New armor system?

@Godde - should be acknowledged that you and I use the stats in different ways.

We use 'soon' when, frankly, we don't know. It's something on the radar to do but I can't give an exact time. Things change and if we say exactly when we think it'll be out, invariably stuff happens and it doesn't go as planned. Then everyone gets upset. So it's easier (and safer) to say 'soon'.

I'm pretty sure we used 'soon' when describing planet smashing, nukes, balance changes, and a host of other major features we've put in since alpha.

Quite probably.

So.... before 2015?

Well of course Scathis knows that damage and health is not the only important stats for balance. How can you think that he does not know that cost is a very important stat?
The thing about balance is that there exists so many different solutions to achieve what you, as a designer, wants and I think that a system without armor can achieve that in a much more elegant and intuitive way. As I said, I don't think PA, the main game, need an armor system even though it is fine for supporting an armor system for mods.
The biggest problem with giving critique to the current balance design is that I don't think the balance have been that well described to the players. Like the roles of the units, the big strategic choices and the strategic counter-relationships so feedback can only address small local balance issues without taking the whole game balance in context because the overall game balance haven't been defined so an holistic approach is almost impossible.

"Time" and "time" really seem to cancel each other since both small "t" and big "T" is the same number, aren't they?

Ah... Here we get to the crux. I would simply write this as:
"Total Metal Spent" = "Metal Output Per Second" * Seconds

I assume that both the players have the same "Metal Output Per Second". Why wouldn't they?

Well the infrastructure requirements are different for Peregrines and Hummingbirds. http://people.dsv.su.se/~akbj7812/pa-db/table/air.html

Hummingbirds would actually outweigh the Peregrines in metal cost as they require less infrastructure to be produced.

I am a strong proponent of consistent game physics above all. Things that happen in the game should be physically consistent according to the laws in the game universe.
This were one of the strengths of TA. Everything could hit everything else and it were only limited by the ingame physics.
You seem to be a strong proponent of real life physics. I would like to see real life physics joined with consistent game physics but that doesn't include physics with fruits as weapons.

Shields are much better defined in Zero-K IMHO but I still think it breaks game logic that light airplanes can go past the shield while heavy missiles can't. Conceptually there isn't much difference between them.

I didn't say that Laser Blasters are realistic.

Plasma weapons are not realistic because I read this article:
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html
Feel free to debunk it.
IMHO that is a big problem with basing stuff on realism. You have this awesome idea about Star Wars battles and then someone comes along and says it is unrealistic and then you try to motivate with stuff with realism but yet you are just speculating about the future which none of us knows too much about.
I think game mechanical consistency is much more important than realistic physics.
Me:"What is HP?"
Someone:"It is the amount of armor the unit have and how much damage it can take before it reaches critical failure."
Me:"Okey, fine. Why can't the AA fire at ground targets?"
Someone:"Because I said so and it would be overpowered otherwise."
Me:"Meh..."

Maybe, maybe not.

How are you sure that the laser on a future robot would be able to be that extreme and even if it does; In what way will the damage from a HEAT warhead be different to a laser on future nanolathed materials?

Well you can speculate about future robotic warfare, materials and weapons and make an armor system based on your best guesses and hopefully your game will be fun.
But what if it is not fun? What if future combat is boring and lack variety?

Fair enough; up until now you always promised and delivered. As long as we are - at some point down the line - able to supplant your carefully crafted unit balance with our own less carefully crafted one so we can silently say to ourselves 'he told us so!' consider me a happy panda.

Balance is repeatedly changed from a fairly balanced position to "that will result in X being much more OP than x - shall I try it in game - yep, that happened." (Not talking about Ubercannon, more talking about t2 dynamic with t1)
Oh he'd mentioned cost too. Plus Scathis keeps making comments about health and damage being more important than other stuff. This confused me.

My post was actually talking about ranges and so on. I brought you in because of the metal cost vs time.

This is true...

@neutrino - it's March Unit list from January "Soon"?

In other news, what happened to the lore that was due this week?

Yes, and that's kind of my point. Fruit in real life as weapons is preposterous. But if the game universe changed so that fruits as weapons were the only method of damage, it would just take a change in sprite. There would be no difference between a rotten tomato and a hard watermelon. And that isn't consistent game physics according to physical laws of the game universe.

