I'll never discount this sorta thing once we get a new gui that would support a more elaborate presentation of vhicle customizables, but I'll make it pretty clear that I don't want Spreadsheetpires. I love muh numberz, but that's not what I think this games needs. Empires gets its complexity from other areas.
Protip: Don't balance with the expectation that a bug that is preventing the balance is going to be fixed. I've got literally nothing for this bug. Literally. Nothing. Also, I'm pretty certain most people consider flat-out resist values to be simpler than trying to achieve pretty much the same thing using parameters like Speed to Damage. If I was a new player and someone told me that Armor A is good against missiles because of it's 30% missile resist, then I'm solid on it. If they tell me it's good against missiles because it has high health and this esoteric value called "Speed to Damage" that I've never heard of in any other game before and that makes it weak against cannons so it's implicitly good against missiles, then I'm just confused as fuck.
I feel ya. I try to balance a proper implementation pace and responding to player feedback. In this one circumstance, I sped things up. I think it was the right call since this armor is content that didn't exist before, so it's not "replacing" anything, i.e. there's no premature content "loss". Also, if speed/damage affects the bug, can't you just check where the cannon speed and/or damage parameter gets used? Is that all contained in the cannon fire function? Oh well. McGyverrrrrr, hawwwwlpppp. And as always, if you need a testing bitch, I'm always your man. Oh baby, am I. You don't frame it that way. You just say that it's strong against slow projectiles and weak against fast projectiles and let shit work itself out. I mean it's the opposite of absorbant, so there's precedent.
I hear ya. A lot of that comes from all of the weapons basically being the same speed. I mean rails are sooooo fucking slow. 9% faster than ER? Are you kidding me? But yeah, I was on the fence between designing a 100HP armor versus an 80HP armor and I picked 80HP. It doesn't feel good. It's only made worse by Capacitive basically being 2.52.6 Compo for cheap. Shits cray, yo.
Giving people easily visible resists and damage types is not spreadsheetpires, having to do maths on publicly unavailable formulas to work out how much speed to damage actually affects your armor (and then comparing it with ingame because this shit never matches up with the numbers you calculate) is FAR more spreadsheetpires. Also I'm going to prove you wrong and show the current GUI will work. Give me 10 min.
It'd be nice to have a unique icon for each damagetype and you'd be able to see the icons listed with their resistances to be more eyecatching, but this would work fine.
That looks like some hot little Photoshop action. The reason that I say that is because I don't know how to force a return in the armor description text string. Lol, that seems like a silly little superfluous thing, eh? It's not. We're not making descriptions into small essays. But that's just one relatively minor detail. In general, just because the information is in the screen when a player equips a particular customizable doesn't mean it gets read or it doesn't mean gets properly digested even if it is read. Communication is hard. Like really hard. I can't impress on everyone how truly difficult it is to properly communicate this kind information. To put it plainly, I recognize that there's a way to accomplish this that satisfies you. However, it doesn't satisfy me. I need something even clearer. We might get that in future and I will never say never.
I really don't see the problem you are having Spartacus. The only thing I would change on the mockup Empty made is to put those resist values next to the other stats that are already shown. Always put the important stuff before the lore. That's simple design rules.
Firstly, I want to mention that communication is more than just making sure the data is visible the user. I know I mentioned that, but it's really my prime issue. We might be showing all the data necessary for an educated decision, but that educated decision might still not take place in an unacceptably large portion of users. My biggest example would be reactive armor. It's admittedly unintuitive, but the hp/plate values are right there, but people still hate it even though it's the single best armor for getting as much hp on tank as possible (barring any unintentional issues with capacitive). The players that struggle with reactive are not first playthrough noobs. They are experienced players that should understand that reactive's large weight carries very high benefits. For some reason, people miss that and prefer a lighter armor even if it has much much less hp per plate. That's an example of an instance where 100% of the necessary armor information is presented in a style that's pretty similar to the communication style that empty is suggesting we use, but players still aren't properly using that information to make the right choices. I have to conclude that there's something wrong with the current way that the information is communicated in that particular situation so we're not going to rely on that style of communication even more with a resist-heavy system. One last time, I cannot impress on everyone enough how truly enormous a task it is to properly communicate this kind of stuff. It's not a problem that well be solved in an hour on a text forum. It's really hard and we can't underestimate it.
