Armor Systems

I do not like too much the armor idea.
More stats to remember, and my memory capabilities are very limited...
From what i understood from the game, it's going to go for massive battle and macro management. Armor would lead to a lot of micro.

But, if armor had to be implemented, i would prefer flat directionnal non destructible armor.

Flat :
A plaque of armor does not have the same effect against a rifle shot than a canon shot.
(shoot on a tank with a rifle in real life : you will scratch the paint. Shoot 100 bullets on the tank : the paint will be very scratched, but tank will still be fully operationnal).

Yes, this lead to some immunity, but what's the point to attack a Tiger with a flea ?

Directionnal :
Speak by itself, not every part could be armored, and it gives somes depth to gameplay allowing to flank tactic on big units (but agian, i understood that the game is going to have hundred units on screen, flanking a huge army will not have a lot of effects i think)

Non destructible :
If you manage to destroy the armor of a tank, that would very probably mean that the tank is reduced to a big piece of molten metal.

So, not for armor, but if it has to be used, flat directionnal non destructible !

I fully agree with you.

It was mentioned that if ultras are good against marines, but something else is good against ultras, then it's "balanced". But that's just rock paper scissors all over again.

My favorite part about TA was that EVERY unit was more or less suited to kill every other unit. And the main reason certain units were effective against others was because of their movespeed, unit size, and projectile type. Those systems add enough variation on what unit should be vs. what unit. We don't need flat armor to add yet another way for certain units to own others.

Direction armor, especially for defensive buildings, adds the most depth as you don't want your units to be out of position

I personally don't like the idea of directional armor. Sure it's fine in real life, and in some games too (realistic WW2 and onwards games), but I don't think it adds a lot of good qualities to PA, while it adds some bad ones, and I don't think it is the system that should be implemented in a game like PA.

- It adds, in my opinion, unnecessary micro.
This can make the game less approachable to newer gamers, and even people with a long history of strategy gaming. Early skirmishes, where less units are involved and micro is more useful, will probably require constant attention and micro if you are to win, assuming the system of directional armor is implemented. This can make people with very good macro, but little to no micro (ie. myself) lose these skirmishes, and get frustrated with the game, regardless of army size and composition. While I am not advocating for getting rid of micro completely, I believe that this system (directional armor) adds unnecessary micro that many strategy games have done without.

- It makes the game more complicated
While, to some degree, complexity is a good thing, if you have too much of it, it makes the game more frustrating and confusing, especially to newer players and players new to the strategy genre. Will some units have it and some not?, will many units have different proportions than others? (ie. 1 tank takes 4 less front, , 2 less side, and 1 less back 4:2:1, while a different tank takes 6 less front, 5 less side, and 4 less back 6:5:4). If so, it will be semi-required knowledge to know which tanks/bots have what armor values where, which can get overwhelming if the diversity is too great. While this aspect can be diminished by having all units have the same proportion of front armor to back armor to side armor, those who are not familiar with this system might be asking themselves why their larger number of tanks got destroyed by a smaller number of the same type, assuming that the difference between front/side/back is very large, as many have suggested, especially if they micro like in other strategy games (ie. take a line of units and kite the blob so that not all of their units can hit). This degree of complexity will, in my opinion, require and extensive and tedious tutorial (overall, not just about the armor) to make newer players understand it completely. In a game with orbits, multiple maps, a flow economy, and perhaps a day/night cycle, the game is already complex enough without players having to worry about directional armor.

