Emissive armour - what is it used for?

Daynarr · #1 January 7th, 2001, 06:37 AM

You are right. The way things are now, all armor except for the basic one are pointless.

This goes for stealth and scattering armor too. They are supposed to give you a bonus in defense, but since the effects are not cumulative with each other or with any other component that gives you same benefit (like ECM) they are completely useless. So far I use only standard armor.

Emissive could be more useful if the damage it can absorb would be greater. Like 50, 75 100 points. I am not sure if the effect is cumulative, but judging from other components it is not.

I would just lose scattering and stealth armor. Usseles and AI uses them if he researches them.

Marik Wahoooka · #2 January 7th, 2001, 07:58 AM

Er, gotta beg to differ here. One shell of emmisive armor and half my fighters can't touch a ship. The Bombers can still take you, but all the little guys with light uranium cannons are gonna get slaughtered. Emissive armor isn't a necessity 90% of the time, but in the right circumstances it is pretty frickin nice.

Mephisto · #3 January 7th, 2001, 11:21 AM

The volley of a fighter group counts as ONE! damage, i.e. forget about emissive armor, even a group of 2 fighters will not be stopped by it.
Another question: Are you sure that defence bonus from armor is not cumulative with ECM?

Trachmyr · #4 January 7th, 2001, 11:31 AM

What would be a lot more useful is if the armor had a divisor... say only 2, that would divide all damage by 2 until that armor was deystroyed... damage would always be applied vs. the armor with the highest divisor first. Even a divisor of 1.5 would be nice, and I don't think that would be too hard to code in, nor too unbalancing since as soon as the armor is gone, so to would be the the divisor.

Daynarr · #5 January 8th, 2001, 02:09 AM

quote:
Another question: Are you sure that defence bonus from armor is not cumulative with ECM?

Unfortunately, I am sure. I stumbled across this when, I was trying to add Inertial Stabilizer component. When I was testing this, it wouldn't add to ECM. Then I tried the armor components, to see how they work, and they also didn't stack. Most likely all identical abilities for components are not stackable, just like this one. I have also tried it with combat sensors with the same results.

This BADLY needs fixing. As it stands now armor is next to useless.

Barnacle Bill · #6 January 8th, 2001, 02:17 AM

>The volley of a fighter group counts as
>ONE! damage, i.e. forget about emissive
>armor, even a group of 2 fighters will not
>be stopped by it.

I'm not sure this is correct. Read on for why...

I recently played a game in which I created a new tech area for a beam weapon that has a size of 10kt, with damage per turn per kt of hull space used comparable to other weapons. The idea was to be able to create "balanced" small ship designs even in late game (you need a shield, ECM, combat sensors, 6 engines and a solar sail and the little guys don't have room for all that plus any weapons). Anyway, this resulted in a smaller amount of damage per individual weapon, but if the damage from a volley is treated as one shot it should not make any difference (10 points each from 4 weapons fired together = 40 points from one weapon fired by itself). I found that this was not the case, at least against crystalline armor (which adds a given number of damage points out of every volley back into shields).

I had an exploration squadron of 3 battlecruisers equipped with large mounts (15kt) of mt new toy. Ran into a ship equipped with crystalline armor. Blew his shields away, then found that every weapon hit added back into his shields the amount of damage my weapon did - first shot after his shields went down put them back up and every subsequent shot knocked them down, then put them back up by the same amount. That ship was basically invulnerable to my weapons!

It appears to me that every shot in a volley from a ship is resolved separately. They clearly are for "hit or miss". It appears that the special armors (at least crystalline) treat each weapon as a separate shot, and it also appears that special damage effects of special armors are cumulative if multiple armor systems of the same type are installed.

Maybe all the damage from a fighter group volley is treated cumulatively, but that does not appear to be the case for ships.

Grognard · #7 January 7th, 2001, 06:19 PM

Just did a test in the simulator.

36 planes with two DUC III's, 30 damage combined per plane, quit attacking the emissive armored ship once they reached the emissive armor.

36 planes equipped with four DUC III's, 60 damage combined per plane, totally destroyed the emissive-armor equipped ship in two volleys.

In conclusion, at least in the simulator, the game is comparing the damage resistance of 30 with the damage inflicted per plane.

Grognard

Editted: Forget what I just said. The above results used auto-combat in the simulator. When I tried it using manual combat, the planes with 30 damage apiece destroyed the ship. So with differing results between auto- and manual control, nothing conclusive can be determined. My only conclusion is the lack of consistency brings the validity of any simulator results into question

[This message has been edited by Grognard (edited 07 January 2001).]