Armor Systems

So you're saying swordsmen should devastate pikemen, pikemen will devastate cavalry and cavalry should devastate swordsmen?

The proportions you suggest are ridiculously high, one of the hardest counters i've ever heard of with each unit practically incapable of being able to hurt its counter. You would lose almost any encounter if you had the wrong unit formation. You cut peoples damage so dramatically that when it compounds with other simulation effects like missing, loss of units to alpha strike damage, etc. they are incapable of taking field against anything they don't counter. And because of all these things your battles all go faster because everyone kills their opposite in 10 seconds max.

If the tank had as much as 5 armour and a bit more health, maybe a little cheaper, your system might actually work.

Traditionally that medium tank would first have, say 1058 hp as opposed to the 5000 you suggested which would be for a super heavy unit, maybe an advanced armoured assault unit. but this higher health comes at the cost of maneuverability, which would let it be hit by comparatively slow but long range and damaging rocket projectiles that have a range of about 400 (almost double the tanks range) and deal 105 damage each. Of course these rocket bots would have a harder time against the smaller and faster moving, lets continue to use the name pee-wees which could change direction constantly and mitigate the damage from those rockets to have the advantage against those rocket bots.

The largest reason i have argued against the inclusion of the flat armour system, which can work in some places other than here, is that it adds a feature that will already be a part of the game. Bringing the right units should be an advantage, not the only means of victory.

You get no argument from me that RPS is extremely bad. However a well-designed armor system that treats all damage universally that results in some weapons being less effective is not the same thing as arbitrary damage type RPS.

A weapon that deals 50 damage becomes less and less effective linearly as the target's armor increases. An unarmored target will, of course, lose 50 HP. A target with 5 armor loses 45, 10 armor loses 40 HP, and so on and so forth. Unlike damage types, a universal rule functions uniformly, and continuously where a type is discrete.

Is it really so unreasonable that small arms from some of the cheapest units in the game has no effect on a medium tank with such a high cost? If he can afford to spend those resources on a tank, then you should be able to have higher-caliber weapons.

Cheap high caliber weapons are going to have range, mobility, durability, or other limitations. Rockets, recoilless rifles, tank destroyers, etc. etc. There are lots of options other than using the battlefield equivalent of a rifle to shoot at a tank. Still, if you want it cheap, something has to give. Expensive versions might be medium tanks of your own, gunships with rockets or even ATGM's, or a variety of other options.

A unit is a weapons platform. It is a way to get guns into place to shoot at the enemy. The weapon involved should suit the enemy you want to attack. The platform is negotiable.

I supposer that depends on if the differences are actually that large between tanks and Bots.

Mike

Focus on the existing mechanics first. Ballistics, reclaiming, terrain superiority, and explosive death offer countless ways for units to interact. Being stronger doesn't only have to mean a direct kill, as there are plenty of indirect ways to secure an advantage and win.

Armor systems are an answer that only matters if everything else screws up.

There was a misunderstanding here, i wasn't saying you were suggesting an arbitrary system like RPS, i was saying the effect of the values you suggested would create an effect more or less identical to RPS.

The effect of armour is actually exponential due to the strange relationship of comparative damages. The damage decrees is linear and its easier to show with smaller numbers. You deal 4 damage, the 1 armour cuts your damage by 25%. if they had 2 armour instead that 1 more armour decreses your 3 damage to 2 resulting in a 33% loss of damage. 1 more armour is 50% loss. While spinning this different angle on essentially the same maths is in many ways pointless, my point is that the numbers you suggest reach the point where armour can equal damage, reducing a units effect on the battlefield to 0 (or as near as)...

This is where i start to get confused, you assert that RPS is the epitomy of bad. Then suggest a system where rock beats scissors (pee-wees cant hurt tanks), scissors beat paper (Pee-wee's dps beats anti tank's. And because if it doesn't why build them), and paper beats rock (anti tank). obviously the game is far more complicated but this basic scenario will be true in most instances.

It seems reasonable that you reduce the hardness of these counters so that it is not RPS, but if you reduce them they start to just be overlapped by the current game system that present a similar effect.

Oh I see what you are thinking. You think that pushing units into the center of the table to have a big fight is the only thing you can do with them. And that consequently if peewees can't hurt tanks, that means if your opponent has tanks, then you shouldn't make peewees. This is exactly the kind of composition-centric thinking I always rail on when I talk about how bad RPS is. Especially for players who are stuck in the RPS mindset that a direct confrontation with a deathball is the only way games are played.