- It can produce a very steep learning curve
I have already mentioned the difficulties newer players can face with this system, but this topic deserves its own bullet point. When I first play a strategy game, I have expectations about features that are intuitively obvious (resource collection, base building, combat, ect.) Armor is not necessarily part of those, but since it is frequently in strategy games it is what I have come to expect. I have only played two video games with directional armor in it, one of which was Mechwarrior 4, Mercenaries (an fps), and Combat Mission: Operation Overlord (a WW2 turn based strategy simulator). In those games it added depth, but in PA, a real time strategy game with hundreds of units involved in giant battles, I would not expect this to be the case. I suspect that someone would have to tell me that there was this system, and I often skip tutorials in strategy games (like many others, I suspect). However, established players will have known about this since launch or before, and it is entirely possible that if this system were implemented they would have a much better understanding of these types of tactics (ie. facing your army towards the enemy base/artillery outpost) and that these tactics would be expected of players, new or not. I was never told in SC2 about any expected strategy, and was branded as a bad player for not being aware of this knowledge. This can get frustrating for newer players, and they may decide to quit instead of trying to figure everything out, a perfectly reasonable action in my opinion (the point of these games is to have fun, after all)

As for my own preferences on the topic of armor, I favor a non-directional, non-destructible, flat damage reduction system. This gives much of the realism of the directional armor system without making things too complicated, and I find is very easy to understand. It also allows for natural counters to emerge, instead of having to resort to damage types (a fine system, but not one I particularly like).

I try not to offend anyone or to suggest anything personal in this post, and I have tried to not make too many assumptions without clarification. These are just one mans opinions (though i suspect many others share my views) and should not be taken as a personal attack on anyone's viewpoint or intelligence. Excuse any grammar mistakes or spelling gaffes, this is a long post and as long as I get my point across I won't take the time to tediously spellcheck the whole thing. If any mistakes were made, it is not indicative of my intelligence otherwise, nor should it be. Any viewpoints I have expressed here are my viewpoints as is, what you see is what you get, and you cannot make any assumptions on my opinions otherwise, nor is it fair to blow anything I say out of proportion. Anything I say in this post should be taken in context and not as a statement by itself.

Killing the tiger.
I played around with FA today, because some people argue experimentals are OP and stuff. They're not, they suck against the UEF T3 AAB Percival. So far, so uninteresting. But the following might be interesting: a very good Percival-counter is the UEF T1 LAB.
Giving units a flat armor forces you to use high frontload damage units against armored targets. In the situation of FA above this would require you to fight Percivals with Percivals and LABs lose one of their few uses.
Therefore I'm against flat armor, I'm voting for none.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. First of all, SupCom's three tier system is deader than Elvis- PA will use a system like TA with tech levels that don't necessarily create strictly larger, stronger, more expensive units.

Secondly, the sheer number of T1 bots needed to bring down a force of Percivals makes it totally impracticable. I have never seen a SupCom or FA game where a player on T1, making mass light assault bots, has ever beaten a player who has access to T3. I would wager it has never happened. Higher tech is, from a practical standpoint, strictly better than lower tech. Sure, T2 has its uses such as tactical missiles, splash AA, etc. etc. But if you can afford T3 main combat units, or other roles, then make them instead.

Go play Zero-K. The entire unit pool is flat-balanced, and it is my understanding that PA will take a similar approach, but have more specialized units from higher tech discrete factories. I doubt their tech cost will make them stronger- the game will likely be designed assuming players have access to everything (large economy assumption) and the tech restrictions will be used to shape the early game.

I like the strategic advantage of flanking your enemies then total annihilation. This would add another level of strategic management into the game in terms of troupe placement and group size and type. and would force you to learn a bit about each of your different units in detail weakness and strengths and i don't just mean what unit there weak against. I'm talking lots of different situations including terrain types and height advantages. OK ill stop there hopefully you get my point.

p.s if any one wants to give me feed back on my artwork for a game I'm currently creating please go here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e821v0k71e5an ... ESIZED.png
and let me know what you think

Flat armor's utility as a mechanic scales inversely with the presence of extreme rapid-fire weaponry (and to a small extent, extreme alpha strike weaponry). The more spammy weapons get, the tricker it is to give the average unit any armor whatsoever because then those really spammy units get their DPS killed horribly. Therefore, such a system would primarily be dependent on how machine-gunny the low tier bot weapons/specialist rapid fire weapons are.

(You can reduce this by having individual shots be less effected by armor or set up a "per second" system so armor mitigation is based on DPS instead of per shot, but that gets difficult to communicate quickly, and would require some UI dev time to figure out)

Who ever said AABs had to have high flat armor? If their goal is to counter experimentals but be countered by swarms of peon units, why not give them high health and low flat armor?

