[Suicide Junkie]

1.4.2 AI Difficulty:
Setting the AI difficulty to Medium or Low causes some of the ministers to be disabled for that empire.
High Difficulty makes the AI use all of its ministers.
Setting this below "high" is not reccommended.

2.2.3 There are none in the unmodded game, but mounts that affect accuracy will do so as follows.
The mount modifier adds (or subtracts) from your accuracy after all other modifiers.
That includes the Talisman, so a mount with an accuracy penalty can cause your talisman-armed ships to miss!

2.5.2 Which armor is best?
2.5.2.1 Choosing Organic, Crystalline, emissive, stealth, scattering, and standard armor.
2.5.2.1.1 Stealth armor
2.5.2.1.1.1 Stealth armor's biggest advantage is its bonus to defense. Its biggest weakness is its reduced strength relative to shields.
2.5.2.1.1.2 At max tech, Stealth Armor is worth using in place of some shield generators or standard armors if:
15% of the total firepower an enemy must use to kill your ship is greater than 165 points of damage. This includes misses!
2.5.2.1.1.3
EG: if enemy ships are attacking with an accuracy of 30%, and your ship has 600 shield points, the enemy must fire on average 600/0.30 = 2000 damage worth of ordnance at you in order to kill your ships. 15% of 2000 is 300, which is greater than 165.
Therefore, by removing some shield generation and adding stealth armor, you will increase your ship's survival time.

2.5.2.1.2 Scattering armor
2.5.2.1.2.1 The situation with scattering armor is very similar to that of Stealth armor. The difference is that the scattering armor is less efficient. If given the choice of ONLY Stealth or Scattering armor, go for the stealth armor first.
2.5.2.1.2.2 At max tech, the value of scattering armor can be calculated similarily to that of stealth armor.
The only difference in this case is that you should use 290 in place of 165.
Using the example given for stealth armor, you can see that scattering armor would only barely be worthwhile.

2.5.2.1.3 Standard Armor
2.5.2.1.3.1 To understand the relative usefulness of standard armor, the best comparison values are Hitpoints per KT space. This calculation also applies to shields, since they are simple hitpoint generators.
2.5.2.1.3.2 Example:
Standard armor with 40 hitpoints, and size 10kt has a value of 4 hitpoints per kt.
Shield generator I's have 75 hitpoints and are size 30kt, for a value of 2.5 hitpoints per kt.
Thus, it is much better to add the standard armor than a shield generator I.
As tech improves, the shields rapidly outpace the armor in strength, rising to almost 9 hitpoints per kt for a Phased Shield Generator V.

2.5.2.2 Determining the value of modded armors.

[ October 20, 2002, 19:25: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]