Emissive Armor?
 

hi guys, another newbie question from my side, how does "emissive armor" exactly work? tested it against fighters but my ship still received damage although the fighters only dealt 15 damage per shot.
thanx

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...=009103#000000

explains it better than i could

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I gather it didn't work because your fighters are treated as a single, very powerful stack, rather than as a myriad of weapons. Or rather, because of some difference between units and ships.

The ability worked fine against a ship equipped with 14 Meson BLaster V (30 damage), but it failed against a single fighter with four Small DUC III (15 damage each). First round 15 damage was dealt and next turn 30 damage was dealt to the ship, before third turn where the armor was destroyed and then all damage was applied. Very weird. Or are all weapons on a fighter considered as being a single weapon for all purposes?

Yet another reason for scorning this... erh... wonderfully useless Emissive Armor. (Unless you are fighting an opponent who loves to use Meson BLaster V and below without any mount that is. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif )

Edit: I see, I was beaten to post as I had to run a few tests. I will have to learn how to type faster.

[ December 16, 2003, 20:08: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

thanx a lot, to both of you, I think I will redesign my ships now http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I've made excellent use of the EA on my LC fleet in this one game...
They're fighting off Xichung who happen to be using Lightning guns on their LCs.
With the damage falloff, plus the emissive effect, my ships are extremely durable at long range, and the EA absorbs an average of half the damage at medium to close range.

Don't ask the EA to be an invulnerability device. What it does is reduce the damage form each hit you take.

In order to make it work, what you need is:
1) Plenty of Standard armor to actually absorb the damage and prevent your EA from getting blown up too early. (All the other armors come in chunks that are too large, and thus won't get hit before the EA)
2) An enemy using moderately small weapons. If they're stocking up on missiles and WMGs, don't even bother. Less than 100 damage per shot for best results.

So, if the enemy uses 80 damage guns, your EA will reduce that to 50.
Given 400 hitpoints worth of armor, that means you withstand 8 hits instead of just 5... not too shabby.

[ December 16, 2003, 22:12: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I love EA+crystall armour !

4 CA and EA will subtract 80 points from each shot http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif (assuming no skip armor or skip shield weapons )

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

sorry? please explain this to me again. I always thought that the EA III would negate any weapon which deals 30 or less damage, but would not reduce usual damage.
this would mean a weapon dealing 30 damage per shot would be doing zero damage, while a weapon doing 31 damage would deal full damage.

am I wrong here? does EA III really REDUCE (!) every damage dealt by 30? every shot?
does EA also work as long as I still got shields, up? or will it start to affect the damage taken only if all shields are down?

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

EA reduces by the stated amount any damage that hits the ship components, armor or otherwise, while it is still undestroyed itself. It will not reduce damage to shields that I am aware of. With the CA it works because every hit with CA adds to the shields so the next shot hits the small amount of shields generated then hits the armor generates more shields and is reduced by the EA amount. Quite effective. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

So if you had a 31 damage weapon and hit a ship with EA of value 30 then 1 damage would be dealt to the ship.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

EA didn't work.
Then it was fixed to negate low damage as described.
And then it was fixed again to work as in SE3 reducing damage from incoming shots.
As long as the description is not changed accordingly the Last fix must be considered a bug.

And the fact that all weapons in a fighter group are stacked as a single large weapon also sounds like a bug.
Every figher should be able to target individually and EA should negate damage made by most figher weapons.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

All damage stacking isn't considered a bug, because IIRC it was done intentionally. And EA working the way it does certainly isn't a bug, because it was also done deliberately.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

Emissive armor has its uses though. Make a ship with 11 crystal armor and one shield. It stands invulnerable against 150 damage points/shot. Then make ship with all that + one emissive armor and it stands punishment of 170 damage points/shot. However, in SEIV there is tendency that for some unknown reason smaller components are destroyed first and so this one component is only help against first few shot (it is smaller than crystal armor). If this bug is fixed in future, its value increases significantly.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

Smaller *hitpoint* armor, and bigger *hitpoint* internals get hit first.