:'(. I cry. I have no words. A kinetic shield which is only partially kinetic... Wow. That's very illogical.

Plasma weapons are not realistic because I read this article:
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html
Feel free to debunk it.
[/quote]
Lightning is plasma, is not fully understood, and ball lightning is very similar to that proposed. In other words, yes, the writer of that article makes valid points, until ball lightning floats through his chest. Death doesn't listen to the "But that's impossible" argument.

Besides, they made a nanocar. I'm pretty sure it's within the realms of possibility to create a very spiky molecular projectile which generates plasma from atmosphere as it flies.

At the end of the day, I'm a New Zealander. Ernest Rutherford (Kiwi) split the atom, and in 1933 made the comment that nuclear fission was not feasible to generate energy. A Hungarian scientist, Szilard, found that "rather irritating because how can anyone know what someone else might invent".

The scientific majority (including Einstein) is of the opinion that it isn't possible. In 1934, the uranium nucleus is split without comprehension. In 1937 Rutherford dies, in 1939 the implication of splitting of the uranium nucleus is realised, in '42, Manhattan Project, in '45, the world entered the atomic era.

Szilard had the right idea.

It's how we sublime carbon, now, so that we can nanolathe buckminster balls. Yes, future materials may made out of an undiscovered material, and be so ridiculously OP that their triple point is above 4765K (pure-graphite). You just need to focus the laser more on more spot, or increase the energy going into it. Preferably both.

You know what nanolathe means, right? It's essentially 3D printing, occurring on a scale of 10^-9 m. It's nanotechnology, and it's not fundamentally different to the cellular processes occurring in your own body. Except it's much faster.

Remember the nanocar?
Nanotechnology already exists. Nanolathing already exists - it's how we make our most advanced computer chips. It's still an emerging field, the distances are quite short, but yes, welcome to the twenty-first.

Quick side comment on "cheap stuff is cheap to repair, expensive stuff is expensive to repair" - that's a truth of capital, not true from a manufacturing point of view.

Remember that metal output is a function of time - i.e. to increase the time to manufacture, the time the nanolathe is lathing, you increase the metal cost.

When you're manufacturing stuff, the less parts you need to assemble means that the component is faster to produce.

Think of plastic - 1 piece plastic toys that come out of a mould are much faster to make than Lego (you have to make each piece individually, which may take the same amount of time, but then you have to assemble it)

When you stand on 1-piece plastic toy, and it breaks, it takes a lot of effort to fix it again. Essentially, you have to melt it down, put it back into the mould, and reform it.

With Lego, if you stand on it and a particular block breaks, you disassemble it so much, reach into the bin, find a similar block, place the damaged component, and away you go.

Obviously it wouldn't be exactly the same scenario. But the version which is slower to assemble can quite conceivably be faster to repair.

Err... Anti-armor and Lasers.

Ain't it obvious? Lasers are just light. You deal with light by reflecting it, you deal with heat by deflecting or reemiting it. A heat warhead doesn't create a shockwave that pulverises the armor. A heat warhead cuts right through the armor and delivers moving projectiles into whatever the armor was protecting.

It's quite telling that the most damaging weapon types in the game (Shellers and Stompers) fire a shell.

You realise I'm inspired by other games with weapon and armor types right? I'm convinced it will be fun.



You know what? I think we're all caught up from that earlier post. Time to call it a night I think.

Well I think you can have an approach that you discover the balance as a designer rather than designing the balance. I think Garat might be using that approach to discover the gameplay and find the strategical space for which to balance the game rather than having clear goals from the start. So big buffs and nerfs might be used to see how the players adapt and the metagame changes.
Personally I think I would prefer to try to define the roles and strategies that are to be used as clear as possible and try to design a balance that achieves that but its' not like I really have balanced a game from the bottom up myself.
But yeah the current balance doesn't really promote t1 as basic units to be used through all the game as t2 units will quickly replace most of the t1 units on the battlefield.

This is speculation about future materials, technologies and weapons. You could go further and base the ingame physics and lore on these explanations but to someone that is not familiar with these kinds of physics or have other ideas of future technology, this system could seem very far fetched. If you base a game on todays technology you have a real life precedent and people would have expectations according to real life. Sci-Fi is somewhere between fantasy and real science. In many cases people have imagined things that according to todays knowledge of physics are unlikely to happen.