Even a unit that is useless in a fight, such as an unarmed or minimally-armed scout, can be incredibly useful even though it loses to everything in a fight. If it's an unarmed scout you obviously won't make a large blob of them and A-move into enemies with it. You might say that everything counters it. However if you position these units well out on the map, they can greatly amplify the effectiveness of your other forces by ensuring you see the enemy's force distribution and movements, allowing you to efficiently attack and defend, since you know how many forces they are committing where and can react suitably.

In the same fashion, units which can't fight direct combat units can be incredibly valuable as fighters. A light combat unit like a peewee might be posted on a mex spot to kill an enemy constructor that tries to build on it. The player making such a picket knows full well if the opponent sends a tank, the peewee dies. But the peewee will kill a constructor no problem, and you can put a peewee on every mex spot, and have way more units than the opponent can have tanks. You make a big mistake if you think a direct confrontation is the only way units can be useful, and that units which lose to the enemy's military are useless.

Manever and positioning is everything. Strategy and tactics can make "useless" units win the game, and it can make an unstoppable army completely useless. You can raid their economy to limit their production, or even pin an enemy army in a location by threatening raids against economy or industry. You can cut their transportation or logistical capability, or mount sneak attacks against distant locations to force splitting up a large army. Or if you are very unimaginative, you can just create a very large line of battle and leave your enemy without enough individual units to cover as much area as you can.

You have to think strategically, not like a direct massed battle is inevitable. Deathball warz, where the game is decided in one big clash of blobs, is incredibly bad game design. Big army battles emerge from good players who create a situation where the enemy cannot avoid fighting their big army.

This is why I'm only kind of for an armor system.

I think of it this way:

--- current methods of balance
+++ extra options FA adds

[--------------------------][+++]

So yeah, I think it's worth trialing, but it would have to be used carefully.

You've got a lot of good points about strategy that are all correct, however i had been making the assumption that the peewee type unit was going to be designed as a unit who's goal was to strike against the back lines of what is essentially artillery type units (low armour/hp, low fire rate, high damage). If it is not designed to be a combat unit then as you pointed out a lot of my points just fall down, but that's not a fault of the points, that's a fault of the example.

I think it came up in the counters thread but I'm sure we can agree that each unit will have a role. Because we probably want tons of units (an assumption but it seems likely), but don't want redundancy, it is sensible to assume that there will be a unit for each role. So we should perhaps stop talking about the pee-wee (a raider apparently) and start talking about the unit which essentially fills the flanking role (which would be a main combat unit. And if that is still the pee-wee then i would hope the game is balanced in such a way that I do not have to take my flimsy raiders into a big fight if i want to win.

So a question i have is that can you provide an example of several combat units stats, as you are thinking, we have the tank and the anti tank, but there needs to be something that can close that loop, because if the loop isn't closed everyone just takes all anti tank all the time (although aircraft could also potentially work, but thats an example of how we are using a simplified example so we dont have to make 18 guys every time we talk), a flanker.

Similarly while skirmishing and raiding is a massively important part of the game, when you have to go in for the kill, going in with an army is probably necessary (the alternative is game enders... which we can all agree is boring if that's the only option). And generally a good counter for an army is another army, even if you have some turrets or artillery swinging things in your favour. Deathball or not, groups of troops will meet.

Ok, so just running through some scenarios, and here's what I'm concluding:

Flat armor allows you to greatly tweak the relationship a high dps, high ROF unit has with other units. In the scenario below, each unit has a role to play, and doesn't become obsolete in the face of any of the other units. The tank / peewee combo is particularly interesting in that NEITHER of the two are really good at killing each other, so the battle drags on quite a lot longer than the other matchups.


Scenario:
Peewee - 3 damage/shot, 5 shots per second (15 dps). 10 metal, 25HP, 0 Armor (none)
Rocko - 10 damage/shot, 1 shot per second (10 dps). 20 metal, 50 HP, 1 Armor (light)
Tank - 30 damage/shot, 1 shot per 2 seconds (15dps). 50 metal, 50HP, 4 Armor (heavy)
Metal Extractor - 10metal, 100HP, 0 Armor.

