Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?
 

A couple of questions:

1. Do shields hinder/reduce damage from mines or does armor?

2. What is the difference between normal armor and "stealth" armor?

Thanks,

Bowden Russell

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

I believe the consensus from an earlier discussion was that shields don't come on when the ship hits the mines. But I could be wrong...

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

I beleieve that you are right, so mines are not effected by shields any more.

So armour is good, organic is best!

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

It's not just mines. The damage you sometimes take from moving through funky warp points is not stopped by shields, either.

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

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bowden Russell:
&lt;snip&gt;
2. What is the difference between normal armor and "stealth" armor?

Thanks,

Bowden Russell<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Stealth armor provides defense bonuses in combat (5, 10 or 15%; only one component per ship will provide bonus, though). The Stealth armor also allows a low-grade cloak, while Scattering armor prevents Long-Range Scanners from working (not very useful against AI, limited usefulness against human). There's some debate on relative protection of the various armors; "standard" Armor III provides 40kT protection per 10kT of space; Stealth provides 100kT protection per 30kT space; and Scattering provides 150kT protection per 50kT space. Which means standard armor has a 4:1 protection ratio, Stealth just over 3:1, and Scattering exactly 3:1. HOWEVER, just because you get more protection per kT for standard armor, remember three things:

1) Stealth & Scattering armor provide combat defense bonuses.
2) Stealth & Scattering armor concentrate the protection in fewer components - which means faster repair times when they get damaged
3)Stealth & Scattering armor have less chance of being completely destroyed in the first place, which means no repair required at all...

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

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??

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

I always put one of each on my ships...one stealth, one scattering, at least one emissive, and sometimes one regular armor to fill out remaining space.

But, here's another question...do TWO shield generators produce accumulative shielding effects?

Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

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

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Triumvir Emphy:
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.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The problem here is as much the fault of the fighters as the armour. 20 fighters doing 20 pts ea don't do 20 pts 20 times; they do 400 pts once...

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

oops multi-post

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 27 February 2001).]

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

Again

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 27 February 2001).]

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.

------------------
--
"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.

------------------
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.

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

I don't think Emissive Armor stacked in SEIII either. But it was more useful, mainly because fighters fired individual shots instead of in one volley. And also because, as you mentioned, it absorbed however many points BEFORE getting destroyed (I think).

As for increasing emissive armor's absorption power: look through the list - IIRC, there aren't many weapons that do less than 30 points of damage (except at long range). The "Small" weapons do less than that, but they rarely (if ever) fire alone; they're usually lumped together in a volley of however many exist in a fighter group.

So my point is, we can't change how emissive armor absorbs damage or how fighters fire weapons, but we can adjust how much damage emissive armor absorbs. Maybe 40 or 50 should be the max instead of 30? (I looked at my Last post again, and I agree that 80 might be too high; a lot of weapons do 60 or so points damage, at least on normal mounts... although once you get heavier mounts, 80 damage is easy to do...)

[This message has been edited by DirectorTsaarx (edited 28 February 2001).]

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

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
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...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


I'm hoping the ComponentEnhancement.txt file can be modified enough to accept 'mounts' for nonweapon components and enhance abilities of said components. I did a little test awhile back by copying a large mount and making the copy's weapon type be 'none' and it only made all the nonweapon components bigger. Which might be great for standard armor, but not very useful otherwise since the AI would probably use it for all the components it had.

Being able to set 'armor' or something like that as a large mount might be useful, especially if you could use the 'damage' multiplier to work on any special abilities the armor had. E.g., emissive armor's damage resistance.


------------------
--
"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?
 

In SEIII, every component had one hitpoint.

With the emmissive armor ability, the armor needed four points before being destroyed, otherwise it was undamaged.

So, If you had two Emissive armor rated at 4, and absorbed a 10 damage WMG, you would lose two armor + two extra internal components.

If it used SE4s EA ability, then 10 damage is more than 4, so you'd lose the two armor, and lose 8 other components, for 10 damage.

An SE3 EA, that has a 4 EA rating, could be seen as having 1 hitpoint, and taking no damage from the first (4-1)= 3 damage dealt.

If that was applied to SE4, then a EA III, with 50KT hitpoints, and 30KT EA rating, would require:
one shot of 80KT damage to kill.
two shots of 55KT damage to kill.
five shots of 40KT damage to kill.
fifty shots of 31KT damage to kill.

Also, spillover damage from one armor segment to another would have to go through another EA ability.
(eg. to destroy two EAIIIs at once, you need 80KT+80KT= 160KTdamage)
A 100KT damage shot would hit the first EA:
100 damage - 30EA = 70 damage
70 damage - 50 hitpoints= 20damage (destroys EA#1)
20 damage -30EA = 0 damage
no damage is applied to the second EA.


That way, you can count on the armor absorbing at least its (hitpoints+EA rating)

I would really like the Emissive armor ability to be as it was in SE3.