Armor, Shields and Damage (FAQ)

[Zanthis]

5. And how do fighters fit into all this?
First off, a lone fighter works exactly the same as a ship...almost. You cannot fire only one of multiple identical weapons. All DUC-III's on a single fighter fire at once or not at all. In fact, you must unhighlight all of them or they all fire.

Further, all identical items are combined into a single super-weapon. DUC-III normally do 15 damage each. Mount four on a fighter and you almost have one weapon doing 60 damage. I say almost, because there is a separate roll to hit for each weapon. So if you have only a 50% to hit, your quad-DUC3's will normally behave like a single weapon dealing 30 damage, although it could do either 0 (all four miss) or up to 60.

Incidentally, DUC-III and DUC-II count as different weapons and do not combine in the above described manner. Also, this combining effect is not bad, and can be good. That means you normally don't want to mix weapons on your fighters.

Once you start grouping them, things get more confusing. Like lone fighters, all weapons of the same type combine, but across the entire group. To avoid firing your DUC3's in a squad of fighters, you must unhighlight all of them. Leave even one highlighted and ever fighter will fire their DUC3's.

It should not be surprising that this means larger fighter Groups rip up crystalline armor easier, not to mention help you bypass emmisive armor. Of course, larger Groups are easier to kill due to damage streaming.

If it weren't for how crystalline armor currently works, I'd say the combining effect of fighters is unimportant. It doesn't really effect how things play out. But with CA the way it stands, you might want to consider using larger Groups when dealing with ships protected by lots of CA.

[Tomgs]

You did mention about attacking a normal shield ship with phased weapons and normal weapons. But it seems stranger than what you stated. The phased damage will be transfered to the shields by the first hit of a non phased weapon. The destroyed components inside will not be restored but the damage points from inside will be transfered to the shield. It seems that more damage points than just the "leftover" damage is transfered. It actually looks like the damage to the ship is "healed" and this damage transfered to the shields. However this healing is only cosmetic and will not restore destroyed components.

Also another questain about organic armor. You state that destroyed armor does not regenerate but what about when you have 10 pieces of armor and 3 are destroyed. It seems then that the 3 pieces do contribute to the regeneration but I could have been decieved by the effect of storage of regeneration that I did not know before.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 February 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 February 2001).]

[Zanthis]

Tomgs wrote:

quote:

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You did mention about attacking a normal shield ship with phased weapons and normal weapons. But it seems stranger than what you stated. The phased damage will be transfered to the shields by the first hit of a non phased weapon. The destroyed components inside will not be restored but the damage points from inside will be transfered to the shield. It seems that more damage points than just the "leftover" damage is transfered. It actually looks like the damage to the ship is "healed" and this damage transfered to the shields. However this healing is only cosmetic and will not restore destroyed components.

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The damage listed when you right-click on a ship, and it says 120/1150 or whatever, is a total of two values: The first is the damage resistance of all destroyed components. I have *never* seen it fall below that value (I've figured it out by hand many times). The second is the extra damage on the ship. This is the value that can frequently be reduced via strange shield interactions. So, if you see 120/1150 and you're using organic armor, all 120 is likely to be extra damage, and subject to loss against shields. If you only have Armor III, it probably means 3 Armor III components have been destroyed, and no amount of funky shield stuff is gonna get the damage "undone."

quote:

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Also another questain about organic armor. You state that destroyed armor does not regenerate but what about when you have 10 pieces of armor and 3 are destroyed. It seems then that the 3 pieces do contribute to the regeneration but I could have been decieved by the effect of storage of regeneration that I did not know before.

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If you have 10 pieces and 3 are destroyed, 7 are still helping you regenerate. If they are OA-III, they are building up 210 points per turn. So, if you lose 3 OA in one shot, and next turn all 3 are fine, you're using up stockpiled regeneration. If only one or two are repaired, you've run out of extra regeneration. However, as long as you have at least five, you will get one OA repaired every turn. If you got reduced to only one OA-III, it would take five turns to repair one OA.

The easiest way to see that damaged components don't contribute is when all of your OA is destroyed. Do it enough times and eventually it just won't come back.

[Baron Munchausen]

This is fascinating stuff. I thought that organic armor was a bit screwy in combining its regeneration for all armor in the ship, but if it really works the way you've described, building up "credit" even while not damaged it's positively bizarre. I could live with a single regeneration total for the whole ship. It makes a sort of sense given that the "armor belt" on an organic ship would be a single organism. But the "credit" makes an organic armored ship more deadly as combat progresses! Just wait a while to come into combat range. 10 turns X your total armor regeneration in a battlecruiser with say 10 components of organic armor? 3000 "credit" in regeneration?Yikes! Unless you could destroy ALL of it in one round or had armor skipping weapons you'd be unable to damage the ship at all! This is not a 'feature' -- this is a bug! I finally see what's been happening with crystalline armor and shields, too. Gah! Something has got to be altered in the damage bookkeeping for these special armors, and shield skipping weapons need to be accounted seperately from non-shield skipping weapons.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 06 February 2001).]

[Drake]

Wow. Great work checking out the guts of combat, Zanthis. I really hope they can change things so that partial component damage is remembered specific to what initally got hit. That would take away a lot of this screwball behavior.

-Drake

[Zanthis]

Yes Drake. If they tracked individual component damage, things would work very well. It would be important to note, however, that if you had ten Organic Armor III's and got hit ten times for 100 damage each, with individual tracking it would be possible that each hit applied to a different piece of armor, meaning *none* of them would be destroyed despite taking 1000 damage.

The other option would be to a) stop adding extra damage to weapon damage before applying the damage to shields, and b) track two extra damages: "armor damage" and "internal damage". Most hits that passed shields would add to "armor damage" while armor-skipping weapons could add to "internal damage". Once you lost all your armor, the two could be combined. Only odd thing with this method, is if you lost all your organic armor forcing "armor damage" and "internal damage" to combine, when it regenerated, damage previously done to armor would have sneaked to internal systems.

Lots of possible solutions, I just really hope MM fixes it somehow. I haven't mailed this (my original post) to them because I'm not even sure how to explain it. I wrote this for other players. I'm sure Aaron knows how his game works, so most of the info would be unnecessary. I'm just not sure if he is aware of all the funky interactions.

[SunDevil]

How about each component having hit points.