[Zanthis]

I did some fairly extensive tests on emissive armor as part of my revision of the damage FAQ now that I have Gold. This pretty much confirms what others have said, but does talk a bit about damage assignment. I've not yet completed everything, but this is the relavent info for emissive armor:

First, a term: Volly. A volley is a set of damage treated as if it came from a single weapon. Whenever ships fire their weapons, each individual weapon creates its own volley. However, when a fighter stack fires, each type of weapon across all the fighters in the group becomes a volley.

Put 3 DUCIII on a fighter, and they fire as a single volley. In a group of 6 such fighers, all 18 DUCIII's fire as one volley. Use 2 DUCII and 1 APBII per fighter, and you get two volleys: 12 DUCII in one and 6 APBII in the other (assuming 6 fighters in the stack). Note that each weapon can still individually miss and so the damage of a volley can vary from shot to shot.

Emissive armor reduces the damage of a volley by its value. It does so even if the emissive component is destroyed by that volley. It does not affect damage absorbed wholely by shields. It also does not effect damage that strikes specific components: Engine damage, weapon damage, armor skipping damage, computer virus weapons, etc. Nor does it effect special effect damage such as tractors/repulsors, worm hole guns or increased reload effect weapons.

The greatest emissive value present is used against each volley. They do not stack in any way.

As far as damage assignment, the game now appears to feature a "if possible, destroy a component" strategy. That means, if you take enough damage to destroy a targetable component, that component will be destroyed and the damage won't be stored up against a possibly tougher component.

Suppose ArmorIII and Emissive ArmorIII, 40Kt resistance vs 50Kt. If your enemy has only 70 point damage weapons then use only a single piece of EAIII. Because every hit will do 70 damage, -30 from the EA down to 40, and since 40 is exactly enough to kill ArmorIII, every hit without fail will kill a piece of ArmorIII until you have no more and then finally the Emissive Armor will be destroyed in two hits.

However, if he can do enough damage after the EA reduction to kill a piece of EA (80 for EAIII), then any given piece of armor is equally likely to be destroyed.

This basically means that greater damage resistant emissive armor components are more powerful since basic armor is more likely to be killed. If you modded EAIII to be 60Kt with 150Kt resistances (same size to resistance ratio) it would be much more powerful than mounting three of the existing EAIII components. No weapon doing less than 171 damage could destroy the EAIII before killing all the Armor III.

BTW, the formula given Armor and EA to find the minimum strength damage to have a chance of killing EA before Armor is:

E + 2R - A + 1

where:
A = damage to kill a piece of armor,
E = damage to kill a piece of emissive armor,
R = reduction to damage from emissive component