Minimum damage being 0.5 (Any shot where armor > damage, damage applied = 0.5)

1 Tank = 5 peewees = 2 Rockos & 1 Peewee.

1 Tank = 15 dps
5 Peewees = 75 dps
2 Rockos + 1 Peewee = 35 dps

Tank vs Peewees:
Tank fires first, and kills a peewee. 4 seconds to kill 2nd peewee. 12 seconds to kill all 5.
Peewees lose, having done 8 damage in the first 4 seconds, then 6,4,2, total: 20 damage. 30 hp left on tank. Battle takes quite a while - 12 seconds.

Tank vs 2 Rockos + 1 Peewee:
Tank takes 2 seconds to kill first bot then dies.
Rockos volley 20 damage at 0, then 20 at second 1, and as the tank reloads and fires, they kill it at second 2 with 20 more damage. One Rocko lost. Battle over in 2 seconds

Peewee vs Rockos + Peewee (lets call this the Lone Peewee)
Second 0: Rockos get to fire first (longer range), and do 20 damage to one peewee. Peewees close and engage at second 1.
Second 1:Rockos fire again, killing one peewee, which got off 1 shot (3 damage). Other peewees fire for the full second, (3 damage, 4 bots, 5 shots = 60 damage dealt), killing the Lone Peewee (27) and damaging the Rocko (33 minus armor =22 damage). Lone Peewee gets off 2 shots (6 damage) before blowing up.
Second 2: Rockos fire again and do 20 damage to another peewee, which has also taken damage from the Lone peewee (6 damage), and blows up. 3 Peewees respond and fire at a Rocko for 1 second (2 damage, 3 bots, 5 shots = 30 damage (52 total). Rocko blows up.
Second 3: Rockos fire, peewee takes damage (10), 3 peewees apply 30 more damage to the remaining Rocko which blows up.
Second 4: Rocko fires at peewee, does 10 more damage (20 total). 3 remaining Peewees fire and blow up the Rocko.
Battle over in 4 seconds.

Tank vs Tank
Tanks fire at each other, and kill each other on the 2nd shot (2 seconds in)
Battle over in 2 seconds.

Tank vs Mex
Tank takes 6 seconds to blow up the mex.

Rocko & Lone Peewee vs Mex
Combined DPS of 35 takes out mex in 2.8 seconds

Peewees vs Mex
Combined DPS of 75 takes out mex in 1.3 seconds

A lot of people say that about lightly armoured scouts, but then forget that there's a large class of things that the scout can actually destroy. Basically, "everything that does not shoot back"

On the average battlefield, there's a lot of those around, and they're often more valuable than the things that do shoot back.

Tanks also perform that function, AND they do it much better, AND they counter scouts at the same time. It's a straight upgrade.

Except for being slower, more expensive, longer build times, and having poor vision and maneauverability. So not much of a straight upgrade, just a completely different approach to them same problem.

And if the scout speed made up for those differences, they would have been used, like, EVER, for at least ONE game.

As it stands, using scouts in TA or Supcom gets you rolled hard. They need something more.

That's just TA/Supcom balancing.

I've seen more than one game lost in Zero-K by someone sneaking in a bunch of scouts through an otherwise inaccesible path and taking out critical buildings.
(Including my own in my last game )

ZK scouts also had insanely high damage for their cost, completely misrepresenting their role. They were basically zerglings, a swarm assault unit.

I'm not sure which unit you're talking about, but the one I see mess things up most often is the Flea, which has a damage output of like 10/s. Which isn't much if you consider that most raiders get upwards of 100/s.

It's just a case of using it's cheap cost, incredible speed and high maneauvrability to get behind enemy lines.

Are you sure about that? The Flea deals nearly twice its cost in DPS, a feat only matched by other raiders. There ain't nothing scouty about that. It's pure glass cannon.

Oh, huh you're right. I didn't know they dealt that much damage, I must've remembered their damage per hit over damage per second. Well, that makes them more of an ultra-light raider indeed.

(That still doesn't mean tanks perform their role better though, but raiders with equal speed and maneavrability certainly do)

Directional Armor, Flat armor is my favorite, for the simple reason that it creates situations where you have to flank a target to kill it with weaker units. In Ground Control, my favorite RTS, you could kill IFV's with infantry, but only from the sides; and medium tanks, but only from the rear; and heavy tanks not at all. It creates the need for actual tactics, more realistic reasons for combined arms, and the units work in a complex overlapping, non-rock-paper-scissors manner.

Too complex IMHO when you're talking forces of 100's of units.