Armor Systems

I think it's hard to assess the strength of an incoming force accurately in game by calculation whatever system you are using. In most cases it will just come down to experience of the player - as it does in a supcom match where you are trying to assess what an enemy's force is capable of and, maybe more importantly what it's weakness is.

IMO the process is the same whatever system you use - it's not really a case of assessing strength overall, but trying to break it down into specifics like number of AA units, number of heavies and so on and so fourth. In this respect we can determine what the main strengths and weaknesses are of the force and what they are trying to achieve. An experienced player will be able to do a quick head count and determine with a degree of accuracy how they should respond. Armour, HP and fire power doesn't even factor into it at this stage.

It's a case of seeing that they have mostly heavy tanks, then I should respond by building anti tank. That's just like saying force is made up mostly of armour level 5 then I need AP level 5 units to respond effectively. It's also like saying I see lots of AA so I won't bother building aircraft.

These assessments are a lot more simple than people think and looking at armour values and such is all background work. Just like how you look at the database and see that mass for mass a Rhino is worth 3 or 4 Mantis. Based on this, when you are in game you can see 40 mantis you need 10 or so Rhinos. You don't look at the stats in game, you just look at what the units are and respond accordingly.

I don't see why this would be. Say you know laser isn't good vs tank armor and you see a bunch of laser units in the enemy blob you know you're at an advantage. That's pretty easy to understand.

How much is a bunch when it comes to a blob? All you know is that if that bunch of units targets your tanks, you'll be at an advantage. But what about the rest of the bunches of units in their blob? You've only stated one interaction, you need to judge all the interactions that armour brings in, at the same time. How do you tell prior to a fight how the blob as a whole functions? You don't know what will target what, and with the number of units that could be involved it's not feasible to ensure everything is targeting the most effective thing, and not doing so when armour is involved is much more punishing. So not only is the effectiveness of a blob harder to read, but the reading doesn't necessarily match the actual effectiveness, since armour introduces variableness dependant on what targets what.

Say you have a comp of bots and tanks, and the enemy went with mobile artillery, tanks, and a couple of t2 anti-tank cannons. Will your bots get decimated by the artillery? What if they get microed? How about the tanks? will they work? Or will you not be able to kill the anti-tank cannons in time? Should you keep the bots back and try to bait the artillery out?

You can ask just as many questions of regular blobs as you can of ones that use armor.

Restorers broke more than the simple RPS rules, and they weren't the only unit to do it. They were a symptom of much bigger problems under the hood.

No, you can ask far more about those with armour. Ask yourself all the same questions, then on top of that, try to factor in that each unit does different damage to each other unit. It's a pure addition of complexity, and I don't see any compelling reason for it over straight HP to justify the massive jump in difficulty and lowered readability.

The only thing that armour allows that straight HP cannot do, is allow pure rock-paper-scissors (that is, have a circular counter mechanic between 3 or more units, without using especially exotic unit abilities or attributes). Everything else can be achieved with suitable selections of unit HP and DPS/firing cycles alone.

Everyone else in this thread is fixated on composition and unit counters.

First of all, suppose you have an army and they have an army. You scout the enemy composition. What you scout should not immediately prompt you to change what you are building. What you scout should not immediately prompt you to decide "my composition is better- attack." And what you scout should not immediately prompt you to decide "his composition counters mine- don't fight." In fact, the very idea that there is a clear dichotomy between fighting and not fighting suggests people are stuck in RPS-deathball-land, where large blobs engage all at once.

What should happen is you scout the enemy army and decide your tactics. I have artillery and the high ground. The enemy has slow infantry bots that would be dangerous to fight up close, but which can't go around and won't be able to effectively assault. I should dig in and hold this position.

Or maybe I have a main battle tank force- a hardy mobile force with spearhead potential. The enemy is using skirmishers to form a defensive line to secure a large amount of territory. I should assault at a point to try and break through. Then I can get behind the line to threaten the enemy's economy, and force the line to fall back and reorganize, or crumble.