No, I don't think it is obvious how future lasers would affect future nanolathed armor or how damage is mitigated on the different parts of the robot by different kinds of weapons.
Usually I have seen lasers as penetrating the armor of a unit or if unable to do so, it would basically only scorch the surface of the unit and shave off the armor bit by bit.
Now would a penetrating lasers do the same damage to a unit that a HEAT warhead does? I don't know. Maybe it depends on how the unit is designed and what critical system failures that arise from such penetrations.

Yes, but how realistic are those Sci-Fi games? What if realism actually stands in the way of fun? What parts of the realism would you change to make the game more fun? Most likely there will be room for interpretation which can allow you to change some unit stats, game physics or game scenarios and still maintain the jest of realism.

I haven't said health and damage being more important than other numbers. That's just silly. All numbers work in unison each other.

I think you had me confused because people were talking about making certain units more powerful than other units by changing their health and damage and I asked for those numbers because that's what the discussion was around.

For the record, ball lightning is very probably vaporized dirt:
Read
Science

Correct. Well done.


Read it yourself. What is an ionised gas?

Please do not try and insinuate I don't know my science

I'm not trying to. Otherwise I would have explained a lot more.

Those examples are all examples of today's technologies?

Can you stop treating nanolathe like it's some magic please? Your skin is a nanolathed material. A laser affects your skin. That's it. If too much of your skin's cells are effected, it produces a visible burn. Ever wondered what a 4th degree burn actually is? It was an application of something that caused damage to every layer of the skin, plus the muscle/bone/other organs, without actually damaging the structure to the point of failure.

A laser is an electromagnetic radiation weapon. Every time you go in the sun you are exposed to UV. Yes, UV will damage your skin. Yes you can get a 4th degree sunburn. Yes your skin will still be present. And no, there was no hole. The skin is still present, merely damaged to the point that it will not protect you.

Radiation doesn't need to make a hole in stuff to damage stuff behind it. It can go straight through stuff also.

Which is the whole argument regarding thermal radiation. It doesn't need to burn through stuff. It can just heat stuff.
The actual stress strain argument I was using previously was that differences in temperature cause local internal forces to be greater than the material can withstand. Yes, this did cause ships to randomly split in two until it was realised that steel becomes less able to withstand internal loads as temperature decreases.

They're not all scifi games. The armor thing is based off historical games. The laser thing is based off actual real life lasers.

So you're arguing that vaporised silicon (temperature is greater than 3200 degrees celcius) does not produce a plasma, while plasma does exist in flames temperatures of 3100 degrees celcius, and the silicon is oxidising, so the temperature would be higher than that?

Please explain.

Yeah, but are they examples of future technology? Faster than light travel, teleportation and time travel are also examples of future technology and it is either possible or impossible. Can you prove which it is?

Do you even know what materials that will be used for future nanolathed technology, their density, and structural integrity for example?
Using a quote from Geers signature:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws.

Seriously, get into the 20th century dude

One definition of scifi is the improbable made probable, while fantasy is the impossible made possible..

I'll answer with three yeses.

1)

Faster than light travel is impossible according to special relativity. It is impossible to travel, relative to spacetime, at c.

It is not impossible to travel at 0.9c relative to spacetime. And it isn't disproved that it is impossible to move spacetime at a speed relative to itself. The mathematical equations suggest to move space time at 10c, it would require an amount of energy equivalent to the mass of Jupiter. It's awful theoretical physics, and there's a very big if there.

Question isn't "is it possible", question is "is that probable?"

2) Teleportation: Also a yes. Quantum teleportation was achieved in 1993. In 2012 a group of Chinese scientists teleported a photon 50 km or so.

3) Time travel - I don't understand the question.
Every second, you travel at the rate of 1 second per second through time.
Gravity and velocity both slow time down. That's the behaviour which was predicted by Einstein, it's a measured observation. The satellites in orbit around earth measure time slower than the clocks on the surface. If you travelled to the nearest star at close to light speed in 2014, the round trip would take you 8 years, you'd arrive back at home in 2094, because time has been going slower for you while you were away.

