I noticed the "Ship health Icon" turns different colours when you're hit in that spot. Could something be implemented to have "area effect damage?"

For example, you're flying a Warthog, and someone shoots you from behind in the two large engines. As well as your armour decreasing, since your ship was hit in the engines, wouldn't you not be able to accelarate and/or make the same top speed? This area effect damage would add more avenues to the game, imagine losing a wing, and not being able to steer correctly? or having your ship dead in space? Or losing weapons control? It'd add a new immersion, and players would have to think more about what they were doing and if they wanted to get in a fight or not.

I would like to do something like this, and have wanted to for some years. A more involved and realistic damage model has been discussed a couple of times recently, with player cap ships on the horizon and all, so it might not be too far out.

Hooray, disabling engines!

>>"Or losing weapons control?"<<

That's one thing I don't want to see happen. You should always be able to fight back.

I think that while it's a nice realistic touch, and that I loved it in games like Freespace and X-wing, there are certain parts of player-useable fightercraft that should, for playability reasons, never be damageable.

In particular, the engines. How many times were you shot in the back by bots as you were doing those Basic/Advanced combat missions as a new player (or shortly after the retail release for those of you who were there for that)? How many of you think a new player just *might* get a little huffy if they're doing precisely as they've been taught/told to do and BAM they suddenly get wasted by an Artemis or something because it landed a few hits on their engines because they were engaged with another bot?

The bots don't play by the rules that the players (sometimes) do. They don't play with "honor" or "chivalry" or "respect." They gank without hesitation. They play to win. New players may not be able to handle that.

This is not meant as a big fat "NO" stamp on the concept--I just think that this kind of feature should mostly if not completely be delegated to capships (or just large ships, period) with the ability to have multiple players in control at once.

i'd say sublight engins, jump engins, armor/hull integrity, sencores (radar), weapons, power cell, and nav-computer should all be seperat damagable systems.

loosing your engins isn't as big a deal as it's been made out to be since you can always /explode, if you don't want to limp home or lost your engins all together.

however i'd also say you shouldn't lose any ship functionality untill your armor is down to at least 50%, otherwise it could give too much advantage to the player who scores the first hit.

25% should be nice 50% is too high. you should have emergency alarms when at 50% down and subsystem power activation to let you have plenty usage of your ship untill you're down to 25%

And heh, the hud should disapear and reapear randomly (or may be chat tab and radars only)

it'd be good have an auto-systems repair similar to games like X-Wing, so if your engines are disabled, you have to wait around a couple minutes before they're fixed.

You could make things more complicated by setting repair priorities, so some systems could be repaired at a faster rate at the expense of slowing down the repair of other systems.

I am all with CrippledPidgeon on this one. I love the idea, but add an auto-repair system to fix anything eventually. No getting HP/armor back, just subsystem functionality. Also, the chat tab should never disappear... Just imagine the newbie trying to ask for help with a disappearing/reappearing chat tab!

Save this idea for capships. The combat's too great in VO to have the fun/fair part of it reduced to only the first 10% and after that one person is at a disadvantage. Now capships on the otherhand, YES!!! Having strategic locations to disable on capships, (other than turrets) an having turrets+fighters guarding those locations would yield yet more strategy, imersion, and coolness to cappy battles.

-Calder

Losing engines in VO would be devastating. I'd suggest making regular engines undamageable, but allow the turbo function to be damaged and shut down.

One thing I've always wondered about this:

If you get down to, say, 5% damage, but all of the damage is in the front quadrant, shouldn't you be able to take an equal number of hits to all the other quadrants without dying? It doesn't make much sense to have huge damage in one part of your ship, and be killed in one hit by a shot to a completely intact section of armor.

IMO, that should come waaay before damageable systems.

Well with an area damage system, you can't use percentages anyway, except for that you need percentages for each area.

Which makes a ton of sense.