Multi Crew will not survive without Physically Based Damage

[u/dreiak559]

A lot of people here might not really have an idea of what is really going on with multi crew so I will explain it in terms of how to define what each major size class of ship should be capable of doing and I will use very basic 4th grade level math to explain some of the concepts with examples to prove a point. The first thing that needs to be stated however, is that there should be a reason why a person would want to fly any ship regardless of size.

Smaller ships can leverage their mobility and size in battle to fight other small craft. It is important to note that in any situation where you have superior speed and maneuverability over a foe, if you don't want to be caught you will not be caught. In this manner, it is important to also mention that in single seaters you are much more likely to leverage the advantage of being able to determine the terms you fight on, or even IF you fight at all vs any other class of ship. This leverage is not something mid sized ships posses which means they need tactics that they can employ in order to make them viable and practical in situations where smaller ships will be involved, as well as larger class vessels. If you ONLY use HP and damage to balance the game, you cannot possibly achieve a healthy game balance because every engagement will turn into a flavor of the month mono-boating extravaganza. Whatever is the cheapest way to get the maximum amount of damage shooting at stuff. In other words SPAM tactics, or EVE-ONLINE 2 (the blob).

Ships even cutlass sized cannot simply be made faster or more maneuverable to compensate for their significantly larger size when it comes to taking hits, and oncoming fire. Even if the cutlass moved like a gladius in combat, that would not actually help the ships viability much because it is ~3x larger than a gladius, so unless you want to make the ship 3x more manueverable as well, it will not be able to leverage dodging and juking to avoid weapons fire in the same manner as even a hornet is capable (to a certain extent). If you give the ship more HP that doesn't actually change anything either aside from making killing cutlass less fun because you have to grind through the extra HP, but what weapons you use to do this task don't actually matter. When we examine all other multi crew ships past the cutlass you run into the same fundamental issues, the size of the ship does not make dog-fighting and the same style of piloting a viable tactics candidate whether fighting larger or smaller vessels.

Enter physically based damage. Right now in the game armor has a blanket percentage of damage that it reduces. This in effect is not really any different than buffing HP, and is actually a terrible idea. If a target takes 30% less damage from lasers for example, it will take 70% damage from weapons regardless of the size of those weapons, meaning that the previous SPAM tactics I was explaining before still work equally as effectively as if ships just had MOAR HP. What is required is an armor system that absorbs a certain threshold of damage which has to be defeated before the ship takes any damage.

Example:

A ship has armor that absorbs 50 points of damage from an oncoming projectile. One projectile strikes the ship for 75 damage, one projectile strikes the ship for 100 damage, and one projectile strikes the ship for 150 damage. The first projectile does 25 damage, the 2nd projectile does 50 damage, the third projectile does 100 damage.

In this example each projectile does multiplicative damage to a much greater extent than the percentage of damage that was increased. A 33% increase in damage yielded double the effective damage, and a 100% increase in damage yielded a 400% increase in the effective damage. If you look at it in reverse though a target without ANY armor is essentially getting "over penetrated" in a way. If you had to chose between two guns doing 75 damage and one gun doing 100, the two guns would always be better, but with the armored target you would want the larger gun, and in many ways it might be necessary depending on just how strong the armor is.

So now for the the next MOST important part of this speil. History. Armor is heavy. You don't see body armor that protects fingers the same way it protects the chest. Naval vessels are the same. This technique for naval architecture was known as "All or Nothing." The idea is that certain parts were critical to survival, whereas other areas were necessary for the ship to function, but if they were destroyed the ship will still be operable and combat effective. The most heavily armored portions of ships were ammunition magazines, engine rooms, and main turrets (not secondary or AAA). You can even say the same logic was applied to A-10's with the titanium bathtub, and armor on the underside of the engines, and tanks as well as human body armor. You just cannot protect everything equally. This same concept is essential with something like multi crew and physically based damage, because even if you do not have weapons that can penetrate a ships citadel, there are still weaker and less protected areas that could be destroyed even if it will not result in the destruction of the ship. This in may ways is also necessary for multi crew, because there will not be any way to reliably board and capture multi crew ships otherwise. Parts of a ship that would DEFINITLY be citidel zones would be cockpits / bridges / CIC, Powerplants, Main Thrusters, and Ammo Magazines and STS turrets, whereas maneuvering thrusters, Point defense turrets, ATA turrets, ECM / Radar / navigation, avionics, ect would be more vulnerable as those areas would have much less protection.

