Weapons and Armor in Planetfall

[Anon Zytose]

There's been some discussion over how these might be best modeled in Planetfall, particularlyin my tech tree thread. If there's enough demand for the rest of the conversation, I'll copy it here. For now, here's the last bits of it so far.

Suppose we have a situation where the attacking party has a powerful weapon and good armor, and the defending party only has a weapon of strength one, but a defense of many multiples of the strength of the attacking party. Is it possible for us to have something which simply renders the attack unsuccessful? (the attacking party simply retreats)

Because that was one thing that never made sense in SMAC--when I attacked with a gravship with a stasis field and singularity laser, it shouldn't be possible for me to be killed by someone with a strength 1 gun and stasis field armor.

I'm not sure how we should go about this--if we only have the armors go for the defending party, then any attack in Planetfall is likely to end in failure. Unless we somehow make it prohibitively expensive to have a high armor value and a high weapon value--but I'm not sure that is possible with our current mechanics. And if we have the defense be an added value or a multiplier, then armor is simply acting like a new weapon, and there isn't any point in putting it in the game at all.

Perhaps if we could have a defense strength from the armor which only is used when defending, and an attacking strength which is only from the weapon when attacking? In effect this would be simulating SMAC's system within CIV IV's "simplified" system.

Otherwise we could simply state that weapons have become so powerful that mobility is much more valuable than armor, (such as how muskets made suits of armor obsolete), and that there is almost no point in wearing it if your enemy has a tachyon gun.

Also, this should probably be put in its own thread I suppose. It is probably an issue which needs a good bit of discussion.

It would be an interesting feature where if the defenses of both units were significantly greater than each others' weapons, then the battle would end in a draw (perhaps with both units injured) and either the units will have to try again or other units would be needed to enter the field.

Under my proposed model, even if a battle shoved always shoved its way until one unit died, an attacker with full hit points and the best weapons and armor shouldn't lose against a defender with really poor weaponry. Sure, if the defender had the best armor, it'll take some time for the attacker to slice through. But it'd take a whole lot more time for the poorly armed defender to slice back at the attacker.

We're going to have problems if one side relies on both while the other relies on just one. I never suggested that, though. o.O

Yeah, I admit that weapons and armor act in very similar manners in my proposal.

As for units using armor purely when defending and weapons purely when attacking, I didn't see it as all that realistic. It's not like a defender would kill an attacker with its armor. (Well, maybe it could with shields that warp space-time or reflect stuff right back at the attacker.) Of course, I now have come up with an idea of giving the attacker in a battle a first strike or two against a defender, in which case it's just the attacker's weapons trying to penetrate the defender's armor. Weapons might also have the advantage in which their heavy bombardment counterparts would be faster at dismantling city defenses.

As a closing statement, the general thought is that if two factions at war aren't at vastly different levels of technology, then each sides' best armor should make some difference against each others' best weapons, just as each sides' best weapons should make some difference against each others' best armor.