/signed.

/signed

1) Armor isn't a straight reduction - it's mitigation percentage. Armor does tell you the precise mitigation value in the tooltip.

2) Just try it out. A creep can take x number of hits from your demigod. You don't need more info than that. The fact that you don't know if your snipe will finish off the enemy now or if you should wait is what's so thrilling about Demigod combat - it's up to you to decide. It's experience that allows you to make the right decision in that situation. Telling players precise numbers eliminates that. You might as well just make the button flash when it's going to be a kill.

3) Mana and Health bars - yes, but only your own. Armor and other values are not shown because they usually only change when you're in the shop - which is when you have time to look at the character screen. Optimally, the interface would be variable so you could simple drag the value you want to observe out of it's window and arrange it on the screen - but that'd require a complete interface rewrite.

/agreed

I prefer to use a formula when dealing with armor.  The reason is that a person with 95% armor reduction will take half the damage as a person with 90%.  So you have to becareful with the damage reduction.

Zorph

1. Because percentages allow for equal effeciveness against high and low damage attacks. 30% armor reduction is quite different than 30 flat reduction when your demigod is hit by both a creep doing 50 and a demigod doing 500 damage.

2. Holy shit no. Your examples are precisely what you need to avoid not copy. Starcraft comes down to math - you can tell who'll win a fight before it even starts by looking at the completely fixed damage/health/armor values. If you know 100% what damage you'll deal and exactly how much health and armor the enemy has you might as well let the AI play. You completely remove the human element. Because you create a situation in which there's a mathematically perfect time for every action - with no room for players to actually show skill.

3. You can see all health bars already. Tilde key. Numbers would ruin it.

Please stay on-topic. If you want to change armor types/debate please start a new thread. This thread is:

1) Make all numbers easier to understand. Less math in your head and immediately obvious what the effects of each number are. Armor is one of those poorly defined numbers.

2) Make numbers easier to access. As in make them easier to get to, at the very least for your character.

3) Make numbers a known factor. If I don't know 1/2 the numbers the other half are useless to me other than "more is good". A more is good is a very hard to control and understand approach.

Also please do not state "but there are workarounds". Workarounds to figure out game mechanics do not belong in a game.

You didn't even adress a single point. You just wrote the same thing you did before with barely different wording. If you can't grasp the difference between a flat and a percentage armor system "simpler numbers" is the least of your worries. They're two different systems. They are not interchangeable.

One button is too hard to get to for you? You can't display them on the main screen - it would needlessly clutter it up.

Then you mustn't have had much fun with game so far - very few games give the player precise straight up information on their enemy. DnD doesn't just tell you "your enemy has x hp left, saves of y and armor class of z". Shooters don't display the precise amount of armor and health your enemy has over your crosshairs. Many RTSes don't tell you preceisly how much damage your troops will do (nor can they, the damage is usually a range not a fixed value).

Status Bars, Color coding - that's the standard indicator for status in most games. It gives you an overview, but doesn't allow you to just math it out.

I hate to break it to you, but you are obsessing. Quite thouroughly so. If you weren't you wouldn't obsess over what the numbers mean.

1) 2000 Armor has far more levels of gradients than 20%. That's why you can't just make it "+20% armor".

2) Okay, then let's hear your solution. I'm really wondering what wonderful dimension you'll put it at that is inbetween "on the main screen" and "one click away". Because right now it is one click away.

3) Wanting to know those precise numbers is obsessing. They're not necessary to win or even enjoy the game. How much hp is gained by the unclean beast? If you're playing as it, all you need to do is press one button to see it. How much damage does a mintaur do? It doesn't matter - you can't control him anyway, nor does one have any value. What does 2000 armor mean exactly? The answer is one click away.

The current system works fine.

To paraphrase you:

When you start paying me for giving you the numbers then I will write them down.

I like it! In any case my point was how time consuming it is. This should have been a 5 minute task and you would have "stuck it to me" but it is not, it is a time-consuming, annoying task.

I forgot to mention how FLAG information is not accessible. We know experience flag gives us experience bonuses, but how much? 1%? 2%? Because 1% exp bonuses is not worth fighing for (except gaining exp for capturing, at which point I'd rather let the enemy hold it and not have the ability to re-capture).

Please add the number of what flags actually do.

One thing to note about hard numbers is, games are never won by numbers alone. Look at Warcraft 3 or Starcraft. Just because you have 8 archers vs 8 archers except one side has less upgrades does not mean the bigger numbers win. The smaller numbered player can be aware that their micro management can compensate for lower numbers and thus use his skill to allow himself to spend the upgrade money elsewhere and still win. However the lower numbered player can be aware of just how much of a disadvantage he has due to the numbers and know when to upgrade.

Better numbers means we can criticize the game better exactly as db0 pointed out, as well as being able to strategize better.

Something REALLY nice would be a number that is a calculation of a unit's average DPS. Taking attack speed and max/min damage into account.

/agree

However not full information.  Mix AI & Human element, an in-between of SC and current system.  Use of simple tooltips and/or clarification somewhere.

It's true that throwing numbers over every creep health bar would clutter up the screen. However, I think that being able to see the stats on the various creeps would be good for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the existance of the Generals. They command their own squads which they buy with gold - gold that might be better spent elsewhere. Right now all we've got to go on is "Minotaur captains are better than Minotaur Berzerkers". How much better? Worth the extra 500? Do they hit harder? Faster? Do they have more health? :/ I just don't know. In addition - unless there's something I'm missing, being able to gauge what upgrades have been given to your creeps without having to return to your home base, or being able to figure out how enemy creeps have been upgraded, is only a good thing.

In most RTSs you can see at least your enemy unit's stats, and you certainly don't control those. Right now we can't even see the enemy's HP in any form beyond colored bars - which can be fine, if you're going for an organic-feeling game, but which raises the question of why exactly we are told how much damage a demigod does if we have nothing to gauge it by besides whether or not the target is dead. It feels like the game begrudges us the numbers we could use to make sense of it, which makes it almost painfully opaque at points.

Please don't misunderstand - I'm all for a smooth organic game, but not at the expense of playability without having to go through twenty matches of trial-and-error. For example: I'm in the field. I want to know if upgrading my creeps' durability will allow them to survive an extra hit from that Rook player over there who's one-shotting anaything that stepped out of a portal. I know how much damage he does - the large floating numbers told me. I've got a teleport scroll burning a hole in my pocket, and five seconds until he's in my face with that hammer of his. One way or another I'm going back to my base, but I want to be able to know if I need to go now or if it can afford to wait until I get rook'd, and I need to know if I should spend the money on upgrading my team's war effort or getting myself an attack speed boost, or armor or what. Numbers help a lot with that.

Right now I don't think there's even a model difference between a level 1 minotaur and a fully upgraded level 10 - I know you'll never see both on the map at the same time, but being able to see that the opposition has put all its gold into armories would help cover for the fact that you will have no idea what upgrades they have unless you go out and start experimenting on a wave of their minotaurs.