Armor Damage Reduction?

I don't think anyone knows for sure, and the devs haven't said.

WWW Link

That's too bad that they haven't said. They've been pretty open about how the rest of the game works so it's not a "magic blackbox" type of thing so maybe they'll tell us if they see this post.

Well, this is from the gameplay constants file:
HullPointPercentageIncreasePerArmorPoint 0.05

And I did some testing. Giving a ship 20 armor makes it take about half damage. Which corroborates with what I've read in other threads: the "effective" HP of a ship goes up by 5% for every armor point. Which makes the damage reduction formula something like:

1 / (1 + HullPointPercentageIncreasePerArmorPoint * armor)

If the relationship is as simple as that then armour seems a little redundant doesn't it? If it just corresponds to an increase in effective HP, why not just give the ship more HP instead of more armour? The "increase armour" techs might as well be "increase HP" techs, ships with high base armour could just have higher base HP and so on.

But it also increases effective regeneration in this way. I.e. if you had a ship that had 20 armor points, it would effectively regenerate twice as fast as ship with just x2 hull and 0 armor.

Or at least it seems this way.

If armor worked this way, then HP upgrades should be more useful than armor upgrades because (Base HP + HP upgrades) would act before (Base Armor + Armor Upgrades), making armor upgrades less worthwhile. It would be more effective if armor was a form of mitigation. For every 'x' amount of damage the hull takes, 1 point of armor reduces it by 5%. Of course, the heaviest armored ship would never reach 20 armor unless someone modded it. Another strange thing is that the level of armor doesn't really scale with the kind of ship it's on. The Vasari's Skarovas Enforcer heavy cruiser has a base armor of 4.5, while Vasari bombers have a base armor of 5! Similarly, a Javelis LRM and a TEC fighter both have 1 armor. And, on a side note, what the hell does "Mass Reduction" do? The last Vasari armor tech, "Atomic Lattice Armor" gives an armor increase of 4.5 over the base and a Mass Reduction bonus of 4%. Does this reduce resource cost, build time, etc., or increase speed or some other weird thing. ----For some reason, line breaks(Enter) aren't working here. Not even the br tag is working----

For some reason, line breaks(Enter) aren't working here. Not even the br tag is working.

From the description, I would assumed that 'mass reduction' does exactly what it says - reduces the mass of the ship, thus increasing its acceleration (and possibly top speed and/or turning rate).

If that's so, than the tech re-emphasizes the Vasari's mobility orientation since they're the only faction to get a speed booster tech. The 8% accel/speed increase on fighters and bombers would have a significant effect and a sizable buff on cruisers & frigates as well. Enforcers would be hitting speeds of 648 and Assailants would be pulling 864.

But in this way, armor regeneration is for free, from the % of hull. I.e. if you have hull 1000 and let's say armor == 25% of hull (too keep it more realistic), then you will regen 25% of effective hull for free. Or looking at in from different perspective - reduce the damage done to the real hull by 20%.



researchModifier
modifierType "ArmorBaseAdjustment"
baseValue 0.000000
perLevelValue 0.500000
researchModifier
modifierType "MassReduction"
baseValue 0.000000
perLevelValue 0.040000

File in question is RESEARCHSUBJECT_SPEEDBOOSTARMOR

It seems weird to me to have shield mitigation *and* armor mitigation.

Some poor soul using an anti-heavy weapon on the hull of a well positioned advent capital ship would only do:

50% (Anti-heavy vs cap)
*
20% (amount that makes it through shield mitigation)
*
60% (amount that makes it through hull mitigation)
=
6% of base damage

Well, Advent capitals don't have 80% shield mitigation. But yeah.

The vasari have several abilities to punch through mitigation, though.

Level 10 capital ship = 75% + 4% (shield tech) + 6% (culture), they can get to 85% mitigation on their home turf, unless the game caps it somewhere. I hope it does, otherwise a level 10 advent capital has around twice the durability of a level 10 capital of any other side.

I believe shield mitigation only applies to damage being done to the shields and armor only applies to damage being done to the hull.

At least that's what seems most logical, could be wrong though.

You'd think so (I thought so), but that's actually not how it works, Shield mitigation is always there, the manual talks about reserve generators that keep the mitigation going.

So how does shield mitigation go up? Is it the number of ships firing on the target or is it the damage per second the target is receiving? If maximum mitigation value is reached to soon/easily it kind of defeats the purpose of spreading your targets out.

As far as I can tell, it goes down a little bit each second, and goes up every time the ship is hit, not sure if it is dependent on % damage or anything.