So yes, time travel is possible. Time travel in the reverse direction is not.

Of course, you could just spend a lot of energy to return the universe it was to the state x seconds before?

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Ok. Can I just clarify Clarke's 1st and 3rd Laws?

1) Is valid. Providing that you don't break any of the current laws of science. Hence Asimov's Corollary. Yes, an infinite work machine is an idea that is denounced by senior scientists, and it is denounced as such because it's an epistemic impossibility. It is also an idea that is seized upon by the "lay public" as being possible. That doesn't make it possible. The "lay public" in this case is wrong, it is proven that it doesn't work because for it to work, at some point in the future, the laws of physics would have to change. And those laws of physics have been observed to be true for literally billions of years.

Err... to clarify..



According to Clarke's first, if a scientist says that it is impossible to draw a red line using not-red ink, then he is wrong, because the majority say he is wrong. Whereas you and I both know that not-red ink is not red ink. (Technically, yes you could just mix inks until you made red ink, but at that point you're using red ink anyway, or you could paint transparent ink on a red surface, but well... why would you waste the ink?)

3) Clarke's 3rd law was used by him to justify advanced technologies without having to provide a dodgy scientific/engineering explanation. It's suspension of disbelief. Don't worry about the how and the why, if you can't see how it could work, just accept that it would work, and move on with the story.

However, I'd really like to see you go back in time 5000 years (with the entire telecommunications network) and explain to people how your smartphone worked, how it knew your location and how you could talk to your friend 100 miles away. Advanced is a relative term.

Additionally, a key part of "magic" in fiction is that it is only available to the privileged few.

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The key part is that just does not apply to what is essentially 3D printing (being done today) moulded with defect-less solids (also being achieved today/in the next 50 years)

What materials are used are rather irrelevant to my original point. Methods of failure are known, the properties of materials are experimental values and have to take a finite value, and at the end of the day, the perfect and ideal nanomaterial is made up of subatomic particles, so it cannot have infinite bond strength.

Not to mention that while the armor is nanolathed to perfection, the weapons are also nanolathed to perfection.

Let's talk about density. Yes you can build your armour out of very dense material. But I can build my warhead out of very dense material too, and my warhead has more energy because it's moving faster, so my dense material beats your dense material. Or alternatively, I can just focus my laser on transferring energy to one atom of the material at a rate greater than that energy can be transferred away. That was your original question, no?

But that means that that atom now has more energy than its neighbours. So it's hotter. So thermal shock comes into play. And yes, if thermal shock is the method of failure, the same factors that describe thermal shock today will describe thermal shock 100,000,000 years tomorrow, because you can't get away from Newton's Laws, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and Electromagnetism.

Did you mean the 21st century?

And here I was thinking I was playing a game about Spess Rhobutts.

No, I meant last few decades of the 20th.

While this discussion continues to amuse me to no end I fail to see how this relates to or even serves to overcome the issues introduced by an arbitrary armor system that is lacking any kind of UI feedback.
So instead of determining whose knowledge of the intricacies of this our world surpasses the other's I would very much like to see a return to the original problem.

edit: Making myself clear does not come naturally to me. Apologies and all that.

This thread being the one thread where I can make off topic posts without complaints has ended.

Ah well. It was a nice run.



It should be pointed out that this thread has been on the first page of this subforum for the best part of a month now, mainly due to Godde and I's vicious bumping, and well... there aren't many people who have posted anything on topic.



There is a lot of hostility in PA's community towards the concept of an armour system in general, with suggestions that such a system need not be arbitrary, but instead be well defined, met with suggestions that then the system by which the armour system was set was arbitrary and illogical itself.


It's the supcom energy shield debate again. Rather than thinking of how the system "could work", people acknowledge why it doesn't work, say it doesn't work, respond to any suggestions as to how other games made it work by saying "no, that will never work", and moan about it until the devs acknowledge that they aren't doing it, or lead themselves to believe that the devs also made that acknowledgement.


Or you know. People read page one of the thread, understood took Scathis's word, and moved on with their lives.

All the rationale and rationality behind the actual armor system does not alleviate the issue of missing UI feedback. Which for me is the sole point of criticism to the whole affair.