact a ship's block at a 45-degree angle the shot only does 50% of its damage.

In short. sloped armor should be a thing in this game. ;D

I have to disagree. Sure, slopes and corners have less hp than full blocks, but they also have a smaller profile. You may argue that slopes have a greater external surface also, but that is irrelevant - two slopes have the same volume and hp, and the same can be said about corners. You can combine them to match the volume of the full block, and by creating the wedge you simply redistribute the volume.

 

The problem with the current block building approach is actually coming from splash weapons like railguns and missiles, which have their damage multiplied simply by hitting several blocks, which encourage simplistic design with few massive blocks. Splash should only affect the blocks being hit, not the damage being done. If a railgun is capable of penetrating multiple blocks, then each block hit should be half as powerful as the previous one, which progressively leads to a total maximum damage of 1.|99|, instead of making it like 5-8x times as powerful. The same is true for explosive weapons - damage should be somewhat distributed between the blocks from a set total value to prevent damage amplification.

[gn_leugim]

those are some valid points there, specially when dealing with splash/penetrating damage. I think it is, as now, a bit OP

[Vis]

I have to disagree. Sure, slopes and corners have less hp than full blocks, but they also have a smaller profile. You may argue that slopes have a greater external surface also, but that is irrelevant - two slopes have the same volume and hp, and the same can be said about corners. You can combine them to match the volume of the full block, and by creating the wedge you simply redistribute the volume.

 

The problem with the current block building approach is actually coming from splash weapons like railguns and missiles, which have their damage multiplied simply by hitting several blocks, which encourage simplistic design with few massive blocks. Splash should only affect the blocks being hit, not the damage being done. If a railgun is capable of penetrating multiple blocks, then each block hit should be half as powerful as the previous one, which progressively leads to a total maximum damage of 1.|99|, instead of making it like 5-8x times as powerful. The same is true for explosive weapons - damage should be somewhat distributed between the blocks from a set total value to prevent damage amplification.

No the real problem with the current block building approach is ships have an HP pool and all blocks just add to the HP pool instead of have each block take damage and break off when the block's HP hits 0. So you have to just make shitty looking and more unrealistic ship designs just to make that HP pool bigger.

A smaller profile only really works at the right angles and it won't make your ship small enough to really make up for the lack of HP.

[FuryoftheStars]

Never thought of that concept, it could be useful in some particular situations maybe. but at the same time it defeats the purpose of the armour blocks.

 

I have seen other comments about armor being useless and I thought one of the reasons behind it had something to do with the affects it has on the ship's hp pool when destroyed.  I may be wrong on this, but that was the basis behind my suggestion.

 

 

 

Something else that occurs to me as well from past posts, when a block gets hit by an extreme amount of damage that's enough to break it several times over, does it pass on the full damage to the ship's hp pool, or only to the point of where it would have been broken if it was slowly over time?  I ask cause I know (at least in the past, but I think it's still an issue?) that folks used to have problems with clipping something like an asteroid and the whole ship goes kaboom.  I've also played with some really over powered railguns that can one shot most ships after shields, but it doesn't seem to matter where on them I hit.  I can hit them on one extreme corner and the whole ship still goes boom.

 

If this is the case and that's what is happening, then that should probably be changed as well.  There should be some kind of hard cap on how much damage a block receives that can be passed to the ship's hp pool, and that cap should be based on the block's hps, not the amount of damage the weapon is dealing.  1e006 damage that clips a lone thruster should still be damage that merely rips that thruster apart and not result in an instant kill of the ship.

[TESL4]

I'd love to see battle damage on ships!  I also really like the idea of armor not contributing to the hull HP, but rather being its own independent HP (similar to eve but not a "pool" HP).  It probably shouldn't be a pool because once you break the frontal armor and keep hitting that spot, the rest of the armor on the ship won't do anything to help.  This could potentially give railguns their purpose where they don't just multiply their damage based on how many penetrations they have, but rather they just pierce through armor and do a non penetrating damage to the hull underneath.  This would make more sense to me as existing railguns are shown to be able to pierce through armor.  This would change the way ships are built too, because to properly protect important blocks such as shield generators ect, you will not only need armor, but a layor of hull plating too which will result in finding a balance between speed vs durability.

 

The idea of volatile components is amazeballs too.  That would really help deal with ships that are nothing but engines, thrusters, and mass shield and generators. 

[DivineEvil]

No the real problem with the current block building approach is ships have an HP pool and all blocks just add to the HP pool instead of having each block take damage and break off when the block's HP hits 0. So you have to just make shitty looking and more unrealistic ship designs just to make that HP pool bigger.

A smaller profile only really works at the right angles and it won't make your ship small enough to really make up for the lack of HP.