So only Standard Armor will normally get hit before EA 3

[ December 18, 2003, 16:58: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Then the description is a bug, since it contradicts how it works and leads to confusion.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I've made some tests and I noticed component's damage resistance is related to the hit probability to the component. The size doesn't matter. It's very likely that the hit percent of a component is (component's damage resistace)/(ship's damage resistance). However this doesn't apply to armor which most of the time are destroyed from weakest to strongest.

This means the smaller the gun's damage the more likely small components are destroyed.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I did some testing for the B5 mod.

Ships with 3000 hitpoints worth of small pseudo-armor components lost to ships with 2000 hitpoints of larger pseudo-armor components.

The key was that the 2000 points of 7kt chunks were more often hit instead of guns.
The 3000 hitpoints of 1kt armor chunks were let the big-hitpoint guns get hit more often, and thus caused the battle to be lost as the ship became just a punching bag.

For actual armor, the little guys soak up the damage first almost ALL of the time. it is quite rare to see a larger armor break first, even if the weapons used are more than enough to kill the large armors in one shot.

[ December 18, 2003, 17:05: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It is not a bug, it is how the combat mechanics were designed.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Actually 1 kt armor chunks were hit more often but they'd absorb less damage. If the ship is hit by a weapon dealing 100 damage, it would require 100 hits to 1kt armor and only 15 hits to 7kt armor to absorb the whole damage. Even though the shot is more likely to hit 1kt armor, the total damage absorb is greater in 7kt armor chunks.

Doh, I'm not good at explaining things. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">definatly not http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I think what Asmala was saying is that:

100 damage is hit
It hits a 1kt armor and now you apply 99 more damage.
It hits a 1kt armor and now you apply 98 more damage.
Repeat that 15 times
83 damage left
Now instead of hitting one of the psuedo armors it hits a weapon and does 20kt damage and destroys it.
63 damage left.
Repeat.


For 1kt armors you have more to hit calcs for the components. So while more 1kt armors are hit the chances of larger non-armors getting hit is increased.

For the 7kt you have less to hit calcs since each one eats up more of the damage and reduces it faster. So less total number of chances of it hitting a none armor.

Hrmm... I wonder if that was any better of an explanation...

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I guess it was, but I still dont get it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

Perhaps I was unclear...
Rounding things off:
1kt non-armor, 10 hitpoints
vs
5kt non-armor, 35 hitpoints (B5 mod uses 7/50)

If you have 100kt of space spent, you get 100 of the light armor, for 1000 hitpoints... VS 20 of the heavy armor for 700 hitpoints.
...With B/LS/CQ/6engines and guns behind that...

What happens is that you have a greater probability of sustaining damage to your engines and/or guns if you use the light "armor", despite the fact that it has more hitpoints total.

Of course, once the "armor" has taken a lot of damage, the extra protection percentage falls off.
And if your ship was destined to be destroyed by the first volley of a large fleet, the light armor would sap more ammo from the enemy.

-----

The point is that early on in the battle, the tiny-chunk & stronger stuff lets more damage through to weapons & engines & stuff than the large-chunk & weaker stuff.
(Where stronger & weaker is measured in Hp/Kt)

[ December 18, 2003, 22:48: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It is opposite for armour http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Bigger pieces tend to be destroyed first AFAIK.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

Damage is not assigned per point. All the damage from a shot is assigned to the same component, unless it gets destroyed. Then, the extra gets applied to a new single component.

Trust SJ. He is quite right on this. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

[ December 19, 2003, 06:59: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It is not a bug, it is how the combat mechanics were designed. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Then it is designed poorly and should be fixed. It is not logical that enemy would 99 % of the combats hit first that same armor (expect with talisman and that only guarantees that you hit the ship, not one specific component in that ship).

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

If that one armor component has a lot fewer hit points than the other armor components, it makes sense. It is the weakest part, so why not target it first?

I should also point out that the armor systems are bound to be integrated somehow, so the weakest part is likely to fail first, not Last. It makes 0 sense to say that one chunk of the hull is CA, one is EA. If that were the case, then the EA ability would not be in effect when CA gets hit, but it is. Given that, whatever the EA is doing is always getting hit and worn down, so it would be more likely to fail first.

