Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Greetings!

As you know with v1.25, the Emissive Armor ability now stacks. This has necessitated the need for change in the mod. There are two main options I can see for Emissive Armor.

The first option is have Emissive Armor function as it does now, that is with a specific damage amount reduction. The likely change required would be to decrease the current damage amount and structure in an effort to balance it against low damage weapons. A good benefit is that the emissive ability can be influenced by tech level. A drawback includes potentially forcing players to add X number of armors to make large ships invulnerable to non-mounted weapons and most fighter designs.

The second option is to change the design types so that Emissive Armor reduces each damage amount by a fixed %. So essentially the more Emissive Armors you add, the greater overall % reduction you get. The main benefit here is that it doesn't entirely discriminate against low damage weapons. The downside is the fixed % won't change, so only the Armor's structure can be improved.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Tough one.

When I think of a battleship, I don't expect a fighters bullets to do any damage other than cosmetic. They should have to bring in torps/missiles. 50 fighters firing small caliber rounds at a foot or 2 of steel? Will that ever get through? I don't know.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Exactly how does it 'stack'? Having multiple components of Emissive Armor with the same damage reduction level results in all those amounts of damage reduction being added together? That's crazy if true. Large ships can become invulverable to everything but the largest weapons and still carry a serious damage payload of their own.

I've been using Emissive Armor in my current Balance Mod game (because my main rival is the Temporal-tech using Xiati http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif and it hasn't seemed to be working that way, but then I haven't been checking to see how often a hit does no damage. It's not easy to do in real-time combat. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Using a percentage damage reduction doesn't really make technical sense. If you throw 10 times the energy at it, it shouldn't get ten times more effective. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

One possible fix is making the components larger. Start at 20 kt, but increase it by 5kt per level so that it gets harder to stack even while the ability increases. You'd end up with 70kt armor at level 11. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

I sort of agree with aegisx; perhaps high tech emissive armor should indeed make one 'invulnerable', or close, to lighter weapons. Obviously this should be offset by other factors, though; i.e. cost, space taken, less total structure, etc.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

It doesn't stack directly, BM. The problem is its actually bugged. A DEAD piece of emissive armor will stack. A live one won't, except in the special case of armor-piercing ammo.

Because of that, I'd leave it as-is and just submit a bug report to MM so this can be fixed. It isn't just an issue for fighters: a DN can become immune to any damage under 450 points!

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

I had received several e-mails and read some comments about the emissive stacking but didn't pick up that it was a bugged effect. There should also be some sort of lesson in that I should test these things more frequently when reported. Stupid AI scripts.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Its not something that'd show up in most testing. I didn't believe the report on SE5.com myself until I tested it..

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Could it be that the emissive armor ability is surviving the death of the armor component?

So, even though the armor has zero hitpoints, it is still taking its 20 damage points off through emissive ability?

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

No. The amount of damage soaked actually goes up as more armor is destroyed.

EDIT: although..hmm. Thinking about it a little more, that might be it.The component could still be being "hit" even though it has 100 damage, and emissive applied before it goes to the next..

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

That's exactly what I mean.

Given that components normally lose abilities when they hit 50% damage (in settings.txt), armor might have been made a special case.

A special case in which a ">= 0 hp" was used instead of a "> 0 hp".

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

I still don't think that's it, though. There was a test with a baseship that had 24 EA. It was being shot at by a Balance Mod 1.03 shard cannon (90% penetration, 288 damage).

The emissive ability was being applied to each armor comp on the way through, but the amount of damage done still dropped as the armor died..

Apparently Shields from Damage applies after death too.

EDIT: damage results from a test baseship:
13/11/9/7/6/4/3/2/1/1 first shot, 121 damage done each shot. The damage continued to follow that pattern until the first EA comp died. With two comps down, the damage done dropped to 100 per shot. With three, 91.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

I would expect that that would be because more damage was reaching the last few armors to be emissed.

Once the first armor is dead, it stops suffering 28 damage points. A greater fraction of the damage is absorbed by emissive effects, and less by armor hitpoints.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Phoenix-D, try a non-armor piercing weapon to see what happens.

Re: Balance Mod\'s Emissive Armor
 

Right, same thing except with an AM Torp: (150 damage stock)
First hit does 135 damage (67% on one armor)
Second hit does 120 damage (100% on one armor, 27 on the next)
Third hit does 120 damage (100/87)
Forth hit does 125 (?!) damage (100/100/40)
Fifth hit does 105 damage (100/100/92)
Sixth hit does 90 damage (100/100/100/37)

So with the exception of #4 there, it looks like each destroyed armor comp is taking off 15 damage. This matches the initial tests..

Side note: on the test of the baseship, its Abilities tab initially said 360 EM ability.

After 1 hit it said 345. Two hits, it said the same. Three hits, 330.

The ability is being subtracted in the tab, but not in the actual effect. Odd.