Weird Crystalline Armor Behaviour

[Jubala]

I was wondering why my 20 medium fighters and 4 top of the line destroyers couldn't knock down a single enemy battle cruiser in strategic mode of the battle simulator. So I played the battle out in tactical mode and noticed some really weird stuff happening. I dropped the fighters as they had an annoying tendency to die anyway. So, there I was facing off against a battlecruiser equipped with one Shield Generator V, 6 Crystalline Armor III and level 2 ECM and CS. Facing this is 4 Destroyers armed with 1 Shield Depleter V and 2 Hyper Plasma Bolt III with the weapons mounted in that order. I move up to the enemy and start shooting with the SD's until the shields are down, then I start firing at point blank range whit my HPB's that do 45 damage. The first HPB fires and does 45 damage to armor which channels 45 damage into the shields. Here comes the weird ****. When the second HPB fires nothing happens! All subsequent HPB fire accomplishes nothing at all! The enemy battle cruiser now have 45 shields and 45 damage taken. A SD fires again dropping the shields followed by the fire of one HPB. The HPB does 45 damage to the armor and 90 shield points are restored. Notice that this is twice as much as the damage the HPB did. Now a second HPB is fired. As expected it drops 45 of the 90 shields but it also heals 45 from the armor! At this point the enemy battle cruiser has 45 shields and 45 damage to armor. Several more HPB's are fired and nothing happens. A SD fires and knocks out the remaining shields again. Directly followed by a HPB blats that does 45 damage to armor and restores shields to 90. Another HPB bLast. Shields drop to 45 and armor is healed by 45. See the pattern? Thought so. Let's change the order of fire from SD, HPB, HPB, SD HPB HPB to SD, HPB, SD, HPB, SD HPB. Continue where we left off with 45 shields and 45 damage. SD fires and drops shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 90 and damage is up to 90. SD fires and drops shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 90 and damage to 135. SD fires and drop shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 90 and damage to 180 and one armor component is now destroyed. As you can see the battle cruiser now takes mounting damage instead of healing itself when hit. Let's change back to the first firing pattern again. SD fires dropping the shields. HPB fires and shields go up to 75 and damage to 225. HPB fires shields drop to 45 and damage drops to 195. Back to healing again. Notice the shields where only raised to 75 after one piece of armor was dewtroyed.

Analysis:

Crystalline Armor channels damage to shields based on how much they can channel, not the actual amount of damage taken. And in some situations actually heals the armor too. And Crystalline Armor aint supposed to heal! Which makes Crystalline Armor equipped ships virtually untouchable by small ships and fighters. Especially if they don't have shield depleters. And even if they have SD's they have to fire in the right sequence which can't be accomplished unless you play tactical. Which you can't do in PBEM games which is what I play. All of which makes me a very unhappy camper as it means my Crystalline Adversaries have a huge edge in combat.

Anyone else noticed this? I smell a nasty bug in there somewhere. Or at least a logical oversight either in design or programming.

[Suicide Junkie]

Note that the healing effect will happen with shield regenerators.

Partial damage that has not destroyed a component yet can be healed, but destroyed components will not heal (unless its organic armor)

Say I have a ship that takes 50 damage internally, but loses no components, and then my regenerators boost my shields up to 100.

The partial damage is added to the strength of the next hit, which depletes the shields. There is no longer any partial damage, so the hull damage + partial damage goes down.

The new problem you are facing appears to be that the armor is pumping more shield power than it should.

Also note that when you hit the enemy with just enough to drop its shields, they didn't take damage.
Observe:
Shields: 31
Meson bLaster hit: 30 damage.
shields=> 31-30= 1 hitpoint.
Since shields are up, armor doesn't boost shields.

Next experiment:
Shields: 29
Hit: 30 damage
shields 29-30 = 0 plus 1 damage to spread to components.
Since shields are down, armor boosts shield power by 30.

Final Experiment:
Shields: 30
Hit: 30 damage
shields 30-30 = 0
Since shields are down armor boosts shield power by 30.

And no damage is ever taken.

The shields being boosted to 120+ is very bad. I could only see that happening if you shot a shield depleter at a shieldless ship, & the energy was sent into the shields via crystalline armor.

[Baron Munchausen]

Someone posted a very exhaustive explanation of the damage allocation interactions of various weapons with the special types of shields and armor a while ago. Maybe one of our local BB wizards can *bump* it up again. Basically, when there is any 'left over' damage that isn't enough to actually destroy a component it's stored somewhere and ADDED to the damage done by the next weapon to hit that ship. Special effects like shield regeneration or armor regeneration are then applied AFTER the fact. So it is possible for the damage on a ship to be effectively 'healed' because the previously accumulated damage is added to the current weapon damage, and THEN this is canceled by the regenerated shields. This can also result in a huge amount of damage being "carried" from armor into the inner vitals of your ship if you've got enough damage to almost destroy a large armor component and are then hit with an 'ignores armor' weapon, for example. The damage is ADDED to the ignores armor weapon and then the damage is applied inside your ship. 100+ points in a single hit. Ouch. It is a messy system, and I think MM has gotten a lot of complaints about it. It's probably a major logical puzzle to make all those special abilities work appropriately in all situations.

[Daynarr]

Well, I encountered it in 1.19 Version and I was hoping that it has been fixed by now. IMO it is a bug and a big one. This is definitely not the way a crystalline armor is supposed to work (makes a ship with this armor completely invulnerable against all weapons that do even or less damage than it can channel and even repairs damage to the ship if you do).

Please send this report to MM with save game if you have one. I was playing heavily moded game before so my save game wasn't worth much.

[Suicide Junkie]

When you send the e-mail please indicate what the problem appears to be:

Ie. The shields are boosted by the weapon damage PLUS the partial damage, instead of just being boosted by the weapon damage.

[Jubala]

Sent a mail to Aaron two days ago. No answer yet. I'll post here when I get one.