emissive armor

[oleg]

OK. This is my observations with new EA.

Some tests included Proportions EA - which is not armor, but some sort of component with high damage resistance, EA ability, but not _armor_ ability. I will refer to it as EAP.

1st, EA works once per shot even if no damage has been applied to EA component itself.
Example: I made proportions ship with EAP and few armor components. In the test, EAP reduction has been applied to the very first shot that was absorbed by armor - nothing destroyed but accumalated damage is exact to [weapon - EA]. Thus, EA ability assigned to any internal component will transfer its ability to all armor pieces !!

2nd, Crystal armor and EA works together. Before anybody start to complain about how weak is EA, consider a ship with 6 CA III and current Version of EA. The ship is INVULNERABLE to "normal" weapons with damage less than 150 per shot !!.

3th. EA ability is taylored to "armor". EAP is not armor and works as advertised against normal weapons. But Shard Cannons and Null-space projectors ignores EA ability, either assigned to armor or internal components, completely.
Crystalline tech in Prportions looks very attractive now !

4th EA ability works on damage to armor and internal components but has no effect on shields whatsoever (it was expected but still needed tests)

My conclusions: fixed EA works basically OK in normal SE4 game. Any changes may require some serious tweeks to weapons. But Proportions, P&N and Devnull may need some serious adjustments, IMHO.

[ August 15, 2002, 23:13: Message edited by: oleg ]

[Rollo]

yes, true they don't stack and the emissive value is only applied once per shot. however, the EA does not actually have to be hit for the emissive value to apply. that balances it out a bit.
so if you use one EA and lots of small armor, that works quite well, as the small armor is destroyed first and the EA can do its thing many times.

Rollo

[Rollo]

Originally posted by oleg:
<snip> Any changes may require some serious tweeks to weapons. But Proportions, P&N and Devnull may need some serious adjustments, IMHO.

yes, true. In DNM I have reduced the EA (six levels) to 10-60. It was 30-80 before the patch. Along with ablative armor that works pretty good.

Rollo

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by javaslinger:
Are there any patches out there incorporating these changes in Emmissive Armor?

I just added an "Emissive Shield Generator" component. This component takes advantage of the fact (at least I heard it around here - and AFAIK it wasn't changed with this patch - if it has someone please let me know so I can remove this component!) that Emissive Armor applies its emissive ability to all components in the ship, so even if you have 1 emissive and 10 regular armor on your ship, if the regular armor gets hit it still reduces the damage. So what I did is I took an Emissive Armor and removed the Armor's get hit first ability, so it continues protecting the ship until the component itself happens to get destroyed! In effect, then, this component acts like the Shields from MOO1 - it reduces the damage of every hit. (Well, every hit that penetrates the normal shields...) Now I wonder, does this effect stack with normal emissive armor, since the new component is of course a different family...

[Baron Munchausen]

No, emissive armor abilities do not stack. The largest value on an undestroyed component in the ship should be used. You know, I have considered requesting a 'minimum damage threshold' for shields like MOO has, but every time I request something and say it's from MOO he won't do it. So, I've been trying to think of a way to request it without mentioning MOO.

[Captain Kwok]

I like the fact that emissive armor does not stack. It would give yet another advantage to big ships that they do not need.

[oleg]

Me too. EA numbers are open to discussion of course - make it bigger or not - but overall the EA concept can be considered "fixed" right now Imho.