Emissive Armor?

[Maerlyn]

hi guys, another newbie question from my side, how does "emissive armor" exactly work? tested it against fighters but my ship still received damage although the fighters only dealt 15 damage per shot.
thanx

[tesco samoa]

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...=009103#000000

explains it better than i could

[Alneyan]

I gather it didn't work because your fighters are treated as a single, very powerful stack, rather than as a myriad of weapons. Or rather, because of some difference between units and ships.

The ability worked fine against a ship equipped with 14 Meson BLaster V (30 damage), but it failed against a single fighter with four Small DUC III (15 damage each). First round 15 damage was dealt and next turn 30 damage was dealt to the ship, before third turn where the armor was destroyed and then all damage was applied. Very weird. Or are all weapons on a fighter considered as being a single weapon for all purposes?

Yet another reason for scorning this... erh... wonderfully useless Emissive Armor. (Unless you are fighting an opponent who loves to use Meson BLaster V and below without any mount that is. )

Edit: I see, I was beaten to post as I had to run a few tests. I will have to learn how to type faster.

[ December 16, 2003, 20:08: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[Maerlyn]

thanx a lot, to both of you, I think I will redesign my ships now

[Suicide Junkie]

I've made excellent use of the EA on my LC fleet in this one game...
They're fighting off Xichung who happen to be using Lightning guns on their LCs.
With the damage falloff, plus the emissive effect, my ships are extremely durable at long range, and the EA absorbs an average of half the damage at medium to close range.

Don't ask the EA to be an invulnerability device. What it does is reduce the damage form each hit you take.

In order to make it work, what you need is:
1) Plenty of Standard armor to actually absorb the damage and prevent your EA from getting blown up too early. (All the other armors come in chunks that are too large, and thus won't get hit before the EA)
2) An enemy using moderately small weapons. If they're stocking up on missiles and WMGs, don't even bother. Less than 100 damage per shot for best results.

So, if the enemy uses 80 damage guns, your EA will reduce that to 50.
Given 400 hitpoints worth of armor, that means you withstand 8 hits instead of just 5... not too shabby.

[ December 16, 2003, 22:12: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[oleg]

I love EA+crystall armour !

4 CA and EA will subtract 80 points from each shot (assuming no skip armor or skip shield weapons )

[Maerlyn]

sorry? please explain this to me again. I always thought that the EA III would negate any weapon which deals 30 or less damage, but would not reduce usual damage.
this would mean a weapon dealing 30 damage per shot would be doing zero damage, while a weapon doing 31 damage would deal full damage.

am I wrong here? does EA III really REDUCE (!) every damage dealt by 30? every shot?
does EA also work as long as I still got shields, up? or will it start to affect the damage taken only if all shields are down?

[Cyrien]

EA reduces by the stated amount any damage that hits the ship components, armor or otherwise, while it is still undestroyed itself. It will not reduce damage to shields that I am aware of. With the CA it works because every hit with CA adds to the shields so the next shot hits the small amount of shields generated then hits the armor generates more shields and is reduced by the EA amount. Quite effective.

So if you had a 31 damage weapon and hit a ship with EA of value 30 then 1 damage would be dealt to the ship.

[Andrés]

EA didn't work.
Then it was fixed to negate low damage as described.
And then it was fixed again to work as in SE3 reducing damage from incoming shots.
As long as the description is not changed accordingly the Last fix must be considered a bug.

And the fact that all weapons in a fighter group are stacked as a single large weapon also sounds like a bug.
Every figher should be able to target individually and EA should negate damage made by most figher weapons.

[Phoenix-D]

All damage stacking isn't considered a bug, because IIRC it was done intentionally. And EA working the way it does certainly isn't a bug, because it was also done deliberately.