Shiels or Armor: Which is best against mines?

[DirectorTsaarx]

I don't think Emissive Armor stacked in SEIII either. But it was more useful, mainly because fighters fired individual shots instead of in one volley. And also because, as you mentioned, it absorbed however many points BEFORE getting destroyed (I think).

As for increasing emissive armor's absorption power: look through the list - IIRC, there aren't many weapons that do less than 30 points of damage (except at long range). The "Small" weapons do less than that, but they rarely (if ever) fire alone; they're usually lumped together in a volley of however many exist in a fighter group.

So my point is, we can't change how emissive armor absorbs damage or how fighters fire weapons, but we can adjust how much damage emissive armor absorbs. Maybe 40 or 50 should be the max instead of 30? (I looked at my Last post again, and I agree that 80 might be too high; a lot of weapons do 60 or so points damage, at least on normal mounts... although once you get heavier mounts, 80 damage is easy to do...)

[This message has been edited by DirectorTsaarx (edited 28 February 2001).]

[Sinapus]

quote:

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Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
I assume you mean emissive armor; scatter armor negates scanners, not damage.

And you're right about it being useless; no ship does a small enough portion of damage to make the emissive armor worthwhile. It should probably start at 40 points for Emissive Armor I and go up to, say, 80 points for Emissive Armor III. Maybe make the size a little bigger (30kT or 40kT space) to preserve some balance...

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I'm hoping the ComponentEnhancement.txt file can be modified enough to accept 'mounts' for nonweapon components and enhance abilities of said components. I did a little test awhile back by copying a large mount and making the copy's weapon type be 'none' and it only made all the nonweapon components bigger. Which might be great for standard armor, but not very useful otherwise since the AI would probably use it for all the components it had.

Being able to set 'armor' or something like that as a large mount might be useful, especially if you could use the 'damage' multiplier to work on any special abilities the armor had. E.g., emissive armor's damage resistance.


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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

[Suicide Junkie]

In SEIII, every component had one hitpoint.

With the emmissive armor ability, the armor needed four points before being destroyed, otherwise it was undamaged.

So, If you had two Emissive armor rated at 4, and absorbed a 10 damage WMG, you would lose two armor + two extra internal components.

If it used SE4s EA ability, then 10 damage is more than 4, so you'd lose the two armor, and lose 8 other components, for 10 damage.

An SE3 EA, that has a 4 EA rating, could be seen as having 1 hitpoint, and taking no damage from the first (4-1)= 3 damage dealt.

If that was applied to SE4, then a EA III, with 50KT hitpoints, and 30KT EA rating, would require:
one shot of 80KT damage to kill.
two shots of 55KT damage to kill.
five shots of 40KT damage to kill.
fifty shots of 31KT damage to kill.

Also, spillover damage from one armor segment to another would have to go through another EA ability.
(eg. to destroy two EAIIIs at once, you need 80KT+80KT= 160KTdamage)
A 100KT damage shot would hit the first EA:
100 damage - 30EA = 70 damage
70 damage - 50 hitpoints= 20damage (destroys EA#1)
20 damage -30EA = 0 damage
no damage is applied to the second EA.


That way, you can count on the armor absorbing at least its (hitpoints+EA rating)

I would really like the Emissive armor ability to be as it was in SE3.