Organic armor fix

[Suicide Junkie]

I've had it with the craziness of Organic Armor, so I'm gonna fix it.

NOTE: if this has already been fixed for v1.41, and nobody has told me yet, please do so now.


Ok, as it is, all pieces of organic armor must be completely destroyed in one turn, otherwise the damage is completely healed.

So, for Pirates & Nomads v2.3, I propose to do the following:
-Change the organic armor ability into an "organic resource generation" ability.
-Give Organic armor a shield generation ability equal to its hitpoints.
-Give Organic armor a shield regeneration ability equal to its old "organic armor" ability.
-Rewrite my AI patcher (My HDD was reformatted and I lost the source, FYI) and program the shipdesign.txt patch to replace "Organic Armor" calls with "organic resource generation" calls.
-Change the description to mention "Bio-electric Field", "provides a shield effect", and "can be tapped to recharge mechanical shield generators"

Thus:
AI's will still use the OA normally.
Against normal weapons, the organic armor work like you would expect it to, from reading the description.
Phased polaron beams will skip the OA's shield effect, but will still have to cut through the armor.
Also, this will remove the invulnerability issue with Organic races who use 10 OAs on a ship (can heal 1500 damage per turn!)

Questions, Comments and Suggestions are welcome

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[Spoo]

I thought Organic Armor stored X hitpoint per turn (X being the regen amount). So during the first few rounds that the ships close on each other the armor is "storing" regen, so even if all of the armor is destroyed on the first salvo, at least some of the armor will grow back. (This is all explained in a previous thread -Armor and Sheild FAQ, or something like that.

What about the situation when a player (or AI) wants phased sheilds and organic armor? Won't the normal sheild generation of the armor make all of the ships sheilding normal?

Just some points to ponder.

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Assume you have a 1kg squirrel
E=mc^2
E=1kg(3x10^8m/s)^2=9x10^16J
which, if I'm not mistaken, is equivilent to roughly a 50 megaton nuclear bomb.
Fear the squirrel.

[Phoenix-D]

Side effect:
Armor-skipping weapons will no longer skip organic armor totally
Organic armor will (probably) not work in a black hole system, or other shield-interfering area.

Phoenix-D

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Side effect:
Armor-skipping weapons will no longer skip organic armor totally
Organic armor will (probably) not work in a black hole system, or other shield-interfering area

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Well, at least not at 100% capacity. They will still give the armor effect, you'll just lose the shield & regen abilities.

quote:

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What about the situation when a player (or AI) wants phased sheilds and organic armor? Won't the normal sheild generation of the armor make all of the ships sheilding normal?

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Yes. For a human, its not too big a deal; they will use OA until the enemy PPBs appear, then switch to ablative/plasma armor or phased shields.
The AI could be royally screwed by this...

What do you think about giving the lower tech OAs normal, but the high-tech ones phased?

quote:

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I thought Organic Armor stored X hitpoint per turn (X being the regen amount). So during the first few rounds that the ships close on each other the armor is "storing" regen, so even if all of the armor is destroyed on the first salvo, at least some of the armor will grow back.

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In my experience (V1.35), the armor just heals everything at the end of each turn. If all of it is destroyed, nothing comes back.
EDIT: OOps I really should be sure that I've got my path.txt set right before I start doing tests
Looks like the reduced OA ability works OK.

So... My main problem is that the 300 regen per turn I get from the OAs is good, but having the stored-up 3000 OA points before I get in weapons range is just plain stupid.

So the question is: how should I fix this? I can leave in the OA regen, but at reduced levels; which will eliminate the AI patch requirement.
But, I still want the moderate hitpoint regen without having the insane storage effect.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 15 August 2001).]

[Master Belisarius]

After my tests, I think that currently the Organic Armor, only regenerate other Organic Armors destroyed in the same ship.

I don't know what happened in previous patches, but now I'm pretty sure about that other ship components (no organic armors), are not re-generated if they're destroyed.

An example: one Aquilaeian fleet with DN ships, with 4 Organic Armors every one, engaged in combat a similar fleet of Pyrochette's ships. The Aquilaeian fleet won, but several DN ships had components destroyed and their engines destroyed for the Pyrochette's weapons.
After a second combat against a colony ship (they were placed over a warp point), still the damaged engines/components were not regenerated... but one ship that had one Organic Armor destroyed but 3 Organic Armors intact, after the combat regenerated the damaged Armor.

[Suicide Junkie]

OA ability is limited to the ship its on, plus only affects components with OA abilities, or maybe components with the same familiy number.

If you want healing of any components, use living ships

This is on a battleship with 10 OAs, just so you know the scale.

quote:

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So... My main problem is that the 300 regen per turn I get from the OAs is good, but having the stored-up 3000 OA points before I get in weapons range is just plain stupid.

