So perhaps buildings should get 'fortified armor' and all units should do 2/3 of their attack or something. Or armored bonuses just ignored and only things doing bonus/alternate damage to structures are units that say so (like blings or ultras).

This. All units should deal base damage only when attacking buildings unless they have a special attack that targets buildings (pretty much what Charlie said).

milly9

Canada325 Posts

April 07 2010 11:13 GMT

#22

On April 07 2010 20:04 lolaloc wrote:

Show nested quote +

This. All units should deal base damage only when attacking buildings unless they have a special attack that targets buildings (pretty much what Charlie said).

I kind of agree but the game would have to be completely re-balanced. Having immortals do almost nothing to buildings wouldn't really make sense. They have less DPS than stalkers without their bonus.

Rabiator

Germany3948 Posts

April 07 2010 11:21 GMT

#23

I think some people here are confusing ARMOR type with UNIT type.

Armor types are light, armored and massive; Units have other types (biological, mechanical, psionic, ...) too to describe their vulnerabilities to certain attacks, repairability and so on.

I can understand the OP, because for me one of the things which make certain units (Marauders for example) seem a bit overpowered is their ability to demolish buildings too fast. Tier 1 units should require a lot of units to accomplish that. While I can agree with a "structural" armor type I am not so sure about giving Tanks and Thors anything of the kind. These two units fall relatively fast, but that is due to a purely game-mechanical reason: Attacking units cluster up a lot more than in Brood War, thus the "damage per attack space" is much higher and this results in faster damage to these units. It has nothing to do with certain units having a bonus vs. armored.

If more people see the "damage per attack space" as a problem too, I can only come up with one solution: Lower the dps on ALL units by the same amount. Adding yet more stats (armor types) would complicate things too much IMO.

BluzMan

Russian Federation4235 Posts

April 07 2010 11:22 GMT

#24

You kinda have to rethink the whole thing, because SC2 doesn't have armor types.

Instead, it has unit property flags. While you cannot be BOTH Light and Heavy in SC1, in SC2 technically, nothing prevents you from being, say, both Light and Biological, and take increased damage from units who have bonuses vs either.

Armor/weapon types mean there's a matrix somewhere that regulates how much damage a weapon deals vs said armor type. That's final. SC2, instead, has a flat structure of flags that is unique for each unit. Once again, there are no armor types because flags are not exclusive (I suppose you can make a unit that is both Light and Armored, if you wish), and there are no weapon types because each unit has it's own fixed damage bonus (not percentile-based).

If anything, that's a lot more data to memorize than a Weapon/Armor matrix in WC3, and is in fact harder to get a grasp on. I'm still not sure if I like it. For what I'm certain, it's nowhere near the elegancy of SC, where global principles rule local unit relation. However, if local rules global, there's more flexibility. You can make unit A do more damage to a unit flagged with B without touching any other unit.

emikochan

United Kingdom232 Posts

April 07 2010 11:48 GMT

#25

This. All units should deal base damage only when attacking buildings unless they have a special attack that targets buildings (pretty much what Charlie said).

Removing armoured from buildings would make all non-special attacksdo base damage. Problem solved. Shjould at least be done on static D.

imo:
Zerg : Biological + Structure
Terran : Mechanical + Structure
Protoss : Psionic + Structure (at least on pylons / nexus)

Just seems like having the armoured tag is more a liability than implying any increased toughness...Each race does have ways of increasing building toughness but they're all quite expensive (Transfusion / Armour Research + SCV coming off gathering to repair / P Shield upgrades)
Maybe these methods should be reduced in cost somewhat to make a softer way of fixing the problem of fast base death.

Just an aside, I think infesters and ghosts should get their default attack giving a bonus against psionic (or energydrain), makes sense really (and slightly offsetting the awesomeness of feedback)

Plexa

Aotearoa39261 Posts

April 07 2010 12:19 GMT

#26

I fail to see what is wrong with the status quo. Why bother changing anything is there is not a problem?

BlasiuS

United States2405 Posts

April 07 2010 14:26 GMT

#27

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the armor system in SC2.

RoarMan

Canada745 Posts

April 07 2010 14:33 GMT

#28

On April 07 2010 21:19 Plexa wrote:
I fail to see what is wrong with the status quo. Why bother changing anything is there is not a problem?

Agreed. What people should be paying attention is yomi's post (Sorry if anyone else has touched base on this topic in thread.)

On April 07 2010 05:39 yomi wrote:
A third armor type might be a good idea. I think the real problem with the implementation of bonus damage is that many of the units are taking it too far and it begins to feel artificial and force extreme hard counters. In BW the maximum bonus or penalty was 50% damage. Now we are seeing units do more than double their normal damage to certain armor types. Helion, Baneling, Immortal, are some of the units that come to mind right away.

spinesheath

Germany8679 Posts

April 07 2010 14:41 GMT

#29

In response to above post:

Concussive damage only deals 25% damage to large units in BW. That's obviously a 75% penalty. The only unit where it really mattered was the Vulture though, and it had spider mines with explosive damage to deal with large units.
Banelings are 20+15 now, not 15+20 as they were before. So they deal less than double damage.
It's not as big of a change towards hard counters as you make it seem.

HydroZ

United States34 Posts

April 07 2010 16:59 GMT

#30

On April 07 2010 21:19 Plexa wrote:
I fail to see what is wrong with the status quo. Why bother changing anything is there is not a problem?

x2. I would like to see more explication from the OP than the "armor system is blatantly poorly thought out" assertion.

Edit: Although this wasn't mentioned in OP, I do agree with many of the replies above that the damage against buildings makes for game-changing play that seems too easy to pull off. E.g., four Void Rays focused on a main takes the main down in ~8 seconds.

btlyger

United States470 Posts

April 07 2010 17:01 GMT

#31

I agree that structures should have a different armor type because those anti-armor'd units (immortals/marauders) are just way too good against them.

However, as for a "siege" armor they already have Bonus damage vs. Massive, and I don't think anything else needs changed in that regard.

spinesheath

Germany8679 Posts

April 07 2010 17:18 GMT

#32

On April 07 2010 20:21 Rabiator wrote:
I think some people here are confusing ARMOR type with UNIT type.

Armor types are light, armored and massive; Units have other types (biological, mechanical, psionic, ...) too to describe their vulnerabilities to certain attacks, repairability and so on.

So both armor types and unit types describe the vulnerabilites of a unit right? Then how are they different?

If you want a subset of unit types that is called armor types then that would be none, light and armored because Blizzard seems to give each unit exactly one of those three. But you'll run into exceptions everywhere and there is no reason anyways to make a difference between, for example, armored and biological. I guess the SC2 engine would even allow a "light - armored" unit.