Armor Systems

A lot of people seem to really enjoy the idea of flanking, but in many ways its indicative of this entire conversation.

Flanking an opposing force is already existent in the game, it is just at a strategic scale instead of a tactical scale. The addition of directional armour adds flanking at a tactical scale but has no appreciable effect on the strategic scale as it just becomes a mish mash of random damage bonuses as units turn around and fire sideways, etc.

I must admit, whenever I think about a heavy unit such as a tank I always think about directional armour. The thing about tanks is that flanking them has historically has been the way to deal with them. They are big, heavily armoured units with a powerful main weapon that is balanced by less manoeuvrability than for example a KBot, and the bigger the gun the slower the turret turn rate.

These are important stats that allow for flanking by smaller, more nimble units and the directional armour is the pay off for using the right unit for the right job. Otherwise you might as well just attack it from whatever direction with other tanks and it just turns into a numbers game.

Additionally, I quite like the concept of flat armour, as the way it is described seems to award a fair bonus based on the weapon that is causing damage to the target. It gives a lot of scope for the devs to kick it up a notch with regard to unit interaction and it's quite an elegant solution compared to that of simply giving heavily armoured units tons of HP.

I think strategically it has a lot to offer because it forces players to think about what kind of units the enemy is using in another dimension and offers more depth than the simple rock, paper, scissors function. It means that you need the right tool for the right job when it comes to attack and defence and the devs can really tailor the units to fit directly into the role they want them to fulfil by using the weapon and armour stats.

IMO HP is a bit of a blunt tool for making tough units tough. The main difference being that if you just have lots of HP then anything in the right numbers can take it out over time. With armour you need the right unit to do the job and potentially if you have the wrong unit you may do no damage at all.

Regarding the above; it also may solve the problem of having air units that have massive amounts of health like in supcom. The air units could have really low HP and the armour defines the amount of resistance to damage the planes have. This allows planes to be resistant to certain types of damage while remaining susceptible to others instead of just being flying tanks. Gunships in particular could really benefit from this concept.

All of this is achievable without the mess and lack of readability of using armour systems.
Turret turn rate, different projectile speeds, arcs, unit movments speeds and turn rates, units with fixed-facing (non-turreted) weapons and weapons that need to unpack to fire all make flanking and manouvering a viable method of gaining an advantage in different situations. But the minute unit A does different damange to unit B vs unit C, it becomes impossible to judge outcomes when you have more than a few units in play.

Regarding your comments on Aircraft, vanilla sup com tried to have a disjoint hp/damage system for air and land, and it turned out awful and was full of ways to exploit it. FA dropped it entireley and it worked out much better.

I still dont get the main concept of the armour proponants.

All i see is people asserting that it will allow for complex unit interactions and advanced tactics, when the game already has complex unit interactions and advanced tactics.

While i do not want flat armour included i could very easily live with it. However the only examples people give are that you can create what are effectively rock paper scissors interactions between units (as those same people argue against rock paper scissors in other threads). If it is used in moderation to add a small amount of complexity to the already complex and deep unit interactions then it would be fine, but still unneccesary.

because of the amount of units in any fight, directional armour is basicaly meaningless, flanking is already effective because of the natural formations you find units in, that is weak long ranged damage dealers at the back and meat shields in the front. consequently flanking that formation will have far more of an effect than a damage bonus for the second or two it will take for the tanks to turn.

And what happens when you get flanked, how are you going to tell your 200 strong formation of tanks and artillery to turn to face the enemy?

All these things end up requiering intense micro, which people tend to be against as it means highest apm wins (as opposed to mild micro). if you have directional armour you have to turn all your tanks all the time, if you have heavy flat armour you have to target small groups of units for maximum damage all the time. Or you automate them and the you suddenly shouldn't control your army in battle because you will only make it worse.

What people dislike about the HP only sytem is that it has large numbers and "small guns" (which are rapid fire plasma cannons the size of a bus) can hurt heavy tanks. I say thats a good thing.

FA went a bit too far in the other direction, which explains why Restorers became such a problem and why ASFs still dominate big games.

well if you change a system there will be balance issues, and given restorers it wasn't just their health, but everything about them.

the problem with having weak air unit HP is that it means you have no idea how tough they actual are. You were effectivly momorizing two different damage scales because "planes are weak".

I'm not convinced it would be that hard to read. I think you make a good point, but I'm not talking about anything like as complicated as I think you're imagining.

Essentially I'd just break it down into unit types like has been done in other games & assigning an armour value can facilitate this. Why should an anti infantry unit be viable against a tank? What you need is an anti tank unit. This concept has worked just fine in every other RTS I've played & the readability wasn't a problem. Making it obvious what a unit does is the important part. When choosing to build a unit, it's effectiveness for the job is what makes it a viable choice. It's part of the game regardless of what armour system you use or even if you don't have one at all.

