Emmisive Armor for Dummies, please...

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, the default Emissive Armor is fairly weak and becomes nearly useless once cruisers appear and all direct-fire weapons get doubled damage. But a little modding to give more levels of Emissive Armor makes it worthwile much later into the game. Given that the standard APB can become a 195 points-per-shot weapon on a battleship and a 455 points-per-shot weapon on a starbase (!!!) I think that Emissive Armor ought to go to 100 points or more. Just make it expensive enough that it's hard to research early in the game.

[Sinapus]

What would be neat is if you could add a component enhancement ability that increased the emmissive ability. Right now you can make a mount that increases the structure of the emmissive armor, but the emissive ability is going to stay the same.

[tbontob]

Lets say I had the 4 types of armor on a ship
1) Emmissive Armor III
2) Armor III
3) Scattering Armor III
4) Stealth Armor III

Lets say I am hit with a 200 or 300 damage shot.

Is the above, the order in which damage is taken by the armor?

[Baron Munchausen]

No matter which component is hit first, the emissive armor ability subtracts its level fromt he damage first. Then, the lowest damage armor tends to get destroyed first. Once you ae dealing with internal components the situation is reversed and the highest damage components tend to get hit first. These are not 'fixed' rules, though, so a clear prediction is not possible.

[PvK]

Geoschmo, your calculation of value is off. EA III is 50 structure + 30 emissive = 80 to kill, and 20kT size. Standard Armor III is 40 structure for 10kt size. You said armor was 4:1 and EM was 2.5:1, but it's really 4:1 as well, so EM III is never worse than SA III.

If you combine one or two EA with a bunch of SA III, you will probably get the EA effect for nearly all of the armor hits, most of the time. Even in mid-game cruiser combat with large-mount PPB's, that can easily get up to a 50% increase in survivability, which can be worthwhile.

Throwing an EA component in with a bunch of Crystalline or Organic armor can definitely be worthwhile.

EA is relatively expensive, but if you are trying to achieve ship design superiority for some classes, it can help tip the scales.

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

"Given that the standard APB can become a 195 points-per-shot weapon on a battleship and a 455 points-per-shot weapon on a starbase (!!!) I think that Emissive Armor ought to go to 100 points or more."

But then you make any weapon which cannot do 101 damage *utterly useless* against the armor.

Phoenix-D

[PvK]

Ya, 100-point emissive would be yet another reason to only build large ships with large mounts, which IMO wouldn't improve the standard game set. I'd say that battleship-mounted max-tech APB's should be the sort of weapon that will tend to degrade the usefulness of EA.

PvK