Change ship armor shielding to make tanking viable

[nero07]

Preamble:

Hello,

this post is mostly aimed at higher difficulty play, because that's where balance changes are the most important. You can make a lot of stuff work on lower difficulties, but that's not because they are viable tactics within the framework of the game rules, but because the laxer difficulty lets you get away with things.

The current combat strategy for ships small and large is basically to stack dodge (in the form of defensive dice) or take hits that very quickly debilitate your ship and make it impossible to fight back or escape.

While that may be realistic - a direct hit from a starship weapon would probably have these effects after all, it makes for very stale builds in the game.

If you want to get better at space combat, there are always only 2 things to do:

1. Max out electronics or piloting

2. Get as many command dice as humanly possible

All other considerations have to stay behind these two, because these two prevent you from getting hit and getting hit is devastating. You immediately start losing crew (Permanently in most cases, which can mean your campaign is over after one bad battle, because you can't replace the gigantic defensive dice pool you need with fresh recruits.). You immediately start losing components. This means your dodge gets worse than when you just got hit. So you get hit again. And again. Your attack dice are also getting worse from this, so you're not going to damage your opponent. This all only leads one way -> Ship destruction and permadeath. If you somehow survive, the cost in both money and even worse time to repair your ship is crippling.

Not only does it get a bit boring to always have to fill up all your module slots with dodge and all your crew with command die. It's also weird rp-wise. I can get behind a cutter swerving around the enemy and getting destroyed in a few hits. That makes sense and is well represented in the current system.

But when I upgrade to a battlecruiser, it's the same thing? I nimbly dodge in my giant warship, or I eat a few hits and turn into a malfunctioning hulk? That doesn't seem very logical. You never feel like you can take any amount of hits and I think it's because of how armor and shielding works in space combat.

Armor and shielding only reduce the damage you take by a percentage (So never to zero). And it only stacks to 60% (75% if you really push it with talents). That means you always take damage directly to your crew and components, no matter how piddly the hit.

The newbie trap, why defenses other than dodge are just bad

Consider this example from the wiki: startraders.fandom.com/wiki/Ship_Damage_Types

Same Torpedo; 50 standard, 40 void, no critical. 30% armor, 20% shield, but with no Void resist.
...
In total, the ship's Hull is reduced by 35 + 16 = 51 and 28 + 48 = 76 damage is passed on to crew and components as unmitigated Internal Damage.

So you're new to the game. You look at torpedoes and see they do 50 standard and 40 void damage. So 90 in total. You might think your 30% armor would reduce the damage by around a third and your 20% shielding by another fifth. So you might take something like 50 damage to your components and crew.

But you would be wrong. It's almost 50% more than that. In fact, that torpedo will do 85% of it's damage directly to your soft innards. 85%! And that's on one torpedo. If your enemy hits you with 2 torpedoes and a missile (which is not unreasonable or uncommon), you're already off the ledge and hanging by your fingernails.

Next example, a plasma cannon hit:

A Pirate fires an Interceder PCX-5 and scores a Critical Hit.
The target ship has 50% Armor, 40% Shields, 0 Radiation Resist from components, and -40 Radiation Resist from 2 Crippling Effects: Radiation Wash and System Blackout.

A Pirate fires an Interceder PCX-5 and scores a Critical Hit.
The target ship has 50% Armor, 40% Shields, 0 Radiation Resist from components, and -40 Radiation Resist from 2 Crippling Effects: Radiation Wash and System Blackout.
1A. The PCX-5 rolls 60 Standard damage (out of 51-80).
The PCX-5 rolls 180 Radiation damage (out of 83-275).
...The target ship takes -(60 + 127) = -187 to Hull, and -(36 + 770) = -806 to crew and components. Jolly Good.

Jolly good indeed. 50% armor and 40% shields. But you have 2 debuffs and that means you take 806 damage to your components and crew. You're dead.

