Armor Components Soak Component Damage First

[drspendlove]

A few of us on Discord had an interesting thought: What if armor-specific components were always targeted by component damage first, at least until they hit 60% damage? The only way to deal component damage to other (presumably more vital components) would be if the armor ones were all already destroyed/damaged OR from any critical hit, which would ignore this new rule. This would greatly shift the meta, and in favor of armored vessels. I think it would make for an exciting change. It would make critical hits much more important versus heavily armored ships, and would raise the value of +armor and +shield components. In fact, it might even merit decreasing side bonuses on some of those components.

This would not have any impact on boarding component damage from sabotage.

Thoughts?

[cerseisadvocate]

I like it, makes loosing the game on an unfortune engine hit a bit less likely.

[fallen]

It certainly would make ship combat far longer in every battle. Disabling an enemy ship would become extensively more difficult and time consuming. Many types of ship combat build styles would suddenly become obsolete. We've reviewed this suggestion before and have not bitten due to a lot of balance reasons and the fact that the system is symmetrical.

[fallen]

P.s. sorry, overly busy in my response.

It would add some cool nuance to the game but isn't something we can do as simple as making that the rule that damage goes to those components first, it would have major bad impacts -- we've tested it. We've talked about it before and always put it on the shelf for future consideration.

[drspendlove]

Ah, I didn't know it had been considered. I was going to suggest it be tested and see which builds were obsolete, which were enhanced, and if fun increased. Sounds like you already did this.

[Darion]

Hmmm... i would've liked to h ave seen that test run. Which leads me to a question, does the armour provided by comps get reduced if they're disabled? Did you only designate the major arm comps as first hits or all comps that provide a arm bonus?

Apart from the Build shifting and player killing (which seem to be acceptable risks for other updates ) i am surprised to read that it does dramatically increase fight time.

[fallen]

The bonus of any component is removed if it becomes disabled.

[gilmoy]

I actually suspect that the +armor/shields bonus of the Barracks component, whichever tier a ship has, persists even after the component is disabled with 60%+ damage. On several occasions, I've damaged an enemy's Reinforced Barracks or Shielded Barracks to 60% or more (sometimes to 100%), and the enemy ship's public Armor% or Shield% do not drop at all. Not even by 1% each.

Weirdly enough, when Shielded Barracks 4 (4 shield points, 8 radiation resist, 14 void resist) is disabled:
[ok] it disappears from the enemy's public list of components
[ok] the ship loses its 8 rad resist/14 void resist
[__] the ship keeps its 4 shield points, and its Shield% does not drop

Every other component seems to behave properly when disabled: they immediately cease to add all of their stats, including mass and jump cost Barracks is the only exception I've seen so far. (I cannot tell about terrox components, and I haven't seen jyeeta)

[fallen]

Odd, that is strange. Will take a look!

[Cory Trese]

Parts of the Barracks are persisted into the ship's architecture even if the barracks is destroyed. This is to avoid problems in other systems when the Crew Maximum fluxuates by large amounts, or even drops to zero.

It appears that perhaps in some cases this transfer of destroyed barracks might be leaking some other properties for reinforced component types. I will investigate this.