Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking

[PvK]

No, I was sleepy and transposed numbers. I mean't 1.78. The latest beta I have is 1.82.

[CombatSquirrel]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Fighters are so totally inept in mid to late game as it is, making them not stack would make them totally irrelevant. I see what you are saying in theory CS, but in practice the effectiveness of PDC and regular weapons against fighters totally makes up for any on paper advantage the damage stacking should give them.

Geoschmo

I also see what you are saying, Geo, and in SEIV standard I agree that it is a largely irrelevant point. But the fact remains that you can make considered adjustments to PD damage, size, accuracy, cost, difficulty to research. You can make choices in the defensive (or offensive) bonuses of manueverable fighters, and lumbering Capitol Ships. You can limit weapons, design special mounts... you have a staggering host of variables at your command to poke and tweak to adjust most any parameter.

You could design a ship that is 20% resistant to the toughest weapon mountable on a Cruiser. You could, if you wanted to, make it invulnerable to an infinite number of Cruisers, or design it so that the average Cruiser will inflict 10 points on its armor per combat turn. One thing you cannot do, however, is make a standard ship's hull able to bounce fighter weapons like peas off a brick wall. Even if those weapons only do 2 points of damage each, enough 25 kT fighters and your vessel will take full damage from every single one of them beyond the threshold.

The possibility to model a particular genre, or design and implement a particular "cosmic slant" is my absolute favorite aspect of SEIV. The ability to totally remodel the basics of design or combat is a real treat for me. I know that many, many participants on this board have more knowledge and experience than me, so I enter the debate to learn.

I just don't see the stacking of damage by units ignoring considerations of the individual effects of each combat hit as a feature. I perceive it as a limitation... maybe a necessary limitation. Clever design can incorporate and enhance a feature. Clever design is required to contain and diminish the effects of a limitation.

CombatSquirrel

[Krsqk]

It would be wonderful to have our cake and eat it too--i.e., Fighters (like drones) don't stack, but they can share a sector in the combat map (like SE3 ships). (For that matter, I'd like to see ships stack, too, up to a reasonable limit.) PDC could only hit one at a time, but fighter weapons would be somewhat limited by EA.

This would encourage wider use of higher damage/higher reload fighter weapons. Alternately, fighters wouldn't cause much damage until capital ships or bombers stripped the EA away.

I guess one alternate modding route to this is to give each fighter hull a shield generation ability of 10-30 pts (maybe goes up by fighter level?) It would limit the ability of PDC to destroy several fighters at once, but large and heavy mount capital weapons would still be able to kill them en masse. Still leaves some problems, but maybe better than nothing.

[Taera]

Krsq: two sides for the solution. The good: it would once and for all remove the PDC power because then one could easily swarm the target with hundreds of fighters. If each of those is a single target it will take infinity to kill all of them by the PDC. Thats the good one.
The bad side is two-fold. First it would make tactical combat watching (i always do that in SP - launch the combat in Tactical and turn it to full auto) a real pain. Second is that a single Emmisive armor would render all but Anti-Matter Torpedo, Kamikaze Warhead, Rocket Pods, Shard Cannon and Graviton beam(point blank) absolutely useless.Torpedoes would do 5 damage each; warhead would do 50 damage but the fighter would be destroyed; rocket pods would do as much as 70 damage but its a one-shot and it is not an option for multi-target combat; Graviton would do 10 damage and only on point-blank range. Shard cannon would rule the day for the Skip Armor ability though.
Now Emmisive Armor is a humble 20kT meaning that even a tiny escort or frigate could be virtually immune to most fighter weapons.

This is not an option. OTOH if the Emmisive armor resistance was reduced to 10 damage resistance it would be more interesting. Still, weapons that gain a lot of use such as PPB & Meson and APB on max range would be useless. Thats a solution, though. Mesons are weak against capital ships anyway. PPB on fighters is stupid IMO.

This raises a question - do multiple emmisive armors on a ship stack their bonuses?
Meaning: i have 4 emmisive armors, thats 30*4=120 damage resistance. Does that mean that if the ship is hit with a Quantum Torpedo (100 damage) it would take no damage? Or would it destroy the first one and do 20 resisted damage to the second one? (100dmg - 30res1 - 50arm1) = 20 damage leftover from the first shot. Those would be resisted by the second armor.
How exactly does it work then?

[jimbob]

They aren't stackable (but having more than one emissive could still be useful - a back up incase the first one is destroyed) so you don't have to worry about trying to attack someone who is immune to 300 points damage.

I'd favor the unstacking of the fighter damage personally. It may seem that this will make ships with emissive armor "immune" to fighters, but everything is modable! You could easily make the Emissive Armor much bigger than 20kT for example, and now only large ships can use it. Or significantly reduce the capacity of emissive armor to match the fighter weapons damages (this is my pref. solution)...

ie. if most level 1 fighter (direct fire) weapons do 3-7 damage, then make level 1 emissive block 6 damage. Some fighter weapons can do damage, but most don't.

ie. if most level 2 fighter weapons do 6-12 damage, then make level 2 emissive block 10 damage.

Etc.

As to special weapons like the one-timer rocket pods or the kamikaze warheads are in a league of their own.

[Q]

As far as I know (see my post in the topic "emissive armor on units" from August this year http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...006819#000003) the emissive armor ability does not work at all on fighters (and probably on all units).
The reason is that SE IV treats an unit in combat damage calculation as one entity and does not take into consideration the individual components of the unit.

[ November 22, 2002, 10:08: Message edited by: Q ]

[Krsqk]

By reducing the emissive ability to 10 or 20 points, then it makes it useless against standard weapons. This forces the design question of "What is emissive armor supposed to protect against?" There doesn't seem to be a happy medium between blocking fighter weapons and blocking low damage standard weapons.

I agree that unstacking fighter damage would make most fighter weapons useless against capital ships, to a point. Unstacking fighters would allow them to survive longer, though, until heavy fighter weapons or capital ships could destroy the emissive armor. Then, the fighters would be able to damage the ship. I see this as somewhat realistic; I have trouble visualizing a single-person vehicle causing major damage to a 800kt battleship, without some heavy weapons breaching the defenses first.

I agree that it would be a pain to watch tactical combat. It would even be a pain to control tactical combat. Maybe (don't hurt me for saying this) fighters could be computer controlled. (Of course, there would have to be a toggle for that for all us option freaks. )

This goes off into another topic, but it might be nice to be able to turn computer control on and off for individual ships in combat.

[Edit: fikseeng tipohz]

[ November 22, 2002, 14:35: Message edited by: Krsqk ]