I still don't get it. You assume nobody is going to read it, so we are not even going to bother to put it in in the first place? What?! The only thing more obvious I could think of is giving people hit markers that depend on the effectiveness of their gun vs their target's armor. And different sounds when you get hit, depending on the same mechanic. I also think it's pretty funny that you try to make such statistics and observations on such a small player base.
I'm with firewarrior here. A solution that isn't ideal is far better than having no solution at all. I'd rather have information available in a shitty menu that most people won't read than not have it there at all, at the very least it'll spread by word of mouth. As it stands I have no idea what armor to use because they're inconsistent and all seem to work pretty much the same, I just put whatever we have researched and pray it'll work. also an armor that weighs 10 and has 50HP is nearly identical in function to an armor that weighs 20 and has 100HP spartacus.
Showing the total amount of hp on each side of the tank either next to the amount of plates you can add on or right above it in a slightly larger font would help with really dumb problems like reactive. Spartacus is right here, people don't want to read. Or in some cases, they do read and are rather misinformed on how something works due to old text or something else. In any case simple text just isn't working for a at least half the players for some reason. Then again, maybe text isn't quite the problem. I wonder now if the main complaints come from vets who have read the description but never bother to read it again, either thinking it wouldn't change or simply not knowing that things have even been updated. There has been a remarkable amount of times where commanders ask so what works now? Anyway, empty and firewarrior are right, some solution is better than no solution. Even then, most people take things at face value when you tell them this has a resist or this doesn't. They would for the most part think it has a straight up resist. Which also makes me wonder, do people actually care about the specifics or do they really just want a simple blurb that something works well against something? Empty, that analogy doesn't actually work, most armors that have some fun effect like abs, regen, compo all have 40 hp at a weight higher than 10, you do indeed get more out of reactive. Even the super light and cheap budget armor can't get close to the amount of armor you can get with reactive.
Well where else are they going to get the info from if not from reading? Other players who tell them the necessary bits vocally also need to read the info first somewhere.
I imagine a lot of people get that info from the forums or private chats with the few people that know how scripts work. I know I do, I haven't bothered ot read the ingame stuff in a while beacsue I get most info from news updates and checking the actual scripts when I want a specific info on something. I'm not disagreeing though, more info in the boxes is a good thing. The only thing that might not be so nice is the extra time it takes to put it in there, but if you simply add it on after the description or before it shouldn't take that much more time really.
Barring the gui update, I try to make sure the descriptions have accurate & concise qualitative explanations. Mostly concise. If there's only one sentence to read, then I'm hoping that players will read it. If we dump a small essay that needs to be scrolled through, then motivated players might become more informed, but an unacceptably large portion of the population may overlook the entire description. That's just the nature of dealing with real, breathing human beings. Don't get me wrong, the rules change when we have a gui that can be easily iterated. However right now, there are certain realities that we will work within.
"Brittle armor absorbs the shock of slow moving missiles but takes extra damage from fast moving projectiles." There, people will understand what exactly it's used for. They won't have any questions of how much because honestly most people don't care, if they did they'd ask for more info on how abs works which they simply don't.
How good is it vs missiles? What is the cost ratio, does it have a significant advantage or am I better off going with a generic armor that defends against all weapons? How well does it stack up against other anti-missile projectiles? These are all questions that I think are pretty fucking critical and aren't explained at all by that description. On top of that, armors are the hardest thing to work out whether they're working or not because generally you dont pay attention to your HP until it's low, since there's more important things to worry about like killing enemies.
