DESIGN: Armor and HP's

[MrBaggins]

As has been mentioned, Armor is effectively a hit point value, and HP's have been standardized at 10. Armor basically divides damage... effectively multiplying the standard HP value.

There is really no purpose to having 2 values for what is the same thing.

We've got a few choices

• Leave it as it is. No downside... but no upside either
• Ignore/remove Armor, use HP for unit hit values. We have finer control over how much damage a unit can take... in 10'ths of the current system
• Use HP for unit hit values and make Armor a useful property. Again.. finer control over how much damage a unit can take... and allows for differences in damage resistance beyond HP's and Defense.

I'd suggest that Armor be used for "immunity"... that is Attack values *LOWER* (modified? unmodified? thoughts?) than the Armor value are ignored and cause 0 damage.

Thus Spearmen can NEVER hurt Tanks... unless their attack value is modified to be above the Armor value of the Tanks (that is... if we go the modified route.)

We'd probably need and want very few units to have immunity, if at all... but it would probably be a very useful property... particularly for scenarios.

[tyrantpimp]

That makes sense to me it could open up some possibilities. Perhaps armor options could be decided in the build que that way you could have heavily armored units which would have penalties eg: moving slower and more expensive but would be harder to kill and light armored tanks which would be faster and cheaper but easier to kill

I think this is a very realistic approach

[Maquiladora]

HP's are for HPs. Ignore (remove) Armor value.

Maybe they were forced by the lawyers to put Armour in and hide hit points, "HP" being very civ, but theres no need for armour now.

[Pedrunn]

remove hitpoints I am serious.The name/idea of Armour makes more sense.

[MrBaggins]

I think that the name issue is spurious.

Firstly, Firaxis/Sid certainly doesn't own the idea or trademark of "hitpoints", or even units on a map having hitpoints.

CTP and its mod makers have made many enhancements to the Civ concept, which have shown up subsequently in Civ3... like Empire based support, abstract trade and unit upgrading, for example. CTP is always going to have a substantially different look and feel, unless we duplicate most of the concepts... units, techs and wonders, for example. There, however, is plenty of scope to make a historically meaningful game, without infringing.

As for Armor being a better name... maybe... but since its a nebulous, abstract concept, I really don't mind the name "Hitpoints". The way Armor has been implemented either is meaningless, or unflexible, however.

I personally very much like the idea of introducing the concept of some small degree of immunity... very obsolete attacks should be futile against very high tech units...

The benefit to this is that differences in A/D don't have to be so massive between multiple age differences... you just make values below a threshold ineffective.

[MrBaggins]

For example...

Tank facing an army composed of Modern Infantry, supported by 6 ancient archers.

In the current game, the archers would do some small amount of damage to the tank... in reality, no amount of arrows (or any human powered weapon) would damage the tank...

[Maquiladora]

I think that the name issue is spurious.

Didnt Activision have to rename the "Temple" to Shrine and "Phalanx" to Hoplite for CtP2? I know they definately had to change the difficulty names, Deity to "Impossible" etc.... which i would like to see return BTW.

Perhaps some kind of "threshold" could be used for a new kind of Armour rating as you mentioned Baggins, but id prefer the keep things simple. I dont have a problem with an Archer damaging a Tank extremely small amounts.

[MrBaggins]

Sure... but as many and more improvements and units had precisely the same names...

The big difference was in Wonders... Activision changed many, if not most. Interestingly Firaxis copied "The Internet" Wonder basically down to the effect, for Civ3, from CTP/2 (cos it certainly wasn't in Civ2.)

I think the look and feel thing is a lot more complicated that just a name, where there is no trademark for it. I don't think we have any issue at all with "HP".

As for the Armor issue... I'm not sure how it will turn out in play. All I know for certain... is that some people are driven nuts by the Spearman/Tank issue (although admittedly less so in CTP, since its been masked by combined arms, largely.)

If people want to use the threshold... for their play.. its a really simple change. Obviously scenario designers may wish to use it too.

[MrBaggins]

dp

[tyrantpimp]

Well to be fair if ugrading units is going to be written into the code there wont be many instances of archers fighting tanks it could be a moot point.

[Maquiladora]

Yeah but itll always be an option not to use the unit updater, and sometimes i might not update my ancient lookout archers, for unit support reasons.

[tyrantpimp]

Well if those are our options then the archers shouldnt stand a chance against the tanks

[Maquiladora]

Archers already dont stand a chance against the Tanks, the chance is small enough now IMO.

[MrBaggins]

I wanted to set up a test. 6 Tanks & 6 Archers on 6 Tanks. I hypothesized that the archers would consistantly unbalance the battle. I think I found a bug... aka odd design decision, in setting up the situation, however.

If you attack with a group of 6 Tanks and 6 archers on that group of 6 Tanks, then the sort will place 4 of the archers on the front line... for some innane reason.

I'll start a thread about it.

[child of Thor]

I voted for the wrong thing - i meant the first option.
I think having two values is a good and useful thing, it can be used to help with the spearman verses tank type situ. The values can certainly do with tweaking i guess to help in this.

As for the wierd archer in the frontline thing, i've seen it and been annoyed by it many times.