PA should not be this silly game of "welp, he has tanks, I should build anti-tank cannons." That is stupid. The key is that strategy should emerge from the players and the current game situation. Each player looks at what they have and where it is, and looks at what their opponent has, and where it is, and decides what to do next with the assets they have. If I have tanks and he has anti-tank cannons, I have options. What I choose to build should be like a battle doctrine player preference/style than a mandatory counter relationship imposed by the game. If there are designed-in unit counters then EVERY SINGLE PLAYER is going to use anti-tank cannons when I build tanks. And in EVERY SINGLE GAME when my opponent builds tanks, I have to build anti-tank cannons. The game is playing itself- the player is just going through mechanical motions.

However if position, unit usage, and strategy matters more than what a unit's properties, stats, and designed unit-counters are, then I can do a huge variety of different things to respond to whatever my opponent does. Having a diverse unit pool allows every player to play completely differently, and their opponent might have never seen their play before and have to react on the fly by adjusting their own play, prompting a counter-adjustment, and so on.

This isn't to say some units shouldn't be good against other units. Obviously some units are going to defeat other units. And obviously some units are going to be efficient against other units. that doesn't mean composition rules all, or that a unit's designed-in-features rule how it can be used. Armor creates an additional way to design a unit, but does not automatically mean its design rules how it can be used. Flat armor simply allows a tank to be tough against small weapons, and still easily killed by heavy weapons. Perhaps the issue here is that the people in this thread are thinking that a unit is uniquely synonymous with a weapon, or with a class of weapon, or with a level of weapon damage.

Consider that in a flat HP system, the best way to make a unit type resistant to splash damage is to make it larger. Fewer units per area means less units hit, which means less total damage, right? Very normal for RTS games. Except this makes absolutely no sense. Larger units should be more affected by splash damage because they have more area to be affected. You know what should protect units from light damage? ARMOR. If a unit takes 6 damage per some size area on its surface, but its entire surface has 5 armor, it only takes 1 damage for each increment of area. However if a direct hit from the shell that caused the splash deals 500 damage, then the tank will take 495 damage if the shell lands right on top of it. The splash damage might be very good against unarmored units, but weaker against armored units. The shell itself might be very good against units with heavy armor. The same artillery unit is firing both the shell and the shell's splash damage. As stated by myself and others earlier in this thread, armor allows for more granular control over weapon and unit interactions. It does not automatically create RPS, and it can provide far more functionality, and do so simply and without arbitrary damage types or damage rules for different units.

Armor is a mechanic that makes a lot of sense to use apart from HP. Having large HP numbers "represent" armor has shortcomings also which RTS players have come to accept as "normal" and overlook. And asserting flat armor is just another way of doing arbitrary damage type RPS is just short-sighted. Universal mechanics are native to the game everywhere, full stop. A game can use whatever universal mechanics it likes, even if they are extremely strange. Arbitrary subsets hard-coded to behave differently just to impose fixed arbitrary relationships between units is what is unnatural.

You mentioned some interesting points, however I don't see why they are arguments for armor. Unit diversity isn't strictly related with the presence of armor. Neither is your use of intel informations.
I don't want to comment on this section too much, since it's from my point of view not related to the armor topic, but I want to point out that your examples in the 2nd and 3rd section showed that fighting and not-fighting is a dichotomy. I think there are some other errors, but I feel it's the wrong topic to discuss these.

I think we agree that this is the mayor incentive for player to build different types of units. If this would not be the case you'd only see very few different units on the battlefield. So this is absolutely crucial in my opinion, but still no argument for armor.

Well, of course do the features and stats of a unit "rule" how the should be used. You use AA-land-units to face air units. You use splash to defeat blobs, gatling guns to destroy slow air-transports/gunships, lasers to destroy fast targets, homing missiles to destroy high-value targets. And for optimal results your units composition should match the enemy threat.

There are other ways to achieve similar results without adding a complex system. Give them appropriate weapons.

In TA/FA larger units got this armor as higher hitpoints.