I know that the PA tier system will differ from SupCom. But that wasn't my point. I don't care what tier these units are but rather what specs they have. And I can very well imagine similar units in PA, regardless of their tech-level.

I think the main reason this didn't happen is the veterancy system. Using weak units lategame made the enemy usually stronger instead of weaker.
Of course the number of units is a problem, especially because of the unit cap. You need 18 T1 LAB to destroy 1 T3 AAB. They don't scale linear but you'd still need slighly less than 120 T1 LAB to destroy 10 T3 AAB. Thats a huge army.
But looking at the economic comparison offers a quite interesting view:

Code:

18 LAB: 18*(35 M, 140 E) = 630 M, 2520 E
1 AAB: 1*(1280 M, 14000 E) = 1280 M, 14000 E

120 LAB: 120*(35 M, 140 E) = 4200 M, 16800 E
10 AAB: 10*(1280 M, 14000 E) = 12800 M, 140000 E

You'd save enough mass/energy to build additionally half the amount of AAB your opponent has on top of an army that can destroy the enemy units alone and still save some metal and much energy.

Depending on your target it might be more clever to use light/napalm bombers instead of costly strategic bombers. There are enough situations where simple-tech is powerful enough, for example you'd not build the most powerful radars for redundancy, but sometimes low-tech radars.

I played Zero-K sometimes, but I'm not quite sure what you mean by flat balanced unit pool. You don't need to climb up the tech ladder to be able to build the units, but there are still expensive units with much healthpoints and much damage and cheap units with low damage and healthpoints.

So to sum it up, my point wasn't about the tiers of units, but rather about the effect of having low frontdamage units (which are usually cheap) fighting armored units.

What kind of unit would you give armor? I doubt the cheap Peewees.

The units designed to counter units like the Peewees.

Give them splash damage. Shotgun, flame thrower, doesn't matter. A little short range AoE will obliterate short range light units. Problem solved.

TBH, Peewees were overpowered. Their weakness came from the relative weakness of TA's pathing system, and the fact they cluttered the field with wreckage.

They don't need armor, they need a low damage - high firerate weapon to ensure they do as less overkill as possible. Armor makes them also resistant to units they aren't designed to fight, such as carpet/napalm bombers, light artillery or similar low damage AoE units.

Ugh. Both of you are missing the point. Which is, flat armor systems can work just fine, independent of whether they are a right fit for base PA.

I think flat armor has been in some great games, BUT it's not what I want for PA. Directional seems the most "simply/best" added strategical element in any game, simply because it makes paying attention most important. Maybe others don't want this but, maybe they have no idea because they haven't played with it either. Seeing as there have only been under-dog strategies that have supported these methods like Warhammer Dawn of War 2 for example: An amazing game, with incredible focus on your units (too small of a scale personally) but, it did "decently well", however, in my opinion due to DOW2 not being a "base building" game, it didn't do as well as some others, as it came out during some crazy competition.

Directional Armor is my preference... I absolutely LOVED it in Dawn of War 2, it made people pay attention to their units instead of sending them in mindlessly or on a way-point like Starcraft's linear strategy style and most other strategy games. It only makes sense to be wary of your units and more 'hands-on" so to speak.. in a *Strategy* game.. but hear me out...

Honestly, this is really important.. this decides if the game will be more: Base/Technology focused with just "send the most advanced/biggest/MOST units here and hopefully we'll win"; or do you want Directional Damage where the actual player can make his vehicles more deadly by actually controlling them and moving them around while in real-time having to pay attention - not just simply "Micro-Managing" the units around, but having to watch your positioning and specific units against the oppositions specific units to be more effective.

Directional Armor has been my favorite so far (Hybrid Directional armor sounds good too, like Uber mentioned) because it allows me to separate myself from people who are not really trying, or rather.. not using actual strategy with their units. This helps to balance players who are spamming resource/technology and ridiculous amounts of units to win, it makes them pay more attention, or lose because they need to learn better strategy and control with their units, simply put.

