Cannon balls going through units, penetration, dgun?

I skimmed through the feature list of Xedis' thread and I didn't find much about projectile physics. So I'd thought I'd bring it up.

In TA you had the mighty dgun that would obliterate anything in its path. Something hit by it couldn't survive.
In Supcom, Overcharge would be stopped if it hit the ground or even by a mech marine.

What if we could have something inbetween?
For example a plasma ball that would go through several small units but be stopped by a big unit.
Penetration where the weapon can go through the unit doing damage(killing it or not) and continuing on the other side unless the armor is too thick.

I think it would be awesome if Planetary Annihilation would support this.

Some different mechanics that I think could be interesting:
1. Damage quota. If the projectile has more damage than the unit it hits it will kill the unit and continue with less damage left.
2. Armor penetration. If the weapon is strong enough to penetrate the armor thickness of its target it will go through with reduced penetration ability.
3. Ground bounce. The weapon might bounce on the ground.
4. Unit bounce. The weapon might bounce on enemy units.
5. Sticky bomb. Sticks on objects.

I like 1 but this seems like a balance thing that would be more appropriate to bring up about when the Alpha starts.

My guess is that it just can't be patched in easily unless it is supported within the game engine.

It was not originally supported by the engine of SupCom: FA, but a railgun unit which shot through multiple enemies was implemented by a modder.

1] I'd rather see this as a special feature for certain weapons, we did this on the Railgun for the Juggernaut MKIII in BlackOps
2] I think this is getting a bit technical, there won't(or shouldn't) be armor types, so I'm not sure how this would end up working.
3] This I don't like because it'd heavily encourage micro to increase range, MAYBE on a particular unit if its designed to ground bounce all the time to reach it's max range this would be neat to see, but from a gameplay perspective......eh.
4] I don't like it from the views of a physical weapon, but something like a lightning gun chaining to several nearby units I could see, might be tough to balance.
5] I'm just not sure I really see the point, if this would hit the target the only difference between that and a normal weapon is that a sticky bomb is delayed damage?

Mike

what you suggest is pretty similar to Company of Heroes system. The problem is that Armor systems make it quite complicated, and the game will probably be already complicated enough. Also bouncing projectiles and things like that make players always feel "i would have won if those 10 shells didnt bounce while the opponent's shells always hit, how unfair"

Bouncing sounds like a bad idea, but piercing attacks should be fine. They can be considered a different type of AoE in balancing terms. However, only limited to special weapon types or when the projectile would perform an clear overkill (like taking away at least 50% of the units maximal health with a single shot) and the damage dealt to next target needs to be reduced, depending on how much damage the previous unit took.

E.g.: Shot causes 1000 damage, unit with 1500HP gets hit. This qualifies for piercing effect (1000 > 750). Damage dealt to the next unit would be reduced by the damage dealt, multiplied some factor, lets say 50%. So the first unit is hit for 1000 damage, second unit is hit for 500 (1000 - 1000 * 50%) damage. If the second unit also had 1500HP, then the piercing effect would be stopped. When using the factor 50%, the total damage dealt will never be larger than twice the base weapon damage.

I agree that every weapon doesn't need to have this feature.

I played Spring 1944(WWII RTS) on the spring engine and sadly it didn't have this feature. Personally I think that an armor system with armor thickness and projectile falloff that reduce the penetration value is quite intuitive and interesting. I have played Spring 1944 quite alot though.

I think Dgun or heavy plasma balls should bounce on the ground. The weapon seems so powerless if it just duds if it hit the terrain. Alternatively it could dig a hole or follow the ground like it does in TA. Again, not all projectiles need to bounce on the ground.

Granted but it could be a way to implement burning napalm, for some kind of parasitic drone or magnetic mines.

If you wan't to implement stuff like grenades it feels much more realistic if it doesn't just explode as it hits enemy units. Although it's future robotic warfare so I guess the grenades could be smart enough to explode when they hit an enemy robot.

I like the idea of there being different classes for projectile behavior as a general concept.

The details would need to be developed to suit the game.

I like this idea. I think, particularly with the game's emphasis on large numbers of units, that penetration of some description has a place in this game.

Splash damage or AOE is something that is pretty commonplace in these games and perhaps something along the lines of penetration could also be incorporated. Maybe specific weapons like the long range laser as seen on the annihilator point defence in TA could use it to damage a few rows of units deep. I'm not sure how hard it is to incorporate. I suppose it depends on how much you want to use things like armour density etc. to effect it.

Something I would like to see is perhaps some kind of laser reflective armour. But if I'm honest I really can't see that making it in to the game.

EDIT: You could honestly just say that penetration only effects T1 and T2 armour types and leave it at that without having to crunch any figures.

Like i already wrote, no need to deal with armor classes.

If the damage of a projectile (or any type of beam weapon) exceeds 50% of the base-HP of an unit, then it is likely that the projectile would have pierced the unit. Reduce the remaining damage of the projectile by 50% of the damage already dealt. The second factor scales the total AoE-damage which can be done with a single projectile. 50% reduction means, that the total damage dealt by the projectile will NEVER exceed 200% of the base damage. (It's maths. Just trust me.)

Any type of projectile which already deals some type of AoE (explosives) or rockets can never pierce.

I'm fairly sure the devs will build a similar projectile system to FA, and *that* system gave modders a ton of flexibility in terms of what they wanted to do with projectiles.

Also don't forget that penetration of multiple units depends heavily on angle from gun to target - a lot of railgun style weapons may just shoot straight through the unit into the ground.

This.

D-Gun worked in TA only because the commander wasn't that much bigger than small units.

In SupCom, the commander was humongous compared to them. When the commander missed a shot, it didn't fly off into the distance; it smacked into the ground a few feet behind the target.

I dont know how able the devs are to implement that, but well the only thing I want penetrate are planets ;D. (and maybe some asteriods)

This is quite unusual, but whatever floats your boat.

This could work for for a system without armor classes.
My point with armor thickness is that you can have a unit with few hitpoints and alot of armor and u can have huge units with lots of hitpoints but no armor which I think is quite intuitive to learn so the fight would be alot about bringing the guns to the fight while RPGs and other weapons could be placed on smaller units.
Anyway that's how I'd prefer it but I think I'm quite lonely in that opinion.

making holes into planets...

for a tier 2 ship, vehicle or maybe kbot I could see some sort of railgun or something of that like that could penetrate and hit multiple units. I would be alright with that. Might be nice to see.

I can't quite wrap my head around the idea the idea of an airplane carrying such a heavy weapon, so I'm iffy on that one.

Not a bad idea really. Worth considering.

oh at risk of injecting some "realism" into this discussion (blasphemy) I should mention the concept of through and through shots. Basically, when a projectile punches straight through something, a large portion of that kinetic energy leaves with it rather than transferring into the body to inflict damage.

In simpler terms shots that go straight through, do less damage.

Just something to keep in the back of your minds for balance on this type of weapon.

I am thinking that the general theme here is not to have these mobile weapons. At risk of putting some kind of reasoning behind it other than simply for gameplay mechanics, these weapons generally tend to be very large and have long reload times.

The annihilator laser was one such weapon on a stationary point defence. Experimentals have had large weapons in the past too, but since there will be no "experimentals" in this game then I think we'll just focus on point defence for now.

I could see it working. With larger numbers of units on the battlefield than ever before there needs to be some kind of way to power up point defence to make it worthwhile. Obviously supplementing it with mobile units such as tanks and kbots would likely make up a large part of a flexible attack/defence/counter attacking force. But that's nothing new.