Improved Armor Cost Calculation

[Ally-for-Hire]

I completely rehauled the armor cost calculation to now take average armor weighted by surface area, it's not perfect, but it should be a far more accurate descriptor of a tank's strength. Is completely functional with debug features, notabley needs the tank's biggest gun to be aiming forward along the correct axis, and there's some guesswork i can do to get around that but for now it should be good. it also gives builders a free armor readout for their tanks.

It multiplies the front+side by 4, so that if a tank has 750mm of avg front + side armor it would be the 3000 points allocated. this should be fine for modern tanks, but the values can obviously be tweaked.

ace_armor_debugvis 1 will let you see the boxes.

im aware it isn't perfect but it's in a functional state for community testing.

[KemGus]

Hi, very curious, what are these green lines supposed to represent? Parts that are expensive/non expensive?
It looks like you're trying to put it upon props, but the angle is wrong?

Also imo we should make a better way to show info of the dupe, rn its too much information forcing user to scroll to see the data he wants.

[Ally-for-Hire]

the green boxes are mostly just to help with dev, i don't know why they are off sometimes besides the main gun having a weird angle tbh. it's just showing the relative armor around critical entities

[KemGus]

I see that fuel doesn't have any cost currently

[Ally-for-Hire]

it should, but also it’s not a raw cost system. it’s the average armor weighted by surface area.

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On Fri, Dec 5, 2025 at 2:50 PM KemGus ***@***.***> wrote: *KemGus* left a comment (ACE-Project-Team/ArmoredCombatExtended#206) <#206 (comment)> I see that fuel doesn't have any cost currently — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#206 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AL4TLIXZPJE35AP6JNDRWQD4AHV27AVCNFSM6AAAAACODBWEBSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZTMMJYGU3DKMZUHE> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[KemGus]

it should, but also it’s not a raw cost system. it’s the average armor weighted by surface area.
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On Fri, Dec 5, 2025 at 2:50 PM KemGus @.> wrote: KemGus left a comment (ACE-Project-Team/ArmoredCombatExtended#206) <#206 (comment)> I see that fuel doesn't have any cost currently — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#206 (comment)>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AL4TLIXZPJE35AP6JNDRWQD4AHV27AVCNFSM6AAAAACODBWEBSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZTMMJYGU3DKMZUHE . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: @.>

Repro: simply spawn a huge fuel tank and it shows cost of 0

[Ally-for-Hire]

well, yeah? armor has a cost, not fuel

[KemGus]

1. Can you please describe your idea, because what I see currently is that it makes it two sided balancing - we only count for front and side armor.

2. I think cost as its own thing might be very well at use at some gamemodes (TPG like), where say you are given certain amount of resources and you must fit in there. What your approach did is we take care of the balancing part of it, but not the cost so there is a confusion here. What I think you want is a potential check up on how balanced the thing is compared to another contraption, but say we do not really appreciate the amount of work a builder can put in. Say, you're going to make a poor armor design and cost will be somewhat similar to another tank that has proper sloped armor and so on.

3. I have few concerns with the system being gamed because it focuses on the armor in “front” of critical entities which can easily be gamed either by consolidating critical entities behind small hitregions and stacking armor around these spots which don’t count orby shifting the resting angle of a tank.

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I think IRL the main factor is the Cost of making a certain product, say it costs 500 bucks to make a t-34 and 100000$ m1a6 abrams, I mean they start using expensive materials such as titanium. We also should understand that T-34 costs less than a tiger tank, because less materials are required due to a more smarter armoring. While I agree that we lack the ultimate warthunder like balancing system (which this tool could be used for), imo "cost" in general should represent real engineering challenges that would inspire ACE builders to take challenge for. Maybe we could try making contests for a particular cost even