I kindly ask NOT for just a regular HP system.. because it can be both, Directional and regular HP while reducing the percentage taken due to a Tank or Mech facing directly towards its enemy and not with it's back.

It should also be kept in mind that if it were chosen, Units with destructible/directional armor can have methods of being repaired on the battlefield as well.. (of course) like if it loses all of it's armor from a battle you can send units to repair it's armor at a cost of time/minute resource maybe.

SO many ways to do this, just be wary of over simplifying the strategy components of the game considering it's mass scale. This is exactly why I do not play Starcraft 1 or 2, or the next upcoming installments, simply because the depth of strategy in Starcraft is STILL THE SAME as it was 12 (TWELVE) years ago; with no-brainer micromanaging, mass unit spam, and with the casual linear trick to come behind their bases with more unit spam/cloak, "ohhh..you got me fooled, never would of guessed with the two entrances you have to my base being blocked off by everything".

I was completely spoiled after playing Dawn of War 2 having to actually care about my units and pay attention to their positions, while using special abilities/items/positioning or Also Known As - Strategy! To defeat my enemy, haha. Thanks guys! Insanely excited about the game either way.

Very slow micro is not strategy. Placing your units and making the most of them is completely tactical.

Strategy are the big decisions, and tactics are the small ones. Micro almost universally falls under the latter.

actual assignment of armour never really ends up being about tank hunters or assault bots, its rate of fire vs armour, the higher a rate of fire the worse its effective DPS against high armour.

You can never have a rapid fire tank hunter (say some sort of plasma torch or cutting beam) unless you add in another layer of maths for armour penetration.

and also what sort of mitigation are people thinking that this armour would stop? the fastest fireing weapon will probably cap out at around 8 rounds per second, maybe dealing 10 damage per shot. If any armour higher than 2 or 3 would become a drastic mitigation. This is just an opinion but all guns should be at least 75% (60dps) effective. Easily enough to tip a battle but when compounded with all the other physics simulation modifiers (10-20% (51dps) of shots miss, rapid fire weapons tend to be lower velocity and lower ranged, so the other units have shot first, maybe 10% (46dps) unit losses before firing, so he's doing almost half his listed DPS now. This is compared to a direct fire cannon (about 75dps)) anything more can easily mean that you just never see a unit that isn't high armour low fire rate.

So yes, flat armour can work in PA, but that doesn't mean it actually adds any enjoyment to the game.

Similarly directional armour can work in the game, but what effect does it have? if you flank a person you get a damage bonus for all of 2 seconds that it takes the opposing forces to target you. obviously you shouldn't get a drastic bonus that just demolishes you for even considering the possibility they might not flank. but i hear you say "oh yogurt, but if i flank them from one direction i can then hit them from behind in a pincer movement! mwahahaha! tactical genius!" Well that just means that half the forces have to turn around again, maybe squeezing out another 3 seconds of damage bonus. Assuming they didn't see you coming. but the great thing about pincer movements and flanking is that you catch their formation in a position where you don't have to fight their tanks first, you can hit their artillery, that's already in the game though. Even if you flank them and the reorganise to face you and a stealth force them hits them from behind to get their newly reorganised formation... but that is also already in the game. Directional armour comes out as a damage bonus for hitting a unit not on the front. the most efficient way to do combat becomes charge forward and fire to the left so you hit the side of a unit at least 45 degrees down the line. At the end of the day it makes heavy tanks worse, because they are balanced with having their armour to the front.

Directional armour works really well in smaller games, where an individual tank is a massive threat, instead of a disposable gun with a battlefield life expectancy of 8 seconds... at best.

Also for the percival vs lab, i hope you are remembering that 20% of the labs never make it into the fight, and they trickle in a few dozen at a time so you can't just but heads with numbers.

Strictly speaking it is the power of the shot that matters. You can have a rapid fire weapon with high power, but it will likely be very expensive or have other limitations.

