Shields and Armor MoO3 vs. MoO2

[Kohr-Ah]

I have yet to see any post on here give a definitive explaination of how shields and armor work in MoO3, especially the deflection/disspation aspect of armor.

In MoO2 shields functioned by subtracting their class level from the amount of damage each weapon did and then applying that damage to the shield points with any leftover damage going to the armor (e.g. a Class X shield would subtract 10 damage from a 40 damage Disruptor and thus apply 30 damage to the Shields with none left over to affect Armor). This meant if a weapon didn't do enough damage (say a Mass Driver), it wouldn't do any damage to the Shield (or Ship if the Shield strength were down to zero from other weapons).

In MoO3 we're told that Shields absorb a percentage of damage with the leftover going to hit the Armor. Well there are a few ways to interpret this (I'm going to use Large Class X shields, Ultra-heavy Adamantium Armor, Megabolt cannons, and Lasers for the examples).

The first way to interpret this is that say for a ~350 damage Megabolt Cannon vs. the Class X shield (~80% absorbtion, 7700 strength) roughly 280 damage is absorbed by the Shields (the Shield strength) and 70 damage gets through to the Armor. In this interpretation, once Shield strength is down to zero, you don't get the 80% absorbtion anymore and all damage goes to the Armor.

The second way to interpret it is to assume that 280 damage is absorbed completely and that the remaining 70 damage is then used to bring the Shield strength down with none going to the Armor. In this case, even when the Shield strength is zero you're still absorbing 80% of the incoming damage. I'm leaning to this since in many combats I see only blue (shield damge) being done meaning none is getting through to the Armor (yellow) or Hull (red). This also fits into the MoO2 way that Shields worked.

Regarding Armor, I've seen two explanations from posters about the meaning of the deflection value.

The first is that for a given value (ultra-heavy Adamantium d-value ~32) if the weapon doesn't do a minimum of that damage (affected by range) then no damage is done to the Armor, but if it does exceed that value then full damage is done - that is the d-value isn't subtracted from the total damage. In this case a Laser would do no damage in either Shield case, but the preceding Megabolt cannon would do 350 damage based on Shield case 1 (with Shield down completely) or 70 damage based on Shield case 2.

The second is that for a given d-value, that number is subtracted from the damage getting through the Shields. In this case, Lasers still wouldn't do any damage, but a Megabolt cannon would do 318 damage or 38 damage again depending on the shield case. I'm leaning towards this interpretation because it too fits with the way MoO2 worked (as far as shield class was concerned).

This speculation is all well and good based on anecdotal observations, but does anyone know for sure how they really work? Is there anything in the mod-able files that explains it? In both instances I think the second case makes more sense, but that doesn't make them right.


If this is the second post in a row it's because of the screwy registration problem with multiple windows for this board.

[visage]

I've been testing this this afternoon, and should have my numbers crunched later on this evening and will make a post on the subject then...

...now only if I could get good data for ECM/ECCM/Cloak/Detection. *sigh*

[velkoris]

Shields split the damage between shield and armor in the listed percentage, until the shield is depleted upon which it all goes to armor.

What might be confusing you is that for any strike it will only show one type of damage - blue if it only damaged the shields, yellow if it damaged armor and/or shields, and red if it damages internals, armor and/or shields.

Armor deflection is a threshhold - if the attack does less than the threshold value it is deflected, if it does more than the threshold value it does full damage to armor.

A couple of examples :

A frigate with a damper field and ultra heavy armor is hit by a PD nuke ( 28 damage ). 21 damage is done to the damper field, 7 passes through, but is deflected by the armor. A *blue* 21 appears over the ship.

A frigate with a damper field and very light armor is hit by a PD nuke. 21 is done to the field, 7 passes through, but is more than the deflection threshold so it applied to the armor. A *yellow* 7 appears over the ship.

A frigate with a damper field and no armor is hit by a PD nuke. 21 is done to the field, 7 passes through and hits internals. A *red* 7 appears over the ship.

[Kohr-Ah]

Originally posted by velkoris
Shields split the damage between shield and armor in the listed percentage, until the shield is depleted upon which it all goes to armor.

What might be confusing you is that for any strike it will only show one type of damage - blue if it only damaged the shields, yellow if it damaged armor and/or shields, and red if it damages internals, armor and/or shields.

Armor deflection is a threshhold - if the attack does less than the threshold value it is deflected, if it does more than the threshold value it does full damage to armor.

A couple of examples :

A frigate with a damper field and ultra heavy armor is hit by a PD nuke ( 28 damage ). 21 damage is done to the damper field, 7 passes through, but is deflected by the armor. A *blue* 21 appears over the ship.

A frigate with a damper field and very light armor is hit by a PD nuke. 21 is done to the field, 7 passes through, but is more than the deflection threshold so it applied to the armor. A *yellow* 7 appears over the ship.

A frigate with a damper field and no armor is hit by a PD nuke. 21 is done to the field, 7 passes through and hits internals. A *red* 7 appears over the ship.

Ok, I've already seen this said before so what I want to know is where did you get this information, or how did you come up with it yourself. I'd like someone to come up with the hard numbers or else the equations the game actually uses. You're basically saying the first cases I laid out for both Shields and Armor are used. One problem with this interpretation is that fact that nearly every weapon does more than the deflection value of even Ultra-heavy Adamantium Armor (~32 I think) even taking into consideration range modifiers, so Armor deflection seems almost useless.

Only hard numbers will solve this (or else a dev could simply come in here and tell us).