Please, don't. I think especially this example is horrible, because units deals splash damage for one reason and one reason only. To destroy unit blobs. If you make some units splash-resistant you'll end with people only building this units and deathballing you.
I really don't like this flat armor-system because it adds a lot of complexity on the one side and affects a lot of weapons in a way I don't appreciate. It affects all Area-of-Effect weapons and all Damage-over-time weapons. And thats quite a large group of weapon systems. You'd have resistance against cluster bombs, flamethrowers, laser, napalm, submunition artillery grenades, ... thats just too much in case you just want to make a unit more durable when fighting versus machine gun peewees. Yes, you could tell me something about armor penetration, but I think an armor value alone makes it difficult to predict the outcome of a battle, if you add a different armor pen value for each unit it'll become impossible without microing your units on the "correct" target. Beside the fact that you need to know all armor pen and armor values and their delta values to make the correct decisions.
Giving units specific armor pen values leads also exactly to the situation, that you define units as counter by giving them the necessary stats to kill a certain unit.

A game can use whatever mechanics the developer wants to add. But this is always a question of benefit and costs. And I am not convinced that the benefits of having such a flat armor system are larger than the disadvantages, namely that the unit battle interaction will be more complex due to new variables which have a huge influence on the outcome.

Flat armor is the way that Starcraft does things. As much fun as Starcraft may be that is the single biggest reason that I think PA should not use flat armor. I don't want PA to feel like Starcraft. I want PA to feel like PA.

TA didn't need armor to make for game play that was better than Starcraft's. PA shouldn't need it either.

I'm confused, ledarsi keeps saying that armour allows for situations to be in the game that are already part of the game.

There is that large part at the start about tactics which is more or less not linked to armour. Then suggests that making a unit would be resistant to splash damage because it had armour and splash weapons tended to do less damage. I'm not seeing the link in one system the unit is tougher against all targets including splash damage (and it was probably going to be tough anyway). In the other system to be resistant to splash damage all splash damage weapons must do lower damage and all resistant units must also resist all low damage per hit weapons.

While from the simulation perspective armour could be viewed as natural, so could crusader kings and victoria 2. As mike says sometimes, gameplay > realism.

I believe paws started on it that at the end of the day, it comes down to personal preference as to whether you want a more complicated combat that is marginally easier to balance or a simpler system.

I think this is a great post describing an enjoyable game to play. There are a couple of things that I want to say about it before I proceed though.

Firstly, the reason that the death ball came into the conversation is that if the death ball strategy exists, it totally negates everything that is compelling about your post and pretty much ruins the game. Though personally, I don't think Uber would ever let it happen in PA for starters and more to the point, armour alone doesn't create or mitigate the death ball. So that said, let's leave the death ball where it belongs and get back on topic.

Secondly, unit counters are significant in creating the kind of game play that you describe in your post. If there is no reason you should avoid engaging a particular unit or combination of units with your units, whether it be because that combination could counter your units, be it the terrain (type, elevation, etcetera) or whatever reason, then the type of plays that you talk about simply don't exist. Of course you should always avoid anti-tank when your main force is made up of tanks. I agree that you should always have options other than simply just to build anti-anti-tank as the only response to scouting anti-tank. However, it still needs to be a valid response.

With respect to those of you who think the addition of armour unnecessarily complicates the game. I disagree. In fact I would argue the opposite: I think it makes it easier. Everything that people have said makes it hard when trying to assess enemy strength on the battlefield is just not true. It's hard anyway and it's not the kind of calculations you do on the battlefield that armour impacts. The kind of calculations you are talking about are background work - research in other words. This kind of information is not available in SupCom unless you go to the unit database, where you can read up about unit stats and arm yourself with information. Hopefully the PA interface will include full unit stats - this will be one of the strengths of Ubers UI. No one does those calculation in game.

The kind of calculations you are talking about are based of of these known quantities, like; How many Rhinos do I need to defeat 40 Mantis? I'm not calculating the total HP and DPS of all the Rhinos and Mantis. What I'm doing is applying what I already know from my research to the situation: 1 Rhino can beat 3 -4 Mantis. I simply then do a quick headcount and come up with the number of 10 - 14 Rhinos for even odds. This takes seconds, unlike all the background work that goes into calculating the range, movement speeds, DPS and HP of the units involved. Adding armour to the equation doesn't change what I am doing during in the game at all.

I think if you read it you will find that he is saying is that armour improves the effect of splash damage by removing the need to make units artificially large. Basically armour allows for discrete controls over the units that are and aren't effected, not just by splash damage, but all types of damage and therefore is an obvious improvement. It's a much better solution than simply heaping on the HP or increasing the size of the unit. HP is a really blunt tool when you compare it to armour.

Take my example on page 8. It demonstrates how armour can work to your advantage as both a developer and a player. It provides solutions that, in this case, help keep the two types of defence (heavy and light) current throughout the whole game. I think this is particularly applicable to PA where there is to be no unit obsolescence.

As you can see, the point defences have clearly defined roles. What I haven't described is the cost of each PD, which is also an important factor in the balance. The light PD is still effective against light armour and still takes out heavy units albeit less efficiently, but obviously the heavy PD is more expensive and this might influence the choice of which to build. The real strength of this system is that the heavy PD can't destroy the KBot any faster than it can the Heavy Tank. This means that there is a clear role that each is suited for and one is not simply better than the other.

I think you are wrong here. In Starcraft there are different types of weapon and different types of armour. In this case it means that the end result is similar but it's not the same as what we are proposing. What I am actually describing is a single value modifier for armour and weapons, not many different types like in Starcraft.

To elaborate, in my example I used arbitrary numbers in a scale of 0 - 10. I used that scale because they convert nicely into a percentage. I simply compare a weapons AP value to the targets armour rating to see the percentage of damage dealt or received. So the light PD only does 20% damage to the heavy tank. It can still kill it, but it's not as effective as the heavy PD that does 100% damage. Cost, range, accuracy and rate of fire are also important factors, but the overall none of these can achieve the same result as armour.

Another thing that armour does is allows us to choose how effective units are against different types that makes more sense than HP. Take the Zeus for instance. That unit used electricity to fry the enemy in CQC. This unit should be equally effective against every unit it meets simply because there needs to be a pay off for getting in so close and all units should be vulnerable to it's weapon. Therefore we give it an AP rating of 8 for example, negating any armour of any unit in game to a maximum of 80% damage to the heaviest units. However, in order to get in close we need to be able to either sustain a certain amount of damage or have a high movement speed. I would opt for the former, in order to give the lightly armoured units an escape route. We don't want Zeus bots zipping around all over the place. So we give them moderate armour instead. An armour rating of 6 would give us mitigation against anything below an AP value of 6.

On the flip side, we have the scout. It needs to be able to defend itself against light attack. But it shouldn't be a match for a heavier vehicle. Therefore we give it low AR and low AP. Or perhaps we have a sniper that has low AR but high AP. These all work along with the units other attributes and it's not hard to work out. Here are some examples of the way I have done it. Other people have done it differently and I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. It's just an example.

Target AR = 10
Weapon AP = 10
Resulting damage to target = 100%

Target AR = 10
Weapon AP = 8
Resulting damage to target = 80%

Target AR = 8
Weapon AP = 10
Resulting damage to target = 100%

Target AR = 5
Weapon AP = 4
Resulting damage to target = 80%

That was an example not a rule. It would be one sensible possibility to use armor to make splash damage less effective against armored units by having splash damage do less absolute damage than direct fire hits, and have area of effect damage applied over the area of the unit rather than 1 unit = 1 hit regardless of size. Having a system like this would allow for far more prevalent splash damage, and much larger splash damage radii, which are potentially interesting avenues to explore.

You are also stuck in the mindset that you have to have strict counters. Imagine for the moment that you can play an RTS game where its units are not expressly designed with killing another in-game unit in mind. Rather, a unit has a strategic or tactical job or role, and give the unit whatever features it needs to be effective at that role. A unit's profile should not read "counters Stumpy" but rather how the unit behaves and performs.

Imagine you are an engineer for an RTS military and want to design a unit. First, we kill the engineer who lost the plans for the Arclite Siege Tank. I kid. Anyway, you don't look at the enemy's T-55 and go "I want to build a unit that kills that." Although a main battle tank or a gunship is definitely designed with killing T-55s as a possibility, their role isn't to counter a specific unit. It is intended to perform a task, and coincidentally that task may require it engage some types of targets.

A recon unit is a forward observer used to gather intel for whatever purpose. A main battle tank is a hard target used to engage enemy armor. A strategic bomber is meant to be used in groups to facilitate a lengthy sustained bombing of a target area, not destroy a specific type of ground target. An air superiority fighter is meant to keep your controlled skies clear, not destroy a specific type of plane.

Depending on the war environment this may mean you need different things. In World War II being an air superiority fighter meant maneuverability to use nose-mounted guns. In the Cold War it meant avionics, countermeasures, and ECM to use missiles and survive having a missile locked onto you. Now it means supersonic speed and stealth because you can't dodge or confuse modern missiles, so the key is to never get shot at in the first place.


Armor and Roles

The point of the above is that armor is useful for defining roles. As a mechanic, armor allows you to specify how "hard" a unit is. Even very heavily armored units might be quickly destroyed by a few hits from high damage sources of any type.

I think it is peculiar that this thread is going back and forth between saying armor is completely irrelevant because HP can fully replicate the entire system, and saying armor creates RPS counters. Regarding the latter, if what you mean is that heavier weapons are more effective against units with more armor, you are completely correct. If what you mean is it results in rock-paper-scissors, you are incorrect. Damage is a continuous distribution, and many different units from many different cost levels and roles might have highly variable amounts of damage. Even a single weapon might have multiple ways it might react which differ between units.

I beg to differ - Without armour, you can learn that W manti beat X unit, and Y manti beat Z unit, so W + Y manti beat X + Z units. Armour breaks this, because even though you can work out W and Y in the examples above, when combined it's not W + Y because it depends on what order X + Z units are destroyed. You can't do quick headcounts when armour is involved unless the unit count involved is low (eg. StarCraft, WarCraft etc.).

Your later discussion about Zeus' is trivially solved with HP alone... why is armour needed in this example? You said it yourself - it needs to be equally effective. Damage vs HP alone = equal effectiveness to all units. It's ironic that using armour actually makes this harder. Scout has low HP & low DPS. Sniper has low HP, high damage (but low DPS due to low reload speed). If you want something to be more effective against heavier units than light you give it a longer reload time but higher damage. Armour adds nothing here except unneeded complexity.

Armour doesn't equal RPS, but it's only advantage over straight HP is it allows RPS, whereas straight HP doesn't. Other than this, there's no benefit to Armour, which naturally begs the question, why have it?

Even if flat armor is allowed, you can still create a high HP unit with zero armor. It functions somewhat differently from a lower HP unit with flat armor damage mitigation, you must admit.

And also, you really cannot extrapolate abstract absolute strength no matter the system. You observe fights, and you use the data about how many casualties each side sustained to extrapolate how future fights might go. This same logic applies regardless of the internal damage system. Even if you test and find it takes 1 of unit A to beat 10 of unit B, you actually don't know anything about 10 A vs 100 B.

OK. First lets talk about the Zeus:
What I did here seems to have gone unnoticed. Let us consider the relationship between the Zeus & two different types of target. One a heavy tank, AR10. The other a KBot, AR2. In this example I can give the two units 500HP as an abitrary figure. It's the same for each unit to demonstrate a point. The Zeus is equally effective against each unit and in this case because the HP is the same can kill them in the same number of hits. However, the relationship between the tank and the KBot is different. This could not be achieved without armour.

Regarding unit roles what you are arguing here is basically chicken and egg. I refuse to get drawn into it. I don't care units role is defined by what it's strengths and weaknesses are or if it's strengths and weaknesses define it's role. The point is that naturally one type of unit will be a counter for another and a third will be a counter for that which is countered by something else. Yes of course there are support roles too, but generally they have their own rules. The point is you will always find tank and therefore naturally anti-tank will occur, be it by name or by nature. This could mean gunship, sniper, rocket KBot etcetera. All of which can rightly be defined as anti-tank amongst their various roles.

This kind of "specialness" is pure RPS which as I said is the one thing standard HP cannot do. But what is the ultimate point of this Zeus unit? To be artificially worse against weaker units? That's all this is doing, being good against heavy units and poor against weaker ones, and it makes no sense to do it in that fashion. You can use cost efficiency and weapon cycles to achieve that goal, and in a much easier to understand way that doesn't require anything arbitrary.

