Weird Crystalline Armor Behaviour

[Jubala]

I was wondering why my 20 medium fighters and 4 top of the line destroyers couldn't knock down a single enemy battle cruiser in strategic mode of the battle simulator. So I played the battle out in tactical mode and noticed some really weird stuff happening. I dropped the fighters as they had an annoying tendency to die anyway. So, there I was facing off against a battlecruiser equipped with one Shield Generator V, 6 Crystalline Armor III and level 2 ECM and CS. Facing this is 4 Destroyers armed with 1 Shield Depleter V and 2 Hyper Plasma Bolt III with the weapons mounted in that order. I move up to the enemy and start shooting with the SD's until the shields are down, then I start firing at point blank range whit my HPB's that do 45 damage. The first HPB fires and does 45 damage to armor which channels 45 damage into the shields. Here comes the weird ****. When the second HPB fires nothing happens! All subsequent HPB fire accomplishes nothing at all! The enemy battle cruiser now have 45 shields and 45 damage taken. A SD fires again dropping the shields followed by the fire of one HPB. The HPB does 45 damage to the armor and 90 shield points are restored. Notice that this is twice as much as the damage the HPB did. Now a second HPB is fired. As expected it drops 45 of the 90 shields but it also heals 45 from the armor! At this point the enemy battle cruiser has 45 shields and 45 damage to armor. Several more HPB's are fired and nothing happens. A SD fires and knocks out the remaining shields again. Directly followed by a HPB blats that does 45 damage to armor and restores shields to 90. Another HPB bLast. Shields drop to 45 and armor is healed by 45. See the pattern? Thought so. Let's change the order of fire from SD, HPB, HPB, SD HPB HPB to SD, HPB, SD, HPB, SD HPB. Continue where we left off with 45 shields and 45 damage. SD fires and drops shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 90 and damage is up to 90. SD fires and drops shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 90 and damage to 135. SD fires and drop shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 90 and damage to 180 and one armor component is now destroyed. As you can see the battle cruiser now takes mounting damage instead of healing itself when hit. Let's change back to the first firing pattern again. SD fires dropping the shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 75 and damage to 225. HPB fires shields drop to 45 and damage drops to 195. Back to healing again. Notice the shields where only raised to 75 after one piece of armor was dewtroyed.

Analysis:

Crystalline Armor channels damage to shields based on how much they can channel, not the actual amount of damage taken. And in some situations actually heals the armor too. And Crystalline Armor aint supposed to heal! Which makes Crystalline Armor equipped ships virtually untouchable by small ships and fighters. Especially if they don't have shield depleters. And even if they have SD's they have to fire in the right sequence which can't be accomplished unless you play tactical. Which you can't do in PBEM games which is what I play. All of which makes me a very unhappy camper as it means my Crystalline Adversaries have a huge edge in combat.

Anyone else noticed this? I smell a nasty bug in there somewhere. Or at least a logical oversight either in design or programming.