[visage]

Originally posted by Kohr-Ah
Ok, I've already seen this said before so what I want to know is where did you get this information, or how did you come up with it yourself. I'd like someone to come up with the hard numbers or else the equations the game actually uses. You're basically saying the first cases I laid out for both Shields and Armor are used. One problem with this interpretation is that fact that nearly every weapon does more than the deflection value of even Ultra-heavy Adamantium Armor (~32 I think) even taking into consideration range modifiers, so Armor deflection seems almost useless.

Only hard numbers will solve this (or else a dev could simply come in here and tell us).

I've been testing the damage mechanisc fairly thoroughly, and his assertions are correct.

When I make my big post with a bunch of stuff, I'll post my methodology, but trust me, that's the way things work. Deflection is usually fairly useles, but combined with shield absorbtion it can screw over fighters pretty badly.

Ever watched a NO fleet soak tens of thousands of damage a second for eight minutes, doing not a single point of damage to armor or internals in the process? I have...

[velkoris]

I have been running a lot of controlled tests to see if I can determine what is causing the PD bug, to see what the best kind of PD layout is when it actually does work, how ECM/ECCM/Cloak/Scanners interact etc etc.

The example I have given you above is something I actually did in the game - playing two races at once to create confrontations between ships of my choosing.

Ultra Heavy Adamantium has a threshold of 36. This seems feeble compared to the damage done by weapons of the same research level, but there are several other factors to consider.

With a damper field, attacks that do up to 144 damage will still remain under the threshold, which makes the ship impervious to attacks by the vast majority of fighters. You can see this for yourself by using fighters to attack the orbitals in the orion system.

One other thing you may not be aware of is that energy weapons do not do a fixed amount of damage, but have quite a wide variance depending on their range from their target. At maximum range they do far far less than the listed damage in their description.

For example, a standard mount tachyon beam will do 231 damage at point blank range (4,500), but only 27 damage at max range (20,000). ( Solid projectile weapons like mass driver, railgun and dark matter projector are not diminished by range, but their chance of hitting is )

[visage]

Originally posted by velkoris
I have been running a lot of controlled tests to see if I can determine what is causing the PD bug, to see what the best kind of PD layout is when it actually does work, how ECM/ECCM/Cloak/Scanners interact etc etc.

Heh. This is exactly what I've been doing.

I've given up completely on figuring out how visual detection is done... I've spent too much time pursuing it and I'm now off doing more productive things... like finding out that multifire and armor piercing seem to do nothing. =) (at least, multifire from PD doesn't do anything; I still need to check multifire from Autofire)

Have you made any progress on visual detection?

If you've got good data on ECCM and ECM etc and to-hit ratios, I'd love to see it and save myself the effort of generating it tomorrow. Since punting on visual detection, I've been focusing on armor, shields, and HPs myself.

You comment on how beam weapons have damage dropoff... notice that the "improved" versions aren't nearly as improved as they claim to be, as they only increase damage at maxrange by 10%.

[velkoris]

Visual detection fails completely to respond with any degree of consistency.

To my great aggravation, a ship equipped with the ultimate detector system and 10 ECCM V's regularly loses sight of ships at range 5000 that do not have *any* type of cloaking or ecm. What annoys me more is that the ships with no scanners or ECCM don't seem to have much of a difference in how long the ship stays detected for.

Nothing I have done with fiddling has actually even given me any solid impressions at all - I don't want to sit there with a stopwatch timing how long ships are visible at a given range if I can avoid it, but I have yet to find a situation where one of my test ship always sees his opponent.

I think I am going to try making detectors, ecms and eccms take 1 space unit and put 1000 of them on a ship to see if that makes any difference.

[visage]

Originally posted by velkoris
Visual detection fails completely to respond with any degree of consistency.

To my great aggravation, a ship equipped with the ultimate detector system and 10 ECCM V's regularly loses sight of ships at range 5000 that do not have *any* type of cloaking or ecm. What annoys me more is that the ships with no scanners or ECCM don't seem to have much of a difference in how long the ship stays detected for.

Nothing I have done with fiddling has actually even given me any solid impressions at all - I don't want to sit there with a stopwatch timing how long ships are visible at a given range if I can avoid it, but I have yet to find a situation where one of my test ship always sees his opponent.

I think I am going to try making detectors, ecms and eccms take 1 space unit and put 1000 of them on a ship to see if that makes any difference.

This is essentially what I've found, as well. My testrig game has mkI detection and ECCM listed in the spreadsheets as 100x normal effectiveness and costing on ly 1 space and 3 AU. Putting 83 of those on a ship was indistinguishable for me from nothing was indistinguishable from 9 MkIII's.

The only thing I've seen which might be a break into understanding visual detection is that I've seen a repeated effect of "ship goes invisible and stays that way for 5+ minutes while I'm right on top of it." This was when I was trying to test armor and had a 'skeet' with no drives or electronics or weapons sitting around for a ship with 40 modded PD mass drivers to fire at. I don't know if it was the short range of the weapons on the firing ship or what, but this could conceivably hold the key to unravelling what's going on. (But like I said, I'm not going down that path any further.)

[Panzergrenadier]

Great works guys at least i know how the damper field works and why i never saw any blu numbers.
Is it correct that it reflects or stop 75% of the incoming damage and the rest is coming throug if the armor cant stop reflect the rest then there are yellow numbers and if the armor is passed it damaged the structure or the internals and so red numbers ar showing on the screen.

[jojobird]

Now here comes the funny part... In all my games, I have NEVER seen a yellow number EVER.
Why? (I have the patch, playing solo, not multiplayer.)

[Ron_Lugge]

Originally posted by jojobird
Now here comes the funny part... In all my games, I have NEVER seen a yellow number EVER.
Why? (I have the patch, playing solo, not multiplayer.)

Bad luck?