This is fine when you do it to the ai. They have unlimited ships and can spend hours of game time trying to kill you by throwing ship after ship at you until one sticks. But it only has to go wrong once for the player and that's it.

Imagine if crew combat worked like that. Your combat captain gets stabbed once and it's -40% all defense, -40% all offense and -10 ini. No healing that either, he just sucks now.

The -only- defense against this is not getting hit. At all. Ever.

So shields and armor are useless at the moment. They don't do what you expect, or the game tells you they do. It's like holding up a paper fan to ward off Brock Lesnar punching you in the face.

The proposal

So how do we change this to make ship combat less all-or-nothing and make more strategies viable?

The problems are:

1. Dodge is not hard to get and getting no damage is strictly better than taking damage, so dodge is always better.

2. Armor and Shields reduce the damage you take by a maximum of 75%, but actually most of the time it's 60%. This is not nearly enough.

3. Any damage that you receive has the potential to immediately degrade your performance to the point you can't fight back or run away.

My proposed solution:

1. Dodge should not be nerfed or capped. It works great for avoiding damage and playing a zippy glasscannon build. The problem is not that dodge is good - it's that only dodge is good.

2. Armor and shield defense should be buffed. Either by increasing the cap or by adding a flat reduction, so that 50% armor reduces you incoming damage by 50 points -and then- by 50 percent.

3. Change shield and armor modules as follows:

  

• All armor modules apply their Damage reduction to incoming damage before it gets to the hull or internal components. The armor modules get damaged by the amount they reduced the incoming damage by. Armor modules have high hp, so they can take a few hits before getting destroyed and are cheaper and faster to repair than normal modules.The remaining damage (if any) gets passed to the hull.
  
• Damage that reaches the hull damages it and passes part of it on to internal modules and crew. This damage to modules and crew is reduced by shielding the same way armor reduces the incoming overall damage. Meaning shields apply their damage reduction, get damaged by the amount they reduced and the rest is applied to crew/modules.
• Critical effects are applied if the applying hit makes it through your amor and deals not 0 hull damage.
  
• Heavy armor reduces your dodge chance, so you can't stack both and become invincible.
  

Quick example with nice, round numbers:

I have 50% armor and 50% shields.

I get hit by a weapon, that deals 100 damage.

Armor reduces damage by 50 (to 50) points and 50% = 25.

Armor modules take the 75 points they reduced as damage.

The remaining 25 points damage the hull by 25 points and create 25 points of internal damage.

This internal damage is reduced by 50 (to zero) and then 50% (still 0).

Shielding modules take 25 damage.

No modules or crew are damaged.

Now your ship can actually take a hit and keep fighting. The damage to your armor and eventually your shielding means you will start taking bad hits after a while, but you can take a certain amount of small damage hits without being crippled.

Still, you are not invincible, because you will take a ton of hits, that will eventually tell on your ship. And you have to take care of crippling effects, as they can still damage your modules/crew.

[fallen]

nero07 - awesome suggestion and thanks for taking the time to post such detailed and well-thought out approach. We've tried exactly this with a few variations throughout the alpha and early iterations of the playable game. While there are still some big meta changes coming down the pipe (Command, Tactics balance) I am not sure whether an adjustment like this is in the cards for STF.

[Cory Trese]

One challenge is that the base assumption -- armor and shield based builds don't work on Impossible -- just does not reflect the actual play data.

"Armor and Shields are a Noob trap" is just a flawed starting point. Will keep working to improve the wiki to help player see why armor, shielding, comp soak, damage cascade, soak cascade and criticals are important parts of the game.

Again, sorry for the negative experience with the game. I'm sad to hear you felt the design was so flawed. I think part of this is our reluctance to push back on community narratives or metas -- there is a commonly held belief that "only dodge" works but less than 5% of our playerbase interacts with us on Discord or the forum. It's hard to form an accurate opinion of the game's real-world high-difficulty performance across the other 95% of the players without digging into the analytics.

/shrug

We will keep working to improve.