Penetration/Damage System

[Shaman]

A weapon penetration system is usually designed around a game engine that has the ability to define material composition like unity so I'm not sure if this would even be plausible but I'll go over my ideas about it.  This feature to the combat system would really bring a sense of realism and allow for new combat tactics.

The first part in implementing it would be to define an objects armor value. A wooden wall versus a concrete wall or a car door versus a armored door, bullet resistant armor versus advanced armor, etc.  The second part would be the penetration factor on the munitions or AP value.  You would then have the choice of ball, AP or explosive ammunition types along with the caliber size of the weapon or if it is ballistic vest energy etc.  This type of system has a lot of moving parts and calculations and is where you will get lots of critiques how the weapons and ammunition should be weighted.

It would be a great system, but I think it would detract from the basics of the game too much but I think it would make a great mod!

 

[Conductiv]

love the idea, but you need to have some suspension of disbelief with regards to penetrating laser beams etc.

now gameplay wise you could play around with it, having "special shots" by carrying mags of special munitions or draining more battery charge (when using plasma/laser tech) for shots with different damage, range and penetration statistsics.

this can be used partially, the environment affecting behavior might be more demanding. 

[Chris]

So one of the biggest problems with this sort of penetration system is how the accuracy information is displayed to the player, and I know this because for a long time in Xenonauts 1 we had "hypervelocity" weapons (largely MAG weapons) that could shoot through walls. The calculation we used was somewhat different to what is suggested above but had a similar effect.

The crux of the issue was that each object needed a fixed amount of damage to shoot through, and weapons do a randomised amount of damage (a rifle that does 40 damage could do anything from 20 to 60 damage per shot). If it takes 50 damage to punch through a wall and hit the target behind, you've only got a 25% chance of penetrating the wall based on those numbers. But if you're trying to shoot through multiple objects the calculation becomes extremely complex, extremely quickly ... and it's only one part of the "hit chance" calculation, because you've got to worry about all the accuracy modifiers too.

So it's not that hard to write code allowing weapons to punch through walls but it is really quite hard to display that information to the player in a way that they can easily understand it. Hypervelocity weapons ended up being so confusing that we just disabled that property in the final game (although I think it's easy enough to turn back on in the weapon stat files if people want to play with it).

[Ninothree]

Knowing the hit chance is a crucial bit of info, it would be hard to plan any strategy without it. But I don't see why the player should be given much data on the penetration calculation. Shooting through objects shouldn't really be the mainstay of your planning and the random element obscuring its chance of success makes a lot of sense intuitively. I'd say that penetration as a game mechanic should be something you get a feel for rather than a properly informed calculation (whereas accuracy is the opposite, as line-of-sight can be irritatingly hard to guess from the top-down perspective). Moreover, giving certain enemies a different predisposition to penetration fire would mix up the strategies you use to fight them.