[Suicide Junkie]

You will also usually want to ignore the armor option.
Units like weapon platforms are treated as a single component, basically.

So the shields, armor and internals all get their strength summed up, and the platform is fully operational until completely destroyed.

Also note that shield regenerators have zero effect, since the shield points are condensed into a single hitpoints total (ie non-shields).

To figure out the defense strength of the components you're choosing for that platform:
1) Start with the shield strength
2) Add the "tonnage structure" of the component
3) Divide by the size of the component (Smaller means you fit more on)

On ships or bases, things get more complicated, but this is perfectly fine for units.

The other thing you may be concerned with is price. Armor is typically dirt cheap, so if you have plenty of space on your planet, you may want to just build piles of 100% Armor. A sort of "Decoy Platform" if you will. As it costs only 5 minerals per KT of armor, you can probably build 2 or 3 per turn, even at orbital spaceyards.

ALSO:
Note platforms share ECM (useless) and Combat sensor bonuses.
(ECM is useless, since planets are huge targets, and will have a minimum 99% to-hit chance despite any ECM you care to put up)
This means you can have a single "Fire Control/Command HQ" platform to provide those abilities to the rest of your planet's platforms.

This is especially effective with a religious talisman, which can give 100% guaranteed hitrate on all platforms for only 50KT per planet.

[ March 06, 2003, 03:41: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]