Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

Heck yeah.

How do you think ships get 1000 shield points as they come to wipe out your defenseless fleets.

Emmisive Armor negates damage less than X points.
I really think it should be changed to negate the FIRST X points of damage. As it is, its a useless ability.

Shields add. If you look in the design window, there is a box near the top middle that totals your supplies, movement, total cost, shields & stuff. Put a couple of generator Vs on, and you quickly get to 1000+ shields.

Unless you're fighting phased polaron beam ships, use shields.

Shields provide up to 8 hitpoints per KT
Armor provides up to 4

As it is now, armor is worthless compared to shields. In my mod I boosted the strength of armor 3x, so by lev 9 in armor, you get 10 hitpoints per KT.
That is 25% greater than shields to compensate for the fact that armor must be repaired after battle, while shields recharge instantly.


As for mines:
Shields are energy forcefields, and probably are very expensive to run. Battle Lasts for only a few minutes, so the shields don't cost supplies.
In strategic movement, you're flying around for 5 weeks. Keeping your shields up for 5 weeks is gonna leave you with no supplies. So, shields are down while moving on the map. You hit the mines while your shields are still down.

Thats how I see it, anyways.

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

I can see why shields don't help when you blunder into a minefield, but I'd expect a fleet to raise shields if they were about to enter a tagged minefield.

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--
"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

If I had a quantum reactor, I'd keep my shields up all the time.

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

Maybe shields prevent a ship from using its engines in "strategic movement mode." Like, they dampen out the warp field or something. So you can sit in one spot as long as you want with your shields up, and you can use your engines in "tactical movement mode" as much as you want with your shields up. But you can't change sectors.

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

I'm thinking that shields need to recharge for long periods of time after every battle (which would explain why they don't use supplies; they simply leech a little power off of the engines for an extended period of time). The shields used in a few minutes of combate would take a week to recharge.

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Assume you have a 1kg squirrel
E=mc^2
E=1kg(3x10^8m/s)^2=9x10^16J
which, if I'm not mistaken, is equivilent to roughly a 50 megaton nuclear bomb.
Fear the squirrel.

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Triumvir Emphy:
which brings me to scatter armour,...scatter armour negates a certain amount of damage. the way i read it is scatter armour is invinsible to any damage less than what it is rated for, so if it is rated at 20 points a fighter that does 20 points of damage does no damage.

a group of 20 fighters doing 20 points each does 400 points of damage. as far as i can tell it isn't negated by the scatter armour. which doesn't seem right.

how does scatter armour really work??<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I assume you mean emissive armor; scatter armor negates scanners, not damage.

And you're right about it being useless; no ship does a small enough portion of damage to make the emissive armor worthwhile. It should probably start at 40 points for Emissive Armor I and go up to, say, 80 points for Emissive Armor III. Maybe make the size a little bigger (30kT or 40kT space) to preserve some balance...

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

woops, got my armour crossed,.... i did mean emmiziefe armour

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

I would much rather have it negate the first 20 points of damage.

If you start boosting the emissivity then only WMGs will have any effect.

The way emmisiveness works now, a 20 point meson bLaster does 0 damage, while a 21 point bLast does 21 damage.

I really wish it would be so that a 20 point bLast would do 0, and a 21 point bLast would do 1 damage. a 200 point bLast would do 180 damage, etc.

Then, emissive armor is best against small arms, but still has some effect on shots that do damage.

Thats the way it worked in SE3, and that was much better.

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

Does Emissive Armor "stack" like normal Armor and Shields do? IOW, do two 10 point EA components ignore 20 points of damage?

Re: Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

Sorry, no stacking emmissive abilities.

Otherwise, Starbases would be invincible, having 1000 emissive points.

In fact, not much stacks anymore. 90%+ of special abilities do not stack.