Armor and Armor Penetration mechanic. Suggestion for future patch / DLC

[nepejke]

Hi, dear Egosoft devs team.

I suggest you idea: armor pen mechanic for bullets and for ships. (as it realized in World of tanks, may be with some randomness )
I think this can add many new variations of different ship build and guns. Some ships can be squishy with low armor, but had good damage. Some ships can be very toughness and armored, but with smaller amount of damage.

Currently, "Heavily armored" ship is implemented as simply having large amount of hull points.
Split ships for example.

But this is just a HP pool. Not the actual armor.
Means still possible to damage heavily armored L/XL ships by small beam, pulse or bolt weapons.

Armor mechanics can change this problem.
Armor is also useful for make more durable surface components and can contribute for diversity of ship/component stat and specialization.

[Feloidea]

We already have exactly that. Shields. Large and extra large shields are already so durable that unless you use very specific anti-surface module weapons, you will barely scratch an L or XL ship in an S or M ship. And if you field none of the specialized weapons and just want to break through those shields with raw damage, you'd either field a large destroyer on your own, or throw a swarm of S and M ships at your enemy to multiply your total damage output in order to burn through those shields. And some ships have more shields than others with various trade-offs for it.

[LameFox]

I do think an actual armour system could be interesting, mostly just because it would allow for extra variety in faction balance and potentially equipment loadouts. I'd be surprised if that was something they were willing to add from scratch in a released game though.

[taztaz502]

Was thinking about this during a few timelines missions, Would be great to have shields, armour and hull. Would add a lot of variety between ships and weapons too. E.g. giving us a reason to use frigates if they were heavily armoured and didn't disintegrate like they currently do.

[Astalid]

i like idea to have armor, shields and hull. it's clear to understanding mechanic and looks like it brings additional variety to game

[Falcrack]

For anyone who has played Sword of the Stars II, they had an interesting armor system in that game. Kinda hard to describe, but basically ships had quadrants with several layers of armor. Depending on where the ships were hit, armor would get weakened. If the ship kept getting hit in the same spot, the armor in that spot got depleted, and any hits on areas where armor was depleted resulted in critical system failures. You didn't know when exactly the ship was going to explode, the whole ship didn't necessarily have a hitpoint pool, but you had a good idea that if you kept getting pounded in areas where the ship armor had been depleted, it was going to go boom soon.

[gbjbaanb]

Agreed - apart from making the middling sized ships tougher, it would mean your fighter squadrons woulnd't be able to destroy the battleships with tiny pewpew weapons. You have to bring bombers. As in, you can't kill a tank with a pistol, but you can kill a Colossus with a pulse laser. Eventually. I take down Xenon K all the time with just bolt repeaters. Takes a while, but its trivial to do.

now obviously that doesn;t mean your fighters can't destroy a battleship, they can still shoot off the turrets and other components leaving it dead in the water, which itself would mean bigger ships could become much more valuable and costly to construct - as you woulnd't be losing them to fighter swarms as easily. It makes combat a little more strategic overall, and thus more interesting.

The problem with armour though, is balance. Its way too easy to stick really thick armour that makes a bigger ship invulnerable, if armour is to be added, it needs to be more subtle in its stats than you'd expect.