EDIT: Added quote

Restorer issues started with the ASF. There's no nice way to put it. The ASF is broken as ****, and it screwed up the Restorer in the process.

A flat HP system means that everyone needs to follow the same rules for setting their HP. Health adds value to a unit, just like speed, firepower, range, versatility and utility adds value. You can't just say "well I'm going to change the health of X theater because I want it different". It HAS to be aligned with everything else, because any potential weapon can go anywhere.

The problem is, you aren't talking about 1v1 fights here, where you can say "oh, that's a heavy tank, I'll move my <counter unit> there to take it out". Instead, your enemy has a force of 100 heavy tanks, 50 mobile artillery, 75 medium tanks, 60 bots, 30 raiders. How strong is this force, actually? what unit composition would you need to take it out if the consequence of a bad match up was much worse? How would you ensure that your <counter unit X>, <counter unit Y> and <counter unit Z> were attacking the right enemy units in such large fights? Armour makes fights much, much more paper rock scissors, and far less forgiving of the slightest imbalance in unit composition, not to mention a massive jump in micro required. Other RTS's that use this, like Warcraft 3, have fights involving maybe 20 units *max* per team at a time. It doesn't scale.

if you read to the end i dont actualy think he was arguing with you raeven. I believe he was suggesting appropriate unit labels.

Such that you see you oponent with a higher tank composition you increase the amount of rocko's you bring to the fight. And that that could work without armour systems as long as rocko fulfiled an anti tank role... which it did.

Ah, yeah, re-read it. Sorry bout that wolf.

That's why I think armour is an elegant solution. In theory you can tailor all your units' weapons and armours to prevent units you don't want doing damage to one particular unit from being effective against that specific unit, while not upsetting it's balance with other units. You don't need different types of armour, just different amounts. If it's there in numbers then it's calculable and therefore transparent.

I think that this rock paper scissors issue is interesting because technically adding armour the way I see it changes the dynamic and makes it a bit different. It gives you offsets like cost and effectiveness to add to the mix. It's not just a case of arty beats PD, PD beats tank, tank beats arty any more. There's another layer that questions the cost and effectiveness of your units against their intended target in addition to range, movement speed, rate of fire etcetera.

Personally I like to think of KBots as infantry - only they move a lot quicker than your typical GI. But to me they are the logical evolution of infantry. Carrying that theme they should be cheaper than vehicles, good at fighting other infantry and generally only specialist infantry should be effective at tackling vehicles. KBots should be good at flanking tanks by moving faster than their turrets can track, but it should be a good idea overall to keep your infantry away from vehicles and not attack them head on.

But if PA can accomplish the same ends without an armor system, shouldn't it? I mean, that's half the appeal of the TotalA experience. Counters were made by the interactions with the environment, not by hidden modifiers in the units.

I totally agree. Anything to keep the complexity to a minimum in order to maximise transparency.

But to be honest, what is difference between reading HP and shield like in supcom and reading HP and armour? In the end you don't need to work it out exactly. The cue should be in the unit description and stats.

EDIT: Used the wrong spelling of cue/queue.

Because Shields are an 'absolute' value just like HP, while armor is more akin to a modifier that applies differently based on what unit you're using against it.

Mike

This is true. However, if every unit has armour that acts in the same way (as in not like starcraft) but moreover each unit has an armour value and each weapon has an armour piercing value and the two are used in a calculation to determine the damage done then it's not so hard to see how the two will interact.

An example would be that if a vehicle had armour of 1 and a weapon had armour piercing of 0.5 then the outcome would be half damage. If you had armour of 0 then piercing would make no difference and if you had piercing 0 then the only damage would be to armour 0.

Since back in the days of Red Alert, infantry have not been effective against tanks. Though the fact that tanks couldn't kill infantry effectively shows that they didn't get everything right. Thing is you just knew that anti tank soldier was for killing the tank with. It's not rocket science. And for those of you who don't want to just play the game like everyone else. As long as it is numerical and calculable then there's no problem as far as I can see.

We have had lengthy discussions based around information on supcom units that can only be found in the database. Nowhere in-game does it mention the specific stats of units that were much talked about in the mass-for-mass T1 vs T2 debate that went on forever. I'm not saying that makes armour right, but it does prove a point that games are playable even when all the information isn't available to the player. And in supcom the unit descriptions were terrible and people still learnt what units to use and where. Fact is that there will always be people who go to the database, crunch the numbers and find out exactly what units are most effective at doing what. As long as it's calculable then where't the problem?

However adding on another system to do something that the game already does adds needless complexity to the game.

If it could be achieved without adding extra mechanisms then I'm all for it. I agree that needless complexity for the sake of it is just silly. I'm just not sure supcom did do all of the things we have discussed and it at least didn't do them that well in the best case scenario. The objective always has to be to improve on what we have. Sometimes that just means change and sometimes it means adding something new.

