Given the recent changes to hardening I thought to consider EMP mechanics which electronic hardening could protect against. It seems like we’ve just bandaged over the irrelevancy of hardening by just making its cost negligible.
For starters I figured that HPMs should start doing EMP damage and not be limited to just doing 1 damage.
They would still ignore armor and attack electronics directly while also doing bonus damage to shields, making them useful outside of electronic damage as well (they already do this but their anemic damage makes it irrelevant)
More importantly though, nuclear missiles should probably do EMP damage alongside their standard damage (and an EMP warhead option that works similarly to the radiation enhancement)
As shields take bonus damage from EMP damage it’d allow missiles to better get through shields, while at the same time not increasing their physical damage to the ship. This EMP damage would also make it so that electronic hardening is important against missiles as well, which makes it more generally important to consider.
As for the defensive side you could make hardening either work as EMP “armor”, blocking out a certain amount of EMP damage per hit or as a % reduction of incoming EMP damage to the component.
I would also introduce Electronic Hit to Kill (EHK) to electronic components. By default this would be 1, but for larger and bulkier electronic systems it could go above, adding an incentive to potentially have larger electronics even when smaller ones are possible. EHK would work in exactly the same way as HTK but vs EMP damage as opposed to physical.
The one thing I haven’t thought about too much is missile defense implications, we could consider adding electronic hardening as a missile parameter if we want to make missiles susceptible to EMP damage. But the only way I could think to make it unique would be a “decoys at range”, where the damage has a low % chance to destroy each missile in a salvo every time it hits.
Maybe with the overall strength of the EMP hit being split for every missile in the salvo that is potentially being affected. Missile E-hardening in this context would then increase the chance that the missile ignores the incoming EMP effect, maybe through a calculation similar to how ECM/ECCM works now. This would also add an incentive for incoming EMP PD weapons to not necessarily just be designed with 1 damage in mind.
2 Likes
Even with some (non-grotesque) HPMW bonus against shields, the shilds themselves would stay better EMP protection measure then any hardening.
I think, the best and probably the only simple way to solve this awkwardness is to rewrite the EMP mechanics (or even Shieds mechanics) at all, by making shields always leaking some damage. With this addition, most of the weapons would do just minor damage on the armour even before shields are down, yet HPMW’s minor damage would be still enough to knock out some sensors, because sensors cannot be robust and sensitive at the same time.
The idea is that Shields do protect you from EMP but not in a damage-efficient way.
So in this calculus HPMs might not do the damage themselves but will very quickly open the way for something (Like a Particle Lance) that does.
I had a suggestion on the old forums that might prove relevant to this. I’ll re-write it here in brief:
HPMs currently have no damage scaling, so we could start by giving HPMs damage scaling. Then implement a tech that allows you to skew the gun towards Sensor Damage % Chance with Extra Range at the cost of Damage or Extra Shield Damage at the cost of Range.
This would create roughly three “categories” of HPM, One for close in shield bashing, doing more shield damage than railguns, but no ‘real’ damage and at the cost of accuracy. Another for long-range sensor scrambling, but requires the shields to be stripped or the enemy to have no shields in the first place, making E-Hardening a must for any armor-only race that uses/faces an enemy with HPMs. And finally a balanced version that scales it’s damage like every other beam weapon in the game sans Mesons and Gauss, ergo “bigger gun = more damage per shot and better chance to overcome E-Hardening”.
I feel this would turn HPMs into a far more useful secondary, and would anecdotally give E-Hardening more usefulness. The rationale for the “how it works” for those who care about such things, is:
The HPM is either more focused to travel farther, but loses more energy as a result. (+Sensor Damage Chance / +Range / -Shield Damage).
OR
The HPM is setup to dump a lot more energy at a much shorter range, possibly with a more varied and active frequency modulation, to disrupt shields better at the cost of overall range. (+Shield Damage / -Range)
ELSE
HPM business as usual, but with damage scaling so you get more punch at close range.
Finally, on the note of the proposed +Shield Damage / -Range skew of the HPM, it is important to note that this and the other skews are assumed to exist in a world where HPMs have been changed to have damage scaling. Said scaling would increase not just shield damage, but also sensor damage chance.
Post change would see E-Hardening become a valuable thing for armor only races, while the utility of redundant sensor platforms would increase in the face of these changes. Of course, only if HPMs are being fielded. 
2 Likes