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Hello TL!
I've played RTS games a very long time. And one of the things I always found to be the most confusing is the armour of the units.
When I was a kid it was easy to understand that a unit had a certain number of hit points and dealt a certain damage with its attacks. But I could never really understand how armor played a role in the damage calculations. And I never quite got why it was even there in the first place.
I mean in Starcraft you have small and big units, and they allready affect how much damage an attack does to a target. If a unit is supposed to have heavy armour why not just increase its hitpoints?
When upgrading armour why not just add extra hitpoints to all units?
I'm not asking because I want to remove armor from the game, I'm just very curious about what that mechanic brings to the table that improves the gameplay.
So in short. How does armor in an RTS make the game more fun?
Any thoughts on this?
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Well, for one:
Armored units would be relatively good vs units that do fast low-damage attacks, because the armor would be applied to each attack. The armor would be far less effective against slow high-damage attacks, since the armor would be applied fewer times.
In numbers:
+ Show Spoiler +
When a zergling attacks a roach, the +1 armor of the roach is applied to each swipe of the zergling, reducing its damage to 4 from 5, a whopping 20%. Without the armor, the roach would have died after 29 attacks, but because of the armor it's still alive after 29 attacks with 30 hp or so left. So in this scenario the armor results in an extra 30 hp.
When a Siege Tank attacks a roach, the +1 armor of the roach is applied to each shot of the tank, reducing its damage to 24 from 25, a pityful 4%. Without the armor, the roach would have died in 6 shots, but because of the armor it's still alive after 6 shots with 1 HP left. So in this scenario the armor results in 1 extra hp.
So adding armor to RTSs -among other things- makes units better in certain contexts but worse in other contexts (whereas adding HP would make units better in every context). So armor in RTS requires the players to make unit composition choices, and that makes for the S in RTS.
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Armour creates some very different scaling dynamics to just attack and health. It allows, for example, marines and zerglings to be very good damage dealers overall for their cost without invalidating tanky units like ultralisks.
The same is true of upgrades, the armour upgrades affect unit interactions differently to attack upgrades, creating additional timings and interactions, in a non-contrived way. A good example of this is mutalisks in ZvZ. As a mutalisk player, and I am rewarded heavily for good scouting of my opponent's tech, because armour is much better in mutalisk vs mutalisk than attack, but against hydras, spores and infestors if I am going ling bane muta I'm better off going attack or investing the gas elsewhere entirely.
So it helps make endgame tech relevant, stops fast-firing early game units from totally dominating all game long (marines especially force the armour system to a degree) and gives another tactical choice that a better player can get edges with over an inferior opponent. As a mostly Zerg player, there are numerous games I've won / come back in etc almost entirely by choosing a timing that relies heavily on ground, air or ultralisk armour against an opponent whose tech or build left them weak to that.
It also nicely augments playstyles with regeneration, so mutas, burrow roaches, bio by allowing you a slightly better chance of saving a unit / getting more effective HP out of it.
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United States12240 Posts
On June 24 2017 03:18 KungKras wrote:
Hello TL!
I've played RTS games a very long time. And one of the things I always found to be the most confusing is the armour of the units.
When I was a kid it was easy to understand that a unit had a certain number of hit points and dealt a certain damage with its attacks. But I could never really understand how armor played a role in the damage calculations. And I never quite got why it was even there in the first place.
I mean in Starcraft you have small and big units, and they allready affect how much damage an attack does to a target. If a unit is supposed to have heavy armour why not just increase its hitpoints?
When upgrading armour why not just add extra hitpoints to all units?
I'm not asking because I want to remove armor from the game, I'm just very curious about what that mechanic brings to the table that improves the gameplay.
So in short. How does armor in an RTS make the game more fun?
Any thoughts on this?
It depends on the RTS game you're talking about. In Starcraft (and SC2), 1 armor means 1 flat physical damage reduction per instance. In War3 (or Dota), n armor provides 0.06n / (1 + 0.06n) physical damage reduction. The former is strong against high rates of fire but weak against big damage instances. The latter is more balanced against both, but harder for players to grasp at a glance.
Let's say you have 1 Siege Tank shooting 1 Marine in BW. The Siege Tank does 70 / 2 = 35 damage to the Marine, and the Marine has 40 HP. If the Marine stims, he can be one-shot by the Tank (35 damage vs 30 HP). If the Marine has 1 armor, 2 armor, 3 armor, it still dies (34.5 damage, 34 damage, 33.5 damage). It can never survive in this scenario. However, if armor upgrades gave +% health instead, say 10% per upgrade, then the Marine would have (30, 34, 38, 42) health after stimming, and would survive starting at +2.
Now let's look at 1 Marine shooting 1 Zergling. It takes 6 shots to kill a Zergling at 6 damage each. At +3 armor, it takes 12 shots. If the Zergling had more health instead, it would need double the health to be as valuable against a Marine as 3 damage reduction. Zerg have health regeneration too which makes damage reduction more valuable than a flat health increase.
It's another tuning lever for balance.
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I'm going to chip in too.
As you said, there is hitpoints and damage. And you wonder how armour comes into play.
Another thing that there is, which you missed, is time. Some units deal many small bursts of damage, others deal slow but big bursts. So even though their damage-per-second (DPS) is the same, they deal it in a different intensity.
This is where armour comes into play. If there was no armour, then the difference between fast-low-damage and slow-high-damage (with equal DPS) would be nil.
But with armour (as it works in sc broodwar), it lowers the damage of each burst with a fixed amount. So fast-low-damage dealers are in disadavantage against armoured units.
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To add to what has already been said, in other games such as Age of Empires, different units have different kinds of armor. Cavalry are weak against Pikemen, who are weak against Archers, or something like that. This difference is created mostly because of armor classes. In BW this is handled through attack types and unit sizes.
Let's not forget that different armor classes means different upgrades for each type of unit - in BW this is ground armor vs. air armor, meaning there has to be some sort of commitment to a certain unit type, which is a strategic point in itself. Same applies to attack.
In summary, it adds depth to RTS, which in turn makes it more fun to learn and master. GG close thread.
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On June 24 2017 04:56 Excalibur_Z wrote:
It depends on the RTS game you're talking about. In Starcraft (and SC2), 1 armor means 1 flat physical damage reduction per instance. In War3 (or Dota), n armor provides 0.06n / (1 + 0.06n) physical damage reduction. The former is strong against high rates of fire but weak against big damage instances. The latter is more balanced against both, but harder for players to grasp at a glance.
War3's armor formula doesn't really change how different types of attacking units interact with a unit's EHP. However, it *does* affect how much relative damage units take between physical attacks and magical attacks, since spell damage does not interact with armor. A low HP high armor unit will be relatively durable to normal attacks, but vulnerable to damage spells, while a unit with high HP and low armor might have similar EHP against normal attacks, but be much less vulnerable to spells.
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United States12240 Posts
I didn't want to water down the messaging by introducing damage types that don't interact with armor (that's why I limited it to physical damage reduction), but yes. =)
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A lot of interesting answers. I can totally see how it gives more design freedom when balancing the game.
The warcraft 3 formula seems to asympthotically move towards 100% but never reach it. I guess it isn't used to distinguish many small attacks from a few big like in SC. Maybe the different armour and damage types fill that role in WC.
Cool stuff 
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On June 24 2017 07:39 Excalibur_Z wrote:
I didn't want to water down the messaging by introducing damage types that don't interact with armor (that's why I limited it to physical damage reduction), but yes. =)
If there's one thing I know, it's that Yango just knows stuff.
Like if you ask him what he thinks the future meta of StarCraft: Brood War will be, he'll probably correctly guess it.
EDIT: But I guess to at least try and attempt to bring something to the conversation, like everyone said, armour is just another variable you can use to fine tune the balancing.
In most of the games I've played, I thinks some people think that armor is synonymous with hit points, but having the two be separate often yields different and interesting interactions.
And then you have systems like Dungeons and Dragons, where having an armour class completely changes how the game is played, how you build your character, etc.
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Armor adds complexity and depth by adding a new stat to the equation outside of Health and Damage just like Attack Speed gives some nuance and depth to Unit Damage output, while also giving more tools for players. And for developers, more options to toggle and tweak gives a bigger game-design-pool to swim in creatively and gives more options for balancing games. To me: "SC With Armor" is to Chess as "SC Without Armor" is to Checkers.
Basic, Piercing, Magical damage types, or Light, Normal, Heavy armor types give more complexity. With all of those in War3 or SC it takes it another step further to make it more like Stratego or Risk compared to Chess.
And just to go off of D&D real quick, it's really cool to look at other Pen and Paper RPGs like King Arthur Pendragon and see how they do things like Armor and Hit Chance and how it changes combat and how players actually play the game.
Edit: Complexity, to a degree depending on the people, adds fun. Simple things are not usually the most fun things. Interactive and complex things often are. People like experiencing and learning new things and interacting with those things, it's fun, and some amount of depth will keep people learning and experiencing something over time instead of all at once, which is a win-win for players and developers.
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