Pykrete is a composite of wood pulp and ice that is surprisingly strong and slow to melt. WWII warships were almost going to be made of it, before the war ended. Pros: Strong Cheap Cons: Slowly melts (negative regeneration) Takes a lot of heat damage Seems ridiculous, especially on desert maps. So, what's you guys'es thoughts? I posted this here because I thought it might be an interesting and doable armor.
I'm fairly certain that I suggested it in another thread, but this is the first time this idea has ever had its very own thread to call its very own. Edit: Thinking about gameplay, it would probably be good with advanced coolant, as overheating will damage the armor (if that's even a thing that can be done in scripts; Now I suspect not), so it would be good to have it in another tree. Physics? That would put it in with mostly things that'll overheat like crazy, so maybe good contrast. Electrical (under 'Advanced Refrigeration')? What do you guys think?
Unfortunately, we can't have armors that immediately start losing health. It's set up such that regen does not occur in the edge cases of 100% armor and 0% armor. Otherwise, that's pretty cool.
That reminds me, what would kinda fix regen with low health is just making it work at 0% armor, even if you lose all plates it can still fix itself. You'd off set it by not giving it a high regen rate. It would be more friendly to new players too.
That's an interesting dynamic too and possibly better than the original idea. I mean think about it, you can drive your shiny new pykrete tank all day, but the second someone takes a potshot at you, your armor starts melting off, the only way to stop it is to get your armor fully repaired again.
Bio pounds out like 10hp/s, so it's sort of an extreme. I'd expect that a balanced armor of that kind would lose hp at a rate an order of magnitude smaller. But who knows? It's not like we've ever tested that stuff, so it's a blind guess no matter what.
im sorry but its a stupid idea. armor constantly losing health from start/as soon as it gets hit? i mean cmon seriously, creativity is good and all, let your thoughts roam freely, but its taking a turn down the absurd lane. why in the world would i want to put something like that on my tank? why in the world would i research something that inevitably leads to more people losing tanks then they already do?
What I'm not sure about is where would it fit with the other stuff? Reactive and reflective both take a good beating, so there isn't much use for a high hp armor. Unless you also want to make it lighter too, like 12 weight or something. High hp that's light but can't stay in extended engagements, something like a armor used to quickly take out or breach something. A short encounter of sort right? That might work, but what's the biio damage gonna be? I think something along the lines of 80 hp, 12 weight, and a damage of 2 a sec would be decent. You'd lose about a plate every 40 secs. Though I can't think of how fast engy repairs armor. Might be better to go with 60hp and 1hp damage a sec. This is what the current scripts are, I'd suggest something a bit more if you used old values. It's an idea that has potential, but it's in line with coolant and fission before it got fixed. Can be really useful in the right hands and certain situations, but ultimately you are just gonna grief the team because people don't know how to effectively use it. Also doesn't help you need to be engy to use it.
It should be more sturdy at first, so that it can take burst damage well, but would peter off if the fight went on for too long. I see its potential but I'm not sure about balancing or using it effectively.
Yeah, it's definitely one of those things that a com can regret getting. I feel like the problem with coolant and fission is that they cannibalized existing engines, thereby reducing commander choice - or worse - misleading a commander into thinking he's getting something else.
I was thinking the loss of armor from melting would be more subtle than that -- 0.01 hp per second? Maybe scratch that effect entirely. It's the damage from heat that'd be important.
Then whats the point? If you are kinda going on the thought of heat to target, there really isn't many weapons that use it. If you are talking about adding in more weapons that do a specific heat type damage, then you have to balance around the current weapons and make sure it not only makes other weapons useless but also useful and most importantly, fun to use. Not just that, but where does it fit in with the rest of the armors? We already have a simple high hp armor, there isn't much reason to get one that can kinda suck against specific weapons. If you change it so this is better than reactive, either lower weight or more hp, then why would people get reactive? Another case of making sure the other armors aren't useless while making this new addition worthwhile. There is 2 ideas I can give. Make reactive like this, have a weakness, which it did to rpgs and stickys before. I don't think it's really worthwhile to do that though. The other is actually add this on as a late game armor for heavy tanks, something like how compo was where it was either more expensive or had a longer research time, maybe both. It can be just as strong as reactive but the weight is only 12 or something, so you have super strong heavies that suck against plasma or whatever. Honestly, not that big of a fan of this one either. Compo heavies were some of the biggest annoying things and having a straight up hp bonus which is the simplest thing an armor aspect can be would make this a tad worse then those old compo heavies.
I was gonna say it would be interesting to have an armour that would convert incoming damage to like DoT. But I was afraid someone might like that and spas out we'd have a spastic armour.
What's the point? You're just delaying damage that you'll get eventually. Yeah, you get to temporarily "float" some damage, but it'll eventually kill you unless you have an engineer sitting there repairing the DoT. It doesn't sound very intuitive or fun to me.