Well, that is just false. Each block can take individual damage and be destroyed. This is why your ship can acquire a "damaged" status, which prevents you from editing a ship since you'd be able to place new blocks and turrets on top of the blocks that are present in the ship layout but are physically destroyed without this status in place. This is also why you have Integrity Field Generators, which multiply the individual health of blocks in its area-of-effect (and are almost mandatory for more expensive designs) while having no effect on the ship's HP pool.

 

This is why it is imperative to have all of your functional blocks to be covered with armor or hull - if you get a hit to a Shield Generator block, the damage to the ship's HP pool can be negligible, but the block itself has very low durability compared to other block types, and if it is destroyed directly, you will instantly lose all of your shields and will have to choose between paying the entire credit and material value of that block to repair the ship or discarding it from the design in the build menu.

 

Placing a solid Block of Hull of a given volume, or using two Slopes with the same total volume, or using Corner 1 + Corner 2 combination for the same total volume, or placing three Corner 3 blocks for the same total volume - either of these additions will give the same bonus to ship HP pool, will cost the same and have the same mass. For every solid block that you use, you can instead place a Slope with any dimension doubled to get the same result, and the chance to hit the block depends on volume, not dimensions.

 

The reason why people usually talk about armor being useless is that it stops Railgun rounds from damaging blocks behind itself, which is utterly meaningless if that doesn't prevent the multiplication of damage again the ship's HP pool. So yeah, a 2000 damage Railgun round will only damage the armor block it hits and not 4 other blocks behind it, but it will still account for those 4 blocks when dealing damage to the ship HP pool, resulting in 10.000 total damage. This is what currently keeps the Railguns ridiculously overpowered, and that was the problem ever since the Railguns were around.

 

Armor is still very good as a source of additional HP since it packs more of it in the same volume and at greater increment to its mass in every case. However,

its interaction with Railgun rounds should work differently - if the Railgun round hits the armor, that armor block simply takes full damage. If there's Hull in its place, then Railgun round should do half damage to that Hull, and half of that to the next block, and half of that to the next block, and so on until the penetration score is expended, and the remaining damage is dealt to the last block in a chain. This way Railguns will be a real threat to vulnerable internal blocks, but won't have damage multiplied by their sheer number.

[Vis]

I never said a block couldn't be blown off, it just only really happens if a ship shoots nothing but that block. I have seen many ships blow up without first losing a single block. Way more often than not a ship's HP will hit 0 and blow up without losing any blocks. ::)

[FuryoftheStars]

I never said a block couldn't be blown off, it just only really happens if a ship shoots nothing but that block. I have seen many ships blow up without first losing a single block. Way more often than not a ship's HP will hit 0 and blow up without losing any blocks. ::)

 

Yeah, that was something I've been thinking about, too, and I think another part of why I made the suggestion earlier about armor.  But I wonder if IFGs are to blame here?  I mean, they increase the block hps by x10 while only lowering the damage to the ship hp pool by /2.

[Vis]

Yeah, that was something I've been thinking about, too, and I think another part of why I made the suggestion earlier about armor.  But I wonder if IFGs are to blame here?  I mean, they increase the block hps by x10 while only lowering the damage to the ship hp pool by /2.

Interesting, but does the added block HP also add the same amount to the ship's overall HP pool? I like IFGs so I don't want to just blame them, but I do think the damage should be done differently because it doesn't make much sense for a ship to take a lot of damage on one side until some blocks of the outer hull actually start to break, then turn the ship to the other side and take just a few hits on the undamaged side only to blow up because the ships HP pool hit 0. XD It makes no sense because the hull on that side is just fine. ::)

[FuryoftheStars]

Interesting, but does the added block HP also add the same amount to the ship's overall HP pool? I like IFGs so I don't want to just blame them, but I do think the damage should be done differently because it doesn't make much sense for a ship to take a lot of damage on one side until some blocks of the outer hull actually start to break, then turn the ship to the other side and take just a few hits on the undamaged side only to blow up because the ships HP pool hit 0. XD It makes no sense because the hull on that side is just fine. ::)

 

I don’t believe so, no.

 

And yeah, fully agree that it’s weird feeling to see your ship die while most of it is still intact.

[TESL4]

 

And yeah, fully agree that it’s weird feeling to see your ship die while most of it is still intact.

 

That's where a visual indicator like the OP suggested would be sweet.  The ship would look like it had gone through a fight instead of looking pristine.

[FuryoftheStars]

That's where a visual indicator like the OP suggested would be sweet.  The ship would look like it had gone through a fight instead of looking pristine.

 

Outer hull or armor looking shabby is still outer hull or armor that’s intact with the internals untouched, though.  But I do agree that damaged blocks should look damaged.  Just think there needs to be a bit more to this than a simple hp pool, or something different with the hp pool and how damage gets applied to it so that your ships aren’t dying while still mostly intact.

[TESL4]

That's where a visual indicator like the OP suggested would be sweet.  The ship would look like it had gone through a fight instead of looking pristine.

 

Outer hull or armor looking shabby is still outer hull or armor that’s intact with the internals untouched, though.  But I do agree that damaged blocks should look damaged.  Just think there needs to be a bit more to this than a simple hp pool, or something different with the hp pool and how damage gets applied to it so that your ships aren’t dying while still mostly intact.

 

I believe I suggested in a post somewhere recently that armor should have independent and individual HP per block instead of adding to the hull HP pool.  Would make it so that damage to actual hull and vital blocks would cause the Hull HP to go down.  Additionally, making the hull integrity blocks become armor integrity blocks would reduce the crazyness that causes ships to die without much, if any blocks being destroyed.  The new armor integrity blocks would simply double or maybe tripple the individual armor HP making armor tanking an option instead of shield tanking.

 

[FuryoftheStars]

I believe I suggested in a post somewhere recently that armor should have independent and individual HP per block instead of adding to the hull HP pool.  Would make it so that damage to actual hull and vital blocks would cause the Hull HP to go down.

 

I posted similar in my first post of this thread as well.

 

Additionally, making the hull integrity blocks become armor integrity blocks would reduce the crazyness that causes ships to die without much, if any blocks being destroyed.  The new armor integrity blocks would simply double or maybe tripple the individual armor HP making armor tanking an option instead of shield tanking.

 

Interesting thought.  Though I believe part of the reason for (or at least benefit from) IFGs is making it so that smaller detail blocks aren't as easily blown off, and those often include glow blocks, glass, and the like, so I'm not sure about changing it to affect armor only.  Up for debate, though.

[gn_leugim]

and in the meantime the original ideas were forgotten I guess  :'(  ;D ;D

 

 

[FuryoftheStars]

and in the meantime the original ideas were forgotten I guess  :'(  ;D ;D

 

Haha, sorry, I hadn't been saying anymore on it cause I pretty much already agreed with it all and was just waiting to see what other feedback others gave, if any was negative, etc.

 

That said, to give some little feedback on #2, Decreased performance with block damage, while I like this, I wouldn't want to see a straight 1:1 on the performance degradation.  IE, I wouldn't want 50% functionality at 50% block health, 25% at 25% block, etc.  I'd rather see the degradation start off slower, then at some point start picking up so we'd reach an obvious conclusion of 0 at 0.

 

If that makes sense.

[gn_leugim]

no need to say sorry ahah :D it's natural, discussion just got carried over to other subjects-

 

Regarding your though, maybe, instead of following a linear path, could it follow a sigmoid shape? the first would be much easier to apply, but I see the logic you are following. a few scratches on the outside are not exactly the most menacing to the function of the block, or should impede it too much.

 

[FuryoftheStars]

Ah, so is that what it’s called?  Best I could come up with in my head was “reverse diminishing returns”....

 

I’ve been thinking about something else today in regards this, but is more complex so don’t know how others would feel.

 

Instead of having the functionality of the block directly linked to block hps, create a separate hp pool (that’s specific to the blocks... no global pool) for the block’s functionality.  Then you can have the different weapons and damage types damage block integrity hps differently from each other than they do the block functionality hps.  This would allow for some weapons being better at disabling than others, maybe even make it where some couldn’t disable (cause they won’t damage functionality as quickly as integrity).

 

I would also then say that functionality hps should be repaired faster than integrity. It can use the same formulas and calculations as current block integrity hps, but also factor in engineers (either in whole or in part).  This would allow it so sustained damage from a “disabling” weapon can disable the block before destroying it, but if you allow the block too many breaks to repair, then even the disabling weapon would destroy it before it could be disabled.

 

The block’s functionality would be directly related to the remaining functionality hps, but I would almost say should be considered disabled and shut off when it reaches a value other than 0.  So for example, a block could still be 10% functional at 10% functionality hps remaining, but then any further damage would cause it to shut straight off.  The functionality hps would then have to be restored to 10% or greater before being able to reactivate.  I’d almost advocate for saying that the functionality hps would have to be greater, like say 15% in this example, before reactivating.

 

You could even take this a step further (though this may be unnecessarily complicating it further) and say that the lower a block’s integrity hps, the more damage that can be caused to the block’s functionality.  So, for example, a weapon that has a 0.8 damage modifier to functionality, at 50% block integrity could get a 50% boost to its modifier and be doing 1.2x damage.

[gn_leugim]

I have also thought and suggested that, although in less detail.  you went to further length on that matter ;)

 

The thing nto consider here is, have all of the same type share a common pool of "FP" (Function points) or have each block has his.

 

Gameplay wise I believe the first one would be more, say, enjoyable, but realism wise, I think the second would be more appropriate.