Re: energy transmition lens and fighters.
 

The combination of Crystalline Armor and the shield-boosting "Energy Transmission Lense' does give Crystalline races a very strong defensive advantage. Even though the Shard Cannon is relatively weak offensively once shields are developed a few levels, it's so hard to destroy crystalline armor equipped ships that they are very likely to get the chance to exploit their special weapon.

I think that Temporal is about as strong offensively as Crystalline is defensively, though. The special weapons available to Temporal races are very nasty. If you can afford the points, taking both of these traits together would be truly evil -- if you get the chance to research all those tech levels.

Re: energy transmition lens and fighters.
 

You know combining say a branch of the crystaline defensiveness and the offensive temporal branchs is an idea for tech tree expansion. Perhaps offensive races could be limited to research only a certain shiled tech level or have shields weakened by 20% ?

Its good to have these variants as it makes the game interesting, i find that the cyrstaline and psychic combination is good - ie convert with heavily defended ships that are hard to destroy.

ETL and perhaps temporal techs could be on fighters but with some restricitons. Ie perhaps bigger size sacrificing movement of sheilding ?

Re: energy transmition lens and fighters.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Actually, it is not http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif The idea is a "Sandwich Battery" (copy right by Oleg, 2002 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif ):

Normally, people put several SD first on ship and then normal weapons, say APB. But when fighting CA, rearrange weapons in this way: SD,APB,SD,APB...
When SD hits ship with CA, it saps shields but shields DO NOT regenerate from damage here.

It leaves CA ship naked to APB hit. Whatever shields are regenerated after APB hit are then removed by SD, etc. CA becomes a basically standard armor !
Notice that you don't even need to waste space using mounts on SD, decent SD with normal mounts take care of 6-9 CAIII

All together you get CA piercing weapon wich is only 30% bigger then large mounted APB (even better on larger ships)

Re: energy transmition lens and fighters.
 

Great idea Oleg, and coupled with a Talisman it would be devastating.
Not sure how well it will work with a more normal 50 – 70 % to hit chance though.

Hmmmm. Time for some more testing http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: energy transmition lens and fighters.
 

WOW, what a nice idea, thanx Oleg.

Re: energy transmition lens and fighters.
 

Interesting idea, Oleg. I agree that would be very effective against standard Crystalline armor. But not quite as effective against the way I have modded Crystalline armor. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif I have added a little bit of 'emissive' ability to it (5/10/15 points to match the shield recharge) so it is extra resistant to damage. This makes it really, really tough. But of course 'skips armor' or 'skips armor and shields' weapons will still go right by it.

The 'standard' solution to Crystalline Armor, btw, is to use very high damage weapons because the shield recharge is per hit rather than a percentage of the damage done. So, High Energy Discharge weapons are a good choice. You could interleave those with SDs and have a real nasty Crystal Crusher.

Since Starfury actually has shield recharge proportional to damage this tactic will probably be useless in SE V. Coordination of weapons fire by the order of placement in the design might also become useless in a real-time combat system. The Sithrak use CA in Starfury right now and they are tough, tough, tough to defeat with conventional weapons. Pick up some Null Space after you manage to destroy a few of them, though, and you can start knocking them out like clay pigeons...