Originally Posted by Malorn
What you describe could be achieved with a single health bar. Its just bigger and at a certain point the vehicle becomes disabled and starts on fire. When that happens depends on how big the 'disabled' health bar is vs the normal health bar. Just stitch them together.
You seem to dislike having a false sense of health where you see a health bar and it's not really the health you have because some of it will mean you are disabled.
That seems reasonable to me to show players exactly how much health before their vehicle will be useless rather than hiding it inside a health bar.
But on the other side of things, its also important to show hostile players exactly how much health is required to blow something up. I assume there will be an advanced targeting implant or something similar that shows health of targets. The opposite is true for blowing something up as being in i - you don't care about disable, you just want to know how close something is to being dead and having two health bars is deciving as to what it might really take to destroy the tank.
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The point of having the disable being AFTER the health is entirely gone is to have disabling be complete, not just a few systems performing below optimally. For all intents and purposes, the disabled vehicle would be just as immediately unthreatening as a destroyed vehicle, as far as not being able to move or shoot, etc.
A disabled vehicle should be obviously burning and disabled, while a destroyed vehicle should be burnt out with pieces missing and blown off of it. With no advanced targeting type of thing, it should be pretty obvious visually whether you have just destroyed a vehicle, or merely disabled it.
With something like advanced targeting, you would simply see the new disabled status health bar appear once the enemy vehicle became disabled. You would also be able to use advanced targeting to guess how likely your target was going to be destroyed or disabled by your next shot.
The whole idea is that your regular health bar show you how long you have to live, just like your health bar does as a foot soldier. The only reason I even bring up a health bar for after it is disabled is because I think it would be good if you could still attempt to repair a disabled vehicle and, thus, the enemy should also have a chance to finish it off for good.
Obviously you could also do this with a singular health bar. Perhaps if there was a part of the health bar that was marked in a different color, like yellow instead of green, at which point you would know the vehicle would become completely non operational but not instantly blow up yet. I would only support this if it were 5% to 15% of the total health of the vehicle.
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Another option would be to have two health bars that are always active, sort of like the armor/health of PS1 or the shield/health of PS2.
The first bar would be armor (which would not regenerate), the second bar would be for the internal systems.
The armor would absorb all damage until it got to say 25%. At 25% or below, the armor would start allowing some damage to seep through and damage the internal systems. The more damage those internal systems took, the less effective the tank would function (firing slower, driving slower, etc), until the tank finally become unable to move or shoot at all once the internal systems reached 50%.
Now the internal systems would START taking damage at 25% armor, but I figure that the armor would only let a tiny fraction of the damage through until it started getting a lot lower, like 10%, so even though you would only have to get the internal systems down to 50% to fully disable the tank, it probably wouldn't happen until the armor was significantly compromised.
The vehicle would be fully destroyed and explode when either the armor OR the internal systems reached zero, whichever came first. In this situation, a vehicle with 50% internal systems or lower would take burn damage, but the damage would only eat away at the internal systems health, doing no additional damage to the armor.
Just some thoughts on how to include an interesting system while improving it to not suck quite so bad.
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