So the question is: how should I fix this? I can leave in the OA regen, but at reduced levels; which will eliminate the AI patch requirement.
But, I still want the moderate hitpoint regen without having the insane storage effect.

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Hmmm... I'm thinking 10% regen per turn would be OK; the ship would only store enough OA points for one complete restore before combat, and could only survive three armor wipeouts per battle. (Fourth is permanent).

FYI, the current value is 20%, allowing a ship to store two refreshes before shooting starts, and have each armor piece destroyed seven times per battle.

Also, with a value of 10%, and four refreshes per battle, the effective HP/KT of Organic armor is increased from 5 to 20, surpassing even the best alternative: plasma projection armor (14HP/KT)

At 20%, you get up to 35 HP/KT!!!


EDIT:
So far, OA with 10/13/15 regen seems OK. A little powerful, but more reasonable.
also, I've given the organic crossover armor 8/10/12 regen.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 16 August 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

Unless anybody has further comments, I'm going to set the organic armor regen ability to half in P&N.

This gives 10% of your hitpoints back each turn, for a full healing stored up before weapons fire begins, and at best, a 20HP/KT armor effect.

BioCrystal armor, and Psy Armor will have approximately 8% per turn.

[Rich04]

Just though I would give my two cents on the matter. I have no problem with the way it works now. Against NPC races it may be a huge advantage but vs human players it is almost worthless. Personally I love organic tech. But toneing the regen down will probally make it totally useless vs humans. As an alternative perhaps give OA the repair one component ability if you tune it down. Crystal Armor shield regen ability is useful pretty much all thru the game.
Just my opinion.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Against NPC races it may be a huge advantage but vs human players it is almost worthless. Personally I love organic tech. But toneing the regen down will probally make it totally useless vs humans. As an alternative perhaps give OA the repair one component ability if you tune it down. Crystal Armor shield regen ability is useful pretty much all thru the game.

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Note: for the regenerative effect between turns, you can take the "living ships" trait, and save on C&C space while you're at it.

When you look at the numbers, this is what you get:

Minimum strength: 5HP/KT
- guaranteed strength against non-piercing weapons
- as good as Armor III

Nominal Strength: 10HP/KT
- Must have at least one armor segment remaining after first volley
- Better than shields without ShieldRegen (8Hp/KT)
- equivalent to Armor Tech 8 (PlasmaProjection II)

Maximum Strength: 20HP/KT
- All armor components must heal after each volley of fire. (ship takes small hits over 30 turns of combat)
- Ultimate protection, 2.5x stronger than Phased shield 5's, 40% stronger than Plasma Armor 5's

This organic armor will operate basically the way you expect during the first volley of fire, and only begin to fail the second or third time the components are smashed.

Now, you also have to consider Bio-Crystal armor, which combines these hitpoints & regen capabilities with the shield boosting effect of Crystalline armor.

Light Cruisers can support 5 BCA's, and subtract 60 damage from all incoming attacks. That is some serious strength, rendering a lot of weapons ineffective.

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Does this convince you at all?
I am still open to making changes if you can show me how it will work better.
At the very least, I might copy the organic armor with changes, and let the players decide which type of armor to pay for.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 20 August 2001).]

[Baron Munchausen]

10 to 1 is a very high ratio. To combine that with regeneration makes an incredibly tough armor that might be difficult to balance against various weapons without a round of 'inflation' that could unbalance other things. I have only given crystalline armor the 10 to 1 ratio in my techs, though shields go as high as 20 to 1 and so it's not so out of place. But, crystalline armor doesn't regenerate... Combining crystalline and organic armor attributes is obscene. Either make it an artifact only tech or only give it to some "evil empire" that threatens to conquer the universe in some specially prepared scenario. I would frankly refuse to play against another human who had such tech.

What MM should have done with organic armor is made the first levels only regenerate AFTER combat. This "basic" organic armor would function more or less like shields, and would still be a signifigant advantage in the early stages of the game. Only at higher levels should it actually regenerate in combat.

For a real interesting twist there ought to be an organic armor like they had in Babylon 5 that 'learns' about what damages it. Each time it was hit by a weapon type, it would 'learn' something and the next hit would do less damage! Now that's evil! Combined with regeneration it might be invincible to anything but "ignores armor" or "ignores shields and armor" weapons. Maybe it needs to be exclusive of regen. The accounting for this on the code level would be a nightmare, though. Each ship would have unique resistances that would take up a huge amount of space and combat code could get very bloated. Sigh...

I like the idea of 'living ships' but the game doesn't properly support it with it's current abilities. The "repair component" ablity will be applied to any and all ships present together. There ought to be a special ability "self repair" that only affects the ship it is mounted in. It would be fairly easy for MM to do that. Then you could have the "living ships" by making special hulls with that ability in the VehicleSize.txt file.

Now, if we can just get the "damper field" so we can have ships with superb armor and no shields to compete against the ships with shields like thay have in MOO.


[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 21 August 2001).]