Stacking of stats with or without a Penalty ? *updated*

At the moment the in game mechanics allow you to stack multiple stats without any flaw when you use more of the same kind. Usually this ends up in worse situations where stacking 1 specific stat shines all above the others, as you have various ways of boosting it. Ideally you can do this with different settings, assuming that we talk about Armored Warfare, you have 3 ways to do this.

• Crew and Commander
• Retrofits and Upgrades
• Consumables

Crew and Commander

If we start with the Crew and Commander stat, you need to know that this system is in a rework phase, although i can understand that they don't pay a lot attention to their current state of the art. This ain't an excuse , because i hope that the reworked system goes into the RPG direction , which would solve some of the problems, depending on how good their math is.

Retrofits and Upgrades

As said before you can stack stats without a penalty, and some of the upgrades improve stats like Aimtime , Accuracy or Reload Time . While i think that upgrades are a legit way to increase the power of a vehicle , retrofits are an incredible way to change a vehicle completely.


When they first introduced this kinda system, i was surprised how much potential it has, but i immediately thought about how you can abuse it, or in other words i hoped that they done the math about maximum efficiency. This might sound bad in first place, but as a player you want to get better and therefore you look out for ways to improve yourself and the vehicle you are using.

Retrofits are balanced by 2 things:

• number of slots
• type of slots
• (penalty for stacking the same stat)

What they are missing is a penalty for stacking the same stat with each other as a balance thing and this is why i put them in () . The meaning of this point is, if you stack the same stat with 2 retrofits, the weaker one will receive a penalty of its effectiveness. This idea is nothing new, as for example in EVE Online there was a similar case with the Amarr Armageddon (i believe it was beta, although it got changed lately).
Amarr Battleship Skill Bonuses: +5% Large Energy Turret rate of fire and -10% Large 
Heat Sinks below (current state)
Dissipates energy weapon damage efficiently, thus allowing them to be fired more rapidly.

Penalty: Using more than one type of this module or similar modules that affect the same attribute on the ship will be penalized. 
The reason why i post this, is that there were modules who are called "Heat Sinks" which increased the rate of fire and they had no penalty, while using more than 1. As a result the Armageddon had an incredible high DPS and as this was more or less broken the devs, decided to put in a Penalty for every type of this kind of module.

In Armored Warfare it should be similar that stacking the same stat with more than 1 module, results in a Penalty to the effectiveness of that module in general . While we are at this, there should be a penalty as well , when a Commander has the "Leadership" skill and you install a retrofit that boosts the same stat, it should be affected by the penalty, even when it is the only module of its kind in the retrofit slot. This goes for the "vision range" skill as well .

The reason why i would do it this way is fairly simple, if you have a Commander that has a passive skill that boost a stat, like vision range or crew skills, it literally acts like a "upgrade / retrofit" and you should either take the penalty or you look out for something different without a penalty to raise your effectiveness . I don't want to prevent stacking, but you need to decide for yourself if it is worth it or not, and Commander skills, at least such crucial ones should apply to that "pool" as well.

Consumables

There are 2 kinds of passive consumables which are boosting stats. The first is the one that is the main reason for all the complains in the forum, the Crew boosting consumables: Energy Drink and Protein Bar . Both boost Crew skills and their effectiveness in general have a real high value if you go with a full "Crew boost setup".
The other passive consumables are Engine oil and Synthetic oil. Here Obsidian made already a call, that you can't stack both with each other, which means you need to pick either the cheap or expensive one for your boost, but you can't use both. It is understandable that they made this call here and have a straight up decision for you, it could be the same case in the end for both above mentioned crew consumables.

However they could also give the stacking of those crew boosters a penalty if you want to use both .


Conclusion

The biggest problem is the math for stats, which Obsidian needs to do beforehand, when they release stuff. I don't want to blame anyone, but their testers need to pay more attention to this.
As a solution, CCP had shown on how you can do it with a reasonable and easy setting, the stacking penalty for the same stat (module regarding EVE). Another way could be the nerf or change of some retrofits or crew skills, although i prefer the penalty concept more.

Edit: Example

Crew : 10% crew skill bonus
Vehicle : 10% crew skill bonus and 10% accuracy bonus
Retrofits : 10% crew skill bonus / 10% accuracy bonus / 10% damage bonus / 10% damage bonus
Commander : 10% crew skill bonus
Consumables : 10% crew skill bonus


Summary : 50% Crew skill bonus / 20% Accuracy bonus / 20% Damage bonus

Vehicle and Crew are our base on what we start the penalties.

• 20% crew skill bonus / 10% accuracy bonus
• 7.5% crew skill bonus / 7.5% accuracy bonus / 7.5% damage bonus / 5% damage bonus
• 5% crew skill bonus
• 2.5% crew skill bonus

Summary : 35% Crew skill bonus / 17.5% Accuracy bonus / 12.5% Damage bonus
Stacking penalties per stack :

1. 25%
2. 50%
3. 75%

This is just an example on how you can proceed and my order is Vehicle+Crew, then retrofits, then commander and last comes the consumables. My penalties affect the bonus itself, that is given by the value and order.
Although you could add a global penalty which affects only the bonus stats and the number of each stack, up to 75%.

• 20% crew skill bonus / 10% accuracy bonus
• 7.5% crew skill bonus / 7.5% accuracy bonus / 10% damage bonus

Summary : 27.5% crew skill bonus / 17.5% accuracy bonus / 10% damage bonus

75% penalty for stacking 3 times crew skill bonus / 25% penalty for stacking 1 time accuracy / 50% penalty for stacking 2 times damage