Make vehicle plates representative of armor health

Discussion in 'Feedback' started by Señor_Awesome, May 13, 2016.

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Is this a good idea?

  1. Yes

    66.7%
  2. No

    33.3%
  1. Señor_Awesome

    Señor_Awesome Member

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    My suggestion is to make all plates have equal health and let the number of plates (something identifiable by enemies) be the main variable. So armors meant to have higher health would be lower weight and allow higher number of plates.

    This is just a random thought I had when using capacitive the other day and yesterday. Capacitive has high plate health but the number of plates you can use is few due to the weight. From the perspective of an enemy with armor detection, your tank is weak - only 2 or 3 plates! But if you see a tank with many armor plates, its easy for players new and old to go 'oh, that tank has high armor plating, I bet they are using X' or just the simple realization that 'that tank has a lot of armor on it'.

    I don't actually think its a good idea really, but I thought it deserved being put out there. The real topic here is that to the untrained eye enemy armor is completely indistinguishable, a problem whose previous proposed solutions have been more particles or visual distinction, both of which requiring not insignificant modelling/art work.

    Since Lazy has been doing this thing lately:

    Pros
    • Easy to distinguish high armor hp tanks from low armor hp tanks
    • Possible way to make it easy for enemies to distinguish different armors as long as they use armor detection skill.
    Cons
    • Ruins the weight/hp balance currently employed
    • Taking away variable plate health removes a variable from balancing, so less fine tuning available there
     
  2. flasche

    flasche Member Staff Member Moderator

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    but plate health should mean nothing, its just a way to be able to scale health since 300 plates on a side would look dumb (imo, no idea what the original intention was)
    if you would need to fully remove a plate before you can deal damage to the next one (with excess damage discarded) it would be of use. like 2 tough plates vs 6 weak ones with same overall hp would play out totally different against high damage weapons, it being "just a value" is just confusing.
    and health alone isnt everything.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
  3. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    There's so little difference between armor weights that it doesn't make a ton of difference when it comes to balancing, or more precisely it doesn't really affect how we make tanks and their total hp.

    I'm not gonna grab a calculator but lets talk a bit more about making everything have the same hp and what that will really do. It would make armors have to stand much more on there actual abilities, I think spartacus tested this out for a week but I think at the time it was also when plates didn't have a ton of hp so it made it harder to judge if was really working well or terribly. In any case this would force 2 things, it would force people to know how to use the armors better to actually make the most of it and would further boost the armors that don't require thought. Abs being a good example, it's just a straight damage nerf, requires no thought to maximize it's use. Of course one would think reflective does require some skill but people rarely try to shoot perpendicularly into a tank that it can still work just fine with no thought.

    The other thought is that really what could be done is make the hp the same but then completely balance on weight alone. Now I said previously this didn't matter much, because for the most part we can make out tanks with any armor or at least close to max, maybe a plate here or there but it doesn't matter as much as people think. So what needs to change isn't just having weight differences of more then 2 or even 5, but to raise the max plates on tanks. That allows a couple of things. Most people do spread out plates evenly on a tank, but with certain armors or in certain situations(as in slaughtered), shoving way more plates on one side can be useful, higher max allows people to customize their tank further. It might also make it easier to balance in a way too.

    Let's talk about reactive for a second. It's flat hp, that's all it's good for. So one would assume any tank with reactive would have the highest raw hp of any tank. This means we can use reactive as our limit for how many plates a tank should have. From there we can use weight to restrict the amount of hp a tank should have for the other armors. This method of balance on plates would also passively balance costs in a way, a plate you don't buy is money saved right?

    Flasche is right though, plates make the most sense if damage didn't carry over plate to plate, though considering the variety of damages I wonder if will actually play out well at all.

    I'm kinda indifferent on the idea itself, it could probably be done adequately in like a hour or so with a bit of testing but I dunno. I know I made a statement somewhere about making plates super heavy and adjusting hp to match so weak points are forced and much more obvious and that idea doesn't mesh well with this one I think.
     
  4. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    plate balance is horrible atm, so a complete revamp is probably overdue anyway
     
  5. complete_

    complete_ lamer

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    if you asked this question to people, they would probably answer "yes change it"
    but noone has a real way to fix it without making terrible terrible balance changes
     

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