Also, if something can break though 10 points of armour, and the target only has 2 armour, then then why isn't it doing even more damage to that unit than to something with only 8 armour?

If that was true, the Zeus would tear through everything in TA. But it doesn't. Its slow speed, short range, and long reload make it ineffective against any moderately fast unit, ranged unit, and it clearly can't fight air. It also gets wrecked by the d-gun, which has superior range and 1-shots units no matter how scarey they are. It is how assault bots should be.

No, it can't, but it doesn't HAVE to. That's the disconnect here. TA battles were designed around a physics engine where bullets hit what they hit. WEAPON and UNIT properties are what create the emergent counters.

If that's too hard to understand, I apologize. It is not always easy to look at a bunch of numbers on a page and know how the game will turn out. But TA proved it can work, and it can absolutely work here. Armor is completely redundant with the counter system that already exists. Get rid of it and use the countless other tools at your disposal instead.

You just exactly described the armor system from Starcraft, not Wings of Liberty, but Broodwar. And your example further down in your post further describes the armor system from Starcraft Broodwar. Can we please stop trying to make PA like Starcraft?

Neutonion physics is already perfectly capable of making things silly complex and dynamic with each unit being variously strong or weak against every other unit in the game via simple weapon dynamics without needing to resort to RPS crap like armor.

All armor really lets you do is make a heavy tank immune to EMGs. And if you have mostly Peewees and the other guy has mostly Goliaths its not really going to make much difference anyway. In a more mixed engagement it just forces micro management of your forces which is something we want to avoid making mandatory.

Bobucles, the one thing TA did NOT do is get rid of the tech levels. T2 was almost always stronger and better for the cost.

The biggest selling point for armor, for me is that it can make a T2 'advanced' tank be less effective against a T1 unit, while still being able to fulfill its role.

The Goliath, for example, needed a big splash damage in order to be effective against the lower tier units - without the ability to spread damage out against a group, the Goliath even with its super armor, wouldn't have been nearly as effective. Actually, I think it would have been called the Bulldog... which suffered from exactly that problem - it couldn't take out the cheaper, higher DPS/cost units before they would chew the Bulldog apart.

With armor, the Bulldog could have easily been brought into the more effective range. It still would perform poorly against groups of small units (Small AOE weapon, inaccurate and slow firing) while doing much better against larger / slower units like the Goliath. And yet, it would last on the field much longer thanks to the fact that it'd be able to absorb the damage output of the lighter units.

So in the context of TA, they never really did balance the entire unit set against itself - it was much more T1 with T1 and T2 with T2. So it's not the end-all on unit properties that you're making it out to be.

I don't wan't PA to be Starcraft. I don't even like Starcraft. That's not to say that it's a bad game but it's nothing like SupCom and it's predecessors. It's not physics based and therefore it's a pure armour system and nothing like what I'm suggesting. We've had pages of discussion without even mentioning Starcraft. If it was like Starcraft no one would be talking about high ground, weapon accuracy or anything physics based at all.

However, the fact that the armour system in Starcraft is easy enough to understand that people play it at home and yet is detailed enough that the game is played as an esport is a strong argument against people who say it overcomplicates things.

The Zeus' weapon in my example could be considered equally effective, not weak against the lightly armoured KBot. It is impossible to do any more than 100% damage. AP doesn't work like that. With the information given it is impossible to say if it is weak or not against the KBot or tank because there is so much we have not considered, like the weapon damage of the Zeus itself or that of it's hypothetical targets which will obviously be fighting back. The movement speeds, turn rate, weapon accuracies, rate of fire, AP ratings... The list goes on.

You seem to have made the assumption that because the Zeus' weapon is equally effective against both units, that I meant the unit should be equally effective and this is not the case. Nor is it the case that because it is effective against the tank, that it should decimate the KBot. In my example they have equal HP so this is obviously not the case. This gives the lighter armoured KBot an advantage over the Zeus because of movement speed and here we naturally see a counter emerging.