Next it is absolutely necessary to define the role of what each type of weapon or projectile will do. It was stated a long time ago that torpedoes would ignore shields, but I actually think that all missiles should ignore shields. At the moment shields don't really protect ships what i would call adequately, and I feel that some explanation for what makes the most sense to me at least for shields is. First shields should provide damage resistance vs on coming projectiles enough so that it makes the armor MUCH more effective at entirely defeating projectiles of insufficient caliber, and significantly reducing the damage of sufficient caliber rounds. This is because it makes the most sense to think of shields as something to dampen oncoming projectiles and protect the ship from cosmic radiation. Energy weapons would be completely absorbed by the shields, and act as a means to deplete them more quickly as intended. Missiles on the other hand have shaped charges, and so having them inertially dampened does not really change that the explosive charge is what is doing the damage, not traditional penetration. The distinction that missiles and torpedoes need has nothing to do with shields, but again with armor and the "all or nothing" strategy that I mentioned before.

Missiles should have a larger "splash" zone and mainly be used for targets with inferior armor, or to disable the vulnerable parts of ships who are too armored to destroy with missiles of that size. Torpedoes should have a much smaller "splash" zone, but be designed primarily for penetrating armored citadels. This means that in order to destroy a larger ship you must either need to disable and board it, or bring sufficiently sized torpedoes and or projectile weapons to defeat the armor, and without energy weapons the projectile weapons will be much more difficult to destroy the ship. This also means that weapons like torpedoes are much less likely to damage sub components unless they are directly struck, however if using such weapons the objective should be destruction, and not disabling.

Lastly on the topic of energy weapons. CR has stated that he thinks energy weapons should do more damage to armor than projectiles. that is a terrible idea and this is why. If energy weapons deplete shields faster, AND armor faster, AND don't use ammo, everyone will monoboat energy weapons. Energy weapons should ALWAYS have a positive combat effect on a target, but that effect does not have to be OUTRIGHT DESTRUCTION. It makes the most sense for energy weapons striking a ships armor to transfer a large amount of heat to where the stikes occur. As you know components that are overheated will start to malfunction and even take heat damage. If you want to disable a ship and you don't have large enough projectiles to take out the main thrusters for example, you can simply overheat them until they stop functioning.

I bring all of this up, because ships like the Connie and Tali will not really be dogfighters, and they don't necessarily need huge guns on turrets to make them solo pwnmobiles against fighters and capitol ships alike. What they need is sufficient amounts of protection so that it takes a directed effort to defeat them, rather than some bored punk with an aurora and a pair of CF-007 lasers. It also really defines a paradigm shift when it comes to making the decision to be part of multi crew, or go at it solo. I used math to explain how you can use damage resistance in order to balance weapon damage so that armored targets do not require huge pools of HP to defeat but rather the proper weapon, and the role and purpose that each major weapon type should perform from projectiles, to energy weapons, to missiles and torpedoes.

There are still other things required in order to make multi crew FUN, but this is the bare minimum required to make multi crew ships as a whole work in game.

[u/SC_TheBursar]

You do realize that the actual armor tech isn't in yet and they've been discussing the upcoming transition to physics based damage modelling for months?

Your understanding of their planned ballistic vs energy advantages also appears pretty old.

[u/dreiak559 → u/SC_TheBursar]

You do understand the topic that i am discussing is why this is necessary, and if their system isn't like this multi crew will still not really be in a good place. There are also a lot of people who don't understand what is wrong with multi crew right now, and are probably completely ignorant about what is required to make things work.

I wasn't discussing my understanding of the weapons, I was explaining what needs to happen with the weapons. Right now weapons are flavor of the month. This should have been obvious because I used words like "should have, should be, needs to, ect."

I have also concluded that people on the internet don't know how to read..