I've noticed that a single capital ship firing at a target can max out that ship at full shield mitigation, so it seems like it's not worth it at all to avoid focusing fire. I'd even say focusing fire is the best tactical strategy at the moment.

If you're some sort of micromanagement god, you could have your ships engage enemy ships 1 to 1, and avoid almost all the effects of shield mitigation, but that would take so much work, and I'm not sure if it would be worth it.

If that is true then it seems as though the purpose of mitigation is not working the way the dev's envisioned it. As I believe they wanted to reduce the amount of focus firing going on.

For mitigation to make more of an impact it needs to go up with the more ships or DPS hiting the target in a non-linear fashion. That way there would be a sweet spot or optimal firing solution. You don't want people thinking "oh well, those two light cruisers caused the shield mitigation to go up to 65% on that cap ship. Might as well focus fire it".

I believe the original intention was to get ships to spread their targeting out more to make for a more climatic and visually interesting battle. Right now it seems almost pointless/redundant in most situations. It should take more directed fire to cause mitigation to go up. That would encourage more target diversity.

mitigation is defined in the player file.


in other words 10 damage causes mitigation to go up 1%.

There's focusing fire and then there's focusing fire. You don't have to do whole fleets on one ship at a time. If you have the micro skill you can set up target strings for multiple groups of ships or strike craft. The easiest way to do this is through number groups, of course...

For another thing, focusing on one target lets your enemy screw with you a bit by moving it around or using Vengeance.

Finally, some knowledge of shield mitigation is helpful for using abilities. For example, the gauss cannon on the Kol... Never use that on your Kols target, use it on something with no mitigation boost. It also increases the relative power of splash damage- all the splash targets will have no mitigation boost.

As best as I can tell, Shield mitigation's primary purpose is as one of the many things that helps players who aren't playing as well. Having a smaller fleet would mean that your ships are taking more damage, so all their shield mitigations would be higher, so they end up taking less damage than they would. (Personally, I'd rather just get crushed than fight a losing battle for an hour and a half though)

Thanks for the information Deadly Shoe. That helps.

It still underlines the issue though that shield mitigation could use some adjusting. I'm just not sure about the linear "shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage 0.001" being the best way to implement the idea. It still may work better if its non-linear and/or was definitely more than 10 damage = 1% growth of shield mitigation. A higher damage amount per percent and/or non-linear progression would seem to encourage alternating targets more or spreading your targets out more making for a much more interesting battle.

If ships are going to go up to maximum mitigation just because you looked at them wrong you might as well remove the mitigation feature and just give them more shield and armor points and/or rebalance weapon damage and fire rates as that's the equivalent of what it is doing now. It seems to make itself redundant.

Then again maybe there is some subtle aspect of its current implementation that I'm not getting. Anyone care to provide some theoretical or practical examples of how the current system plays out versus my line of thinking?

Well, one thing about this whole thing is that the Vasari have that technology that allows them to partially ignore this gameplay mechanic. Preliminary tests seem to indicate they gain a large advantage by focus firing with their % chance mitigation attacks. I don't understand why an anti focus firing mechanic should only strongly apply to 2 of the 3 races, with the third able to mostly ignore it if they wish.

Against that crazy advent capital I talked about before with 85% max mitigation, Vasari phase missiles would effectively deal 3 times as much damage, on average, as any other ship with the same attack power, killing the ship 3 times as fast.

As far as I can figure shield mitigation is there to make it less necessary to micro fight by constantly focus firing everything since doing so actually drops your overall fleet DPS. If you let the AI manage targets then they tend to not focus fire and will pick targets based on what they do the most damage to.



Pretty sure that the shield mitigation applies to missiles that phase past the shield and hit the hull. Also, that really only effects Vasari Assailants and Bombers. Nothing else is all that strongly effected by it.

Edit: Forgot a few of the Vasari cap ships use missiles to varying degrees.

This has not been my experience when I've been playing, and I just jumped into a system where the other player had 14 ships and me with 12 light frigates, left to do their own thing, they focused fire on one enemy ship at a time, target after target.



I ran some tests on this (which is hard in this game because you can't attack your own units for some reason), and found that the phase missiles ignore mitigation completely when they phase.

I didn't even take into account the fact that with 85% mitigation, the hull missiles would kill the hull while they still had shields left, so actually, on average, against a level 10 radiance battleship with 85% mitigation, the phase missiles as they are now would kill the ship 11 times as fast as the same ship without the phase missiles upgrade. That is not an exaggeration, that is right around the real number.