IDEA - Partial armor points

It works like this: 1 armor is 1 armor, but 1.5 armor is 1 armor + a 50% chance to block 1 additional point of damage.

The first time I saw something like this was the “Will to Survive” perk in XCOM: Enemy Within - Long War mod. That perk gave you “1.5 damage reduction” if your soldier was in cover and attacked through that cover. Thus, your soldier would always have damage reduced by at least 1, but a coin flip could bump that up to 2.

In Phoenix Point, this could work for armor. If an enemy has 2.5 armor on a part, and you have 3 damage per shot, you would essentially have a 50% chance each shot to do 1 damage. So do you take the gamble, or wait?

This might just be an overcomplication of the current system, of course. But I wanted to present the idea, just in case you guys thought it was worth going over.

Interesting how would it work for every bullet. Will rolling random number to check that coin flip for each hit in that body part decrease performance for each burst? :slight_smile:

EDIT. But on the other hand I prefer less randomness. Rolling hit for each bullet and eventual armour shredding with specific weapons is enough for me. Wouldn’t checking half point of armour be too much?

No thanks. In FiraXCOM you either hit or miss. In PP each bullet has a chance to hit or miss. For me that’s enough RNG in regards to damage when layered with other mechanics, I don’t want another RNG layer on top of everything else. Especially one that basically makes armor more unreliable.

I think its overcomplicated :confused:

I disagree with the other posters. The amount of randomness is actually slight, assuming you roll separately for each bullet, and it helps fill in the giant space between 1 and 2 AP. The amount of computing power is trivial, and won’t effect performance, and it is very simple, conceptually. If I was going to critique the idea, I’d say it’s so obvious it doesn’t need suggesting.

I’m not so sure about that slight amount. Currently Assault Rifle does 6 to 2 armour and 12 damage to 1 armour. For me it is like making decision about shooting opponent or not.

In case of 1.5 points of armour it can vary between 6 and 12 damage with most probable 9 damage. I would often count for 9 or more damage and doing less or even 6 damage would be dissapointing. You know that people always count for the best when randomness is occuring? :wink:

And it all is assuming 100% hit chance. When your soldier have less chance but you still count that armour penetration will be in your favor and it is not, then such randomness frustrate. Our mentality works in this way and critical reasoning doesn’t help here. :slight_smile: This would be like FiraXCOM hits for full or nothing. Maybe lesser evil but still evil. :alien:

It just brings to my mind a memory, that I always preferred units in Heroes of Might and Magic series with less random damage, preferably with minimum damage equal to maximum damage. :slight_smile: So randomness is great enemy to the strategist. :wink:

Except that 1.5 armor doesn’t fill that gap. 1.5 armor is unreliably either 1 or 2 armor. It’s RNG which means that you could take a burst and each shot could only be reduced by 1. Likewise you could shoot a burst and each shot could be reduced by 2. Sure “over time” it would average out to 1.5 but it isn’t reliable and can screw you with a bad string of rolls.

If 1.5 was truly valuable then I would say it would be better to increase overall health, damage, and armor so that 0.5 increments aren’t needed.

I’m with you here, with one significant exception : the bless spell, that would guarantee that a unit would always inflict maximum damage (depending on which HoM&M, luck skills would have provided similar effects). You could really get a lot of mileage from high variance troops if you had bless/mass bless.

But then you’re not dealing with the RNG variance due to the spell or luck skills. So you’re still doing everything possible to minimize the RNG or avoiding it when you can’t. Which makes the spell more the exception.

Precisely, and considering that you can’t always get your troops blessed/lucky, there are times when you have to mitigate the impact of such randomness. Maybe you want to target a weak enemy so that even a poor damage roll will annihilate it, maybe you want to hit a very durable stack that won’t die in a turn anyway, so that a poor roll won’t force you to completely change your short term battle plans.

High variance is a royal pain when the outcome of the action is a short term binary result (target is dead, or not), and affects us a lot when dealing with regular mooks. Ironically, when shooting a queen that definitely won’t die in a single shot, it matters less if a few bullets miss since the sheer volume of fire thrown at the target is likely to balance the odds.