[ December 19, 2003, 08:01: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

It's logical that EA is destroyed first. In stock game it's bigger than standard armor, less durable and in order to reflect energy back to space it have to be located in the ship's outermost layer.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I can't see anybody disagreeing with him on this. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif I just tried to explain why the heavy pseudo armor is better than the light even if the light has more hit points. Cyrien explained excellently what I tried to say.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

EA is actually destroyed (usually) Last when using standard armor, cause it has more hit points...

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

...right... so it's not logical then. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

Actually isn't standard armor 30/35/40 HP at TL 1/2/3 while emissive is 30/40/50 at TL 4/5/6? So at tech level 4 your emissive armor would be likely to get hit first, at level 5 your armors would have an equal chance to get hit, and at level 6 your standard armor would be likely to get hit first. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

I like to think of emissive armor as a thin coating around the ship, so it's still on the outside in "real-life" terms, and it only works the way it does due in the game due to SE4's quirky rules about which components get hit first http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif If you want to model it this way in the game, make EA 5kT with 15/20/25 hitpoints, that way it tends to get hit first and you'll need a lot to make sure you can keep up the emissive effect as your armor wears down... so you'll probably want to reduce its cost as well http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

What's really weird is how scattering and stealth armor work together... one reflects and the other absorbs, so shouldn't they cancel out? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif (Unless they reflect and absorb different frequencies of light...)

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

one absords what the other doesn't reflect.

[ December 19, 2003, 19:40: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

It just occured to me that there might be some use to EA. Three facts make it useful in early game: easy to research, is destroyed Last and absorbs 30 damage which is quite a lot against DUC. I've never used it but perhaps I'd have to try some day, 30 off from 40 (no mount) or 80 (large mount) aren't bad deal.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

I don't think MM can change anything here. He would have to allocate variables to store damage to individual components instead of just one per ship. Now, if you have 20+ components per each ship, memory requirement and processing time will go through the roof in the late game battles. I would rather leave it as it is than to have SEIV run on ultra fancy computers only !

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It wouldn't be a problem for the computer. The hard part would be convincing MM to program it.

For example, suppose you have a battle with 10,000 ships involved, and they each have 1000 components, each of which can take up to say 63000 points of damage each. That's two bytes per component, x 1000 x 10,000 = 20,000,000 bytes, or about two megabytes. Consider that the largest battle in actual SE4 is probably more like 1000 ships, which have more like 50 components each at most (total more like 100 KB RAM required), and you can see this is not a huge amount of memory you're talking about, also because you wouldn't have to store the damage value for every component - only the ones on partly-damaged ships, etc.

PvK

[ December 20, 2003, 01:21: Message edited by: PvK ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

20 megabytes. and approximitally half of them would have to be searched each time damage needed to be adjusted.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

How do you arrive at 20 MBs? All you need is 1 bool for every component, which is at most 1 byte in size.

[ December 20, 2003, 18:50: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

he's the one who said 20,000,000 bytes. i just used that.

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

That was an extreme case... only even feasible in mods with 1 kT armor chunks AND 0 kT "structural supports" or "bucky tube gel plating," such as B5 Mod, P&N or Adamant. And then, good luck getting 10000 ships in one place. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

[ December 20, 2003, 19:46: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

Ok 20 megs in my example (not 2 megs - my goof), but my example was also rather too big. 10,000 ships is off of what really happens in SE4 by a factor of 10 or 20, and 1000 components per ship is also off by another factor of 10 or 20. So, realistically, the most you would generally need would be say ~1000 ships x ~100 components/ship x 2 bytes = 200,000 bytes. A drop in the bucket even of a 32MB RAM computer (about the minimum needed to reasonably run Win95). And, as I mentioned before, damage might be more efficiently stored as a list of partly-damaged components, rather than the partial-damage state of all components.

Also, it would not have to search all of the components to find the right component, because they would be part of the ship data - if a ship is hit, you know which ship it is, and will never have to search the components on other ships to find the right one to damage.

PvK

Re: Emissive Armor?
 

You know, maybe we should be writing our own space empire games... I wonder how far we'd get... "SE4 by Committee" suddenly takes on a whole new meaning! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif