DevNull and Emissive Armour

[Chris Woods]

Hey all,

I've been playing with the DevNull mod, which I really have to say is a strong mod for this game, but I have qualms with their Emissive armor technology.

Specifically, it gors up to level VI (60 pts ignored) which, from how I understand it, would basically make all fighter weapons useless against those ships. Is it really good from a balance prespective to make a technology that (seems) to say "fighters are now useless"?

Chris Woods

[PvK]

Fighter hits from a group stack against EA, even though it doesn't make a lot of sense.

However, 60EA will make any non-fighter-mounted, non-armor-skipping weapons that do under 60 per hit useless.

PvK

[Baron Munchausen]

As PvK says, fighters 'stack' in weapon damage as well as in location. So, Emissive Armor doesn't make them obsolete. It tends to be just the reverse, actually. Weapons in SE IV are much more powerful than weapons in SE III were, partly because of mounts, and Emissive Armor tends to become obsolete and nearly useless as the game progresses. I have been advocating the increase of Emissive Armor power in the standard game for some time. I'd say 60 is about the minimum power it ought to be boosted to. Even plain old Anti-Proton beams with 'massive' mounts can do over 300 points of damage per hit. It might be smarter to make Emissive Armor go up to 100 points or so.

[ March 19, 2003, 01:48: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Phoenix-D]

"It might be smarter to make Emissive Armor go up to 100 points or so."

And render small ships even more obselete than they are now.

Phoenix-D

[Suicide Junkie]

It would be better to reduce the damage of the larger mounts (while maintaining a similar damage per size improvement).

Something like 125% 150% 175% instead of 2x, 3x and 5x.

[Fyron]

Make emmissive armor percentage based.

[Baron Munchausen]

Introducing scale to ship construction as was done with 'mounts' will inevitably create balance problems. The real problem is that the job was only partially completed. Other components like engines and shields don't scale, or only scale with the addition of more cumbersome mounts. I hope SE V will introduce a different system that lets all components scale to the size of the ship without having to search out a special mount. Then smaller ships can be truly cheaper and more efficient than larger ships.

There is a possible solution to the problem of smaller ships and high Emissive Armor values even in SE IV, though. If there were two Ratings for Emissive Armor, one for the 'per hit' damage limit and one for the 'total per round' damage limit, you could still over-whelm a high-value Emissive Armor with huge amounts of lower grade weapons. Considering the description given of how Emissive Armor works, this makes perfectly good sense. Surely there is a limit to how much energy your armor can 're-emit' into space per combat round? As it is now, yes, any weapon below the 'threshold' value is totally useless. This is Yet Another Example of the 'All or Nothing' problem so common in SE design. If an accounting were kept of total damage absorbed per round and damage above a threshold total were applied to the armor anyway this would allow the 'swarm of ants vs. the frog' kind of battles.

[ March 19, 2003, 05:20: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[oleg]

But what if ship is killed during the round ? There will be nothing left to "radiate back" even thogh the ship would survive if emmision occur during the round, not after it !

[geoschmo]

What if the armor skipping weapons were limited to smaller ships? This is almost reasonable if you think about it in a way like armor piercing wepons would need to be on faster, more manuverable ships that could get in close and "Target the seams" and find the weak points. Your capital ships would have their large mounted beam weapons that pound on each other from a distance and your smaller destroyers and stuff would be coming in close with weaker weapons, trying to score a critical internal hit and disable the ship.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

The rational of at least the current armor skipping weapons is that they penetrate it, not 'slip by' it. It would be nice to have a slight chance to 'skip' armor with any weapon, but that's a combat change that MM will have to consider seperately. I'd like to see the three 'layers' of a ship like SE III had brought back for SE V, too.

I doubt that emissive armor will be so powerful that the 're-emitted' energy of a single round could make the difference of a ship being destroyed or not. By the time a ship is about to be destroyed the armor is a ragged mass of shredded metal, or completely vaporized. If the damage fro one round is so huge that it could wipe the ship out in that single hit then it's not surprising the armor would be over-whelmed anyway.

[ March 19, 2003, 15:46: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]