As long as you can work out what the result will be without too much trouble then it's not going to inhibit gameplay. In the end that might just be as simple as seeing a bunch of enemy tanks, looking down the build menu until you find anti tank units and build a bunch of them. You know you are going to win without doing any calculations but the information will be there if you want to work it out too.

I know it gets more complicated than that, but as long as you use the right units for the right jobs you should never have any issues. Start using infantry against tanks and you deserve to lose. Build infantry PD for use against heavily armoured units and you aren't going to defend for long.

These sort of decisions should be elementary to most people who play RTS games. Things like damage and rate of fire can have similar effects to using armour. But there are some significant differences.

Simple arbitrary example:
Light PD piercing=2 ROF=60RPM Damage=100
Heavy PD piercing=10 ROF=30RPM Damage=100
KBot armour=2 HP=500
Tank armour=10 HP-500

Even though both have the same HP, the light PD takes 6 seconds to kill Kbot and 25 seconds to kill the tank.
The heavy PD takes 10 seconds to kill the Kbot because it fires half as fast and only 10 seconds to kill the tank because it negates the armour.

Could this effect could be achieved by simply increasing the HP of the tank?

the kbot would need to deal less damage over all and the heavy turrets miss rate would be higher against the small fast kbot than the large, slow tank. at a glance.

The thing people aren't realizing about a flat armor system is that the game will have a spectrum of damage as well as a spectrum of unit HP and armor. There will be units that deal very little damage, units that deal slightly more damage, units that deal a bit more than those units, etc. etc. and so on. Flat armor is not at all similar to arbitrary damage types.

Furthermore, a weapon that deals X damage will always reduce that unit's HP by X minus the unit's armor. This rule is applied universally, although some units will have zero armor. Again, the damage rule is universal and functions completely differently from an arbitrary damage type system.

For people who say that this is too unclear- suppose for the sake of argument that Uber had the UI sauce or whatever to make it clear. As a system it is not intrinsically that much more complicated than HP, and only requires representing a second number.

For those who object to the idea of weak attacks not actually doing real damage to heavily armored units- that would also be the case for HP only. The difference is the unit's HP would be extremely large- your little 5 damage scout isn't going to do jack to a 5000 HP tank anyway. The main difference is if you had 200 such scouts, not just a few. A big enough group of weak units might kill the 5000 HP tank, but would basically never kill a tank with much less HP which had enough armor to resist their attacks. However the 5000 HP tank then has 5000 HP against everything, so unless you want to make weapon with suitably massive damage it's going to take a lot of time and hits to kill.

The primary advantage of flat armor is it allows HP to scale without needing to scale explosively. And as a result it is possible to have units that are effectively very durable under most circumstances, but which can still be killed quickly. With armor you won't need units with five, or even six-digit HP, or weapons with enough damage to kill such monsters.


Rock Paper Scissors

I also am seeing quite a bit of confusion about the idea of units being effective against other units and the gameplay pathology or rock-paper-scissors. Just because some units are more effective against specific other units does not create RPS. RPS results from the game itself becoming deterministic based on composition.

A particular interaction between two or more units can actually be very deterministic based on composition. For example, anti-air should completely murder air units, and there's nothing the air units should really be able to do about it. Scout units might get completely crushed by main combat units, with no chance of even inflicting a kill. However these factors don't decide the entire game based on your unit composition.

RPS is when the game is determined by unit composition. In some counter systems the behavior emerges of having a deathball of a specific mix of units, or a deathball of units that counter your opponent's army composition. A single battle between these two armies will decide the game, and the compositions of the armies rigidly predetermines the outcome of the battle. This is a big problem.

However it is entirely possible to have units that counter each other, even very hard, without having RPS gameplay. If player positioning, maneuvering, and tactics can cause the battle to go wildly in either player's favor, then what the players do with their troops matters more than just their composition. It's not just a big army battle showdown where two armies smash into each other, and my 100 rocks beat your 100 scissors, or whatever the result someone has a superior mixture. RPS is a deterministic game based on composition choice. And there are vastly more interesting dynamics than just composition, although composition is what all newbies fixate upon.

Significant terrain and a strong defender's advantage creates territory control, a key aspect of gameplay other than composition choice. Also having player movement and deployment choices take time allows a player to acquire intelligence about an enemy's activities, and then set plans into motion using that information that will take time. The ability to get kills for free if you're clever is another. Players should also have enough assets on the board and be spread over enough space that no single mistake or defeat will immediately lose them the game, although a series might. And at all times there should be tension in a player's decisions, and every action should carry some risk and some fear. Fear that this big army is about to get demolished by walking into a trap, or bombed, or otherwise a large advantage will suddenly become a large disadvantage due to a mistake, an unseen enemy asset or maneuver, or just a random stroke of genius from the enemy. Fear is important.