Improve vehicle coverage for armour

[Midaychi]

As in the title, I’ve been noticing a lot that zombie wildlife almost seems designed to hide in that forest just out of sight until you go to sleep, then cruise missile towards your most exposed gas tank and hump it to death, completely ignoring the sheaf of military composite armour covering it.

So, I’d like to suggest, for both collisions and for smashing/attacking/shooting, if there’s an armour plating on the frame then it will always hit that first, unless there’s a ‘roof or outside’ mounted thing, then that becomes a valid target too because it’s exposed. As the plating gets more and more damaged, then it might start getting holes and allowing some attacks through, and when it is smashed then it is useless.

I can understand this not being the function for things like rebar reinforcement or springs, and solar panels and such being exposed, but plating a vehicle in steel or hard or superalloy should at least protect internal components rather than often being ignored or bypassed.

[Coolthulhu]

Already happens, except armor takes only 50% of the damage.

[Midaychi]

That’s kinda sketchy.

SO I guess the intention is to discourage building supertanks by requiring the player to build out in terms of volume and bulk in order to actually have anything approaching armoured? Ie, you have to make your vehicle douible-wide and keep fragile internals form the side just so you have a layer of half-decent protection?

I mean, if anything, vehicle armour should work like player armour rather than just having a half damage soak. “this military composite armour provides 40 bashing and 40 cut protection” or whatever.

with a 50% soak, that means something that smashes for 2 damage can do 1 damage to anything it wants.

As is, any joe zombie can chew through a heavily armoured tank, eventually. I could see brutes and hulks doing that, but just random zombie? Random zombie dog? Even if we’re assuming that zombification unlocks the latent gorilla in zombies, they really shouldn’t be able to do that.

[Coolthulhu]

A player with a rock or a plank can smash any vehicle apart at the moment.
There are no tanks in the core game. Mods aren’t really taken into consideration.

Changing the way armor works is not necessarily a bad idea, but someone would have to balance it first.
For example, a bunch of scenarios (zed vs car, tough zed vs cargo truck, hulk vs APC, zed child vs civilian cargo truck) and some basic number crunching to get sane values for armor rates.

[Midaychi]

Ok, here’s an idea.
Vehicle armour-type items have a bash and cut rating, but rather than outright block, it absorbs it and decreases the armour’s health. Any damage past that gets delved up into the frame and its components.

Split into two groups; Bash type and Cut type. Shock absorbers and weird blob-derived platings are good at bash but not at cut, and things like plating are good at blocking cut but not so much bash. You can install one of each, but if you do then your aerodynamics and mass ratings suffer greatly. Installing just one is fine though.

The amount they absorb can be balanced per tier based on what you want to be able to take it apart. Things without plating work as they do now.

Two types of plating modes for install: Full and slit, Full is 100% coverage but blocks vision, while slit is less coverage but it’s something you’d install on windows and quarter panels.

As armour is damaged, it loses its coverage and ability to absorb, exponentially, so up until yellow you’re fine, and yellow and below you’re progressively not fine.

Finally, add some sort of flexible tag to wood fences and such that halves return collision damage to armour, or add some sort of off road modifications that can defeat New England’s infamous adamantium bushes, cause current road mapgen is a pita.

[Coolthulhu]

That’s a lot of features, some of which unwieldy.

The idea to make armor accept more damage before the 50-50 split makes sense.

Splitting cut/bash: nope. Vehicles don’t take cut damage at the moment. The only cut damage that would matter here would be guns anyway, so it is not worth the work.
Coverage for vehicle armor doesn’t sound good at all.

Adamantium bushes don’t need a special case for armor. Unarmored but heavy vehicles should smash them just as easily as armored. The question is, how easily exactly?

[Logrin]

I actually like the idea of armor plating working like this:

*Gets hit first
*Resists x amount of damage outright depending on the material
*Remaining damage is split 50/50