Verity Sovereign
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
244
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Posted - 2012.11.10 17:36:00 -
[1] - Quote
I can propose a buff to armor tanking that shouldn't affect capital vs capital engagements...
Surely most of you have played some sort of RTS game with armor, such as starcraft...
Take a Siege tank, it has HP of 150, and a base armor value of 1, that can be upgraded 3 times for a total armor value of 4.
When a marine fires at it with a 6 damage gauss rifle, the armor value is suptracted from the damage value.
With no armor, the siege tank would be dead in 150/6 = 25 shots from the marine, with its base armor, that becomes 150/(6-1) = 30 shots... and if the 3x +1 vehicle armor upgrades have been researched, and the enemy marine has no firepower upgrades, it takes 150/(6-3-1)= 75 shots from that marine to bring down the siege tank
Meanwhile, it has a negligible effect on an enemy siege tank, which does 30 damage per shot. No armor would take 5 shots, its base armor of 1 increases that to 6 as each shot does 29 damage, but even with the 3rd armor upgrade, the enemy siege tank is doing 26 damage per shot, and it still only takes 6 shots to bring down an enemy siege tank
What if we applied this to eve?
In addition to a % resist, armor just straight up does -X damage points from each incoming hit. We could set a base "armor value" for each ship, such that a cruiser/BC class ship taking hits from medium weapons sees minimal benefit from its armor, meanwhilea BS taking hits from small weapons has its armor shrugging off almost all the incoming damage.
Perhaps Armor plates (like 1600mm) can boost this value (i'd use these rather than hardeners, as they come in sizes)
When dreads and titans start firing at enemy super-Logis (err, I mean carriers), the damage harmlessly absorbed by the armor is insignificant
But... such a change would require a lot of additonal balancing... minnie arty would be OP'd compared to other small weapons when engaging larger targets, the minnie "Alpha advantage" would need to be scaled back. We could further differentiate the weapons within a size class by making the smaller caliber weapons actually put out more DPS by virtue of faster cycle times - ie you'd want 75mm rails against other frigates, but if you're punching against cruiser/BC armor then 150mm rails will be able to apply more damage.
In subcap engagements, this could be a huge advantage for armor ships, and the armor values would need to be tweaked to be not OPd, but not insignificant.
Cap ship armor would need to be relatively weak for their size, so that BS sized weapons don't lose too much DPS piercing it - and of course, if BS weapons aren't affected by it too much, then capital class weapons should be able to ignore it, and armor cap vs shield cap balance should remain the same |