Info on the armor nerf?

[Coolthulhu]

I almost wonder if what we want to do is divvy up the surface of each body part into ~100 zones, and have armor state which zones it covers.

Managing that sounds incredibly tedious, not to mention that everything would need those new values applied from scratch.

A simpler way could be to just divide items into two categories: general protection and padding/supplement/vital protection. Then instead of rolling “coverage roll” per-armor, it would be rolled once, with general protection using the roll as is, but supplemental using 100%-roll.

For example, an attack rolls 97% on armor avoidance (really good) and thus bypasses all general armors below 97% coverage, but hits all supplemental armor above or at 3% coverage.

This would also naturally translate into dodge benefits: dodge would lower attack’s armor avoidance, while high attacker accuracy would bring it up.

There is an old problem that would need to be addressed here: at the moment all attacks bypass coverage equally. A sledgehammer can hit an opening between glasses and the head and strike in the eye directly. By adding a armor bypass penalty (that couldn’t be compensated by accuracy) to attacks, it could be possible to have armors that protect from fists perfectly (regardless of accuracy and dodge), but still fail to protect from daggers and stings.

[Arkenstone]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:20, topic:14258”]Your choices for “best” are fundamentally limited anyway, if coverage didn’t dominate, something else would.
SWAT armor is only particularly good in its own niche, which is that mobility is highly valued, and you expect people to be shooting at you. If you remove the getting shot at part, it becomes unecessarally bulky.[/quote]

Ideally there shouldn’t be One True Armor any more than One True Skill, and probably not something that can be found on the first day of the game.

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:21, topic:14258”]For example, an attack rolls 97% on armor avoidance (really good) and thus bypasses all general armors below 97% coverage, but hits all supplemental armor above or at 3% coverage.

This would also naturally translate into dodge benefits: dodge would lower attack’s armor avoidance, while high attacker accuracy would bring it up.

There is an old problem that would need to be addressed here: at the moment all attacks bypass coverage equally. A sledgehammer can hit an opening between glasses and the head and strike in the eye directly. By adding a armor bypass penalty (that couldn’t be compensated by accuracy) to attacks, it could be possible to have armors that protect from fists perfectly (regardless of accuracy and dodge), but still fail to protect from daggers and stings.[/quote]

I like this idea.

[_k1]

I suggest that there should be only 5 degrees of coverage: 0, 25, 50, 75, 100.

edit:
Armor that covers more than one body parts should have coverage for each one. T-shirt, for example, should cover 25% arms and 100% torso.

[Coolthulhu]

I suggest that there should be only 5 degrees of coverage: 0, 25, 50, 75, 100.

If there was a limited selection, it should be 100, 95, 90 and 85. Anything below that is too unreliable to count.

[_k1]

If there was a limited selection, it should be 100, 95, 90 and 85.

That doesn’t make these high-coverage-but-not-100% armor better than they are now. And difference of 5% coverage is not significant unless when it turns a 95% to a 100%.

Anything below that is too unreliable to count.

It is. They should exist for the sake of simulation, though.

[kevin.granade]

A simpler way could be to just divide items into two categories: general protection and padding/supplement/vital protection. Then instead of rolling “coverage roll” per-armor, it would be rolled once, with general protection using the roll as is, but supplemental using 100%-roll.

Considering that armor is additave, just having one 100% layer and another 95% layer would have the same effect. Now that I think of it, allowing multiple layers per armor item would do what we want with very little new code. Neither approach is very expressive with respect to complimentary armor layers, but I’m not sure the expressiveness is worth the extra complexity.

[Coolthulhu]

It is. They should exist for the sake of simulation, though.

If it’s for the sake of simulation, then they certainly shouldn’t have quantized coverage either.

Now that I think of it, allowing multiple layers per armor item would do what we want with very little new code.

Could be made simple by artificially restricting the layers to some easy to understand formula. For example, allowing only 2-3 layers per item, with material thickness divided by layer number (ie. halved for second, then /3 for third).
Then layers could be expressed as a coverage triple. For example: 50%/75%/100% would mean an item that always applies at least 33% of its resistance, 75% of the time it applies at least 50% of its resistance, and 50% of the time it applies all resistance.
Not sure about acid/fire/environmental, though - those ignore thickness.