Secondly, you are thinking pretty small when it comes to rate of fire differences. The M163 Vulcan fires 1,000 rounds per minute. The Vulcan dishes an incredible amount of destruction against both air and ground targets, but is quite ineffective against virtually any hard armor. Loud as hell inside the tank getting pelted, but no actual damage.

Small arms on little bots might be more in line with very advanced machine guns than having every bot carrying a tank cannon, and small arms would also fire very fast, and be fantastic DPS sources that are well mitigated by armor.


A flat armor system lets us differentiate soft and hard targets in a very simple way. It makes a lot of gameplay sense to differentiate weapons that are effective field DPS and which weapons are effective against buildings. It lets us have tanks which are resistant to weapons like small arms, etc. And most importantly, it lets us greatly amplify the DPS and HP cost-efficiency of small units without giving large or heavy units ridiculous amounts of HP.

Moot point

Riptide, 6 shots per second

So how much mitigation would you have armour give at its very best? also at its average?

And what is wrong with ridiculous amounts of HP? Tough units having high health sounds like good readability.

Having a ridiculous amount of HP means the unit is practically impossible to destroy quickly. This is a problem because a unit is 100% effective until it is completely destroyed, meaning having a ridiculous amount of HP means it can ignore everything on the battlefield while its HP remains high. We want more tension, more thinking, and more fear for the player.

High HP low damage combat is highly deterministic and takes a long time to resolve. It is much more interesting to have units that are effectively durable, but which can still be quickly destroyed. The player should be just as scared of moving their giant death robot into the unknown as they are of moving anything valuable. In fact, they should be more scared because they have consolidated so many resources in a single unit, putting a lot of eggs in one basket. A more valuable asset should mean more fear of losing it, not less because it is functionally indestructible.


Battles should be slow and non-deterministic. Depending on player actions, a whole battle should be able to go either way, and take a long time to resolve. Anything that is highly deterministic, on the other hand, should be over quickly. Like a SAM site taking down a plane in one shot.

Furthermore, HP bars are most readable when a hit has a visually discrete effect on the bar. A unit with 10,000 HP taking 5 damage is not good readability. However a unit with 100 HP taking 5 damage is good readability.


Some Numbers

Just to throw out some numbers here, suppose we have a 50 metal Peewee type bot with 250 HP and 0 armor, which fires one projectile per 0.2 seconds for 10 damage per projectile (50 dps). And suppose we have a 200 metal ATGM bot with 250 HP and 0 armor, which has a long-range guided missile which fires once per 5 seconds and deals 500 damage (100 dps). You can get four peewees for the price of the ATGM bot, which means the peewee has twice the dps cost-efficiency of the ATGM, and it has four times the HP cost-efficiency.

Now suppose we have a 500 metal medium tank with 750 HP and 20 armor. In terms of HP alone this unit's HP cost-efficiency is terrible. It costs ten times more than a peewee, and only has three times as much HP. However, the peewee is incapable of damaging this tank (we should probably make a minimum damage rule, i.e. 1 damage). This tank is extremely durable with respect to light weapons. The ATGM on the other hand, can kill this tank in two hits.


Consider the gameplay differences between an HP tank with 5000 HP and the above tank with much less HP, but with armor instead. Even against the ATGM bot, the 5000 HP tank cannot be quickly killed, and is perfectly safe as long as its HP stays high. The tank with armor and less HP has to be used carefully because in a sense it is actually rather squishy, even though it is a durable unit.

It's also very likely that in a flat armor system, you would just simplify things down to classes of armor. Something like: Unarmored, light, medium heavy and ultra.

So it's not like you'd have Unit A with 18 armor, Unit B with 6, Unit C with 8, and so on. You'd have a class of armor which would make the unit visibly more armored. A peewee with no armor could be visibly thinner and more spindly than a bot with light armor. A tank with ultra armor could have these hulking huge armor plates.

You can also have fun things like an equivalent to an MG setup team. A bot that 'sets up' and then fires an absolutely devastating amount of bullets within a specific arc. Unarmored / light units have to dodge around that line of fire, whereas a medium armored bot could struggle through and a heavy armored bot could shrug the fire off.