Emmisive Armor for Dummies, please...

[Q]

Are armor skipping weapons affected by the emissive armor ability?

[geoschmo]

PvK, thank you. Your perspective of looking at it as reducing the strength of the weapon being fired at it helps me understand it better. I think I have it now.

However, given the facts that you have told me here, it seems to me that emmisive armor is still not very useful even in it's "fixed" form. The reamainder damage going straight to components or other armor means that Emmisive armor is actually LESS effective thatn standard armor agasint any weapon that can exceed it's emmisive ability and structure in a single shot. Since most ship weapons available around the time the emmisive armor comes on line fit this qualification, and since fighter weapons are added prior to impact, the high cost of emmisive armor and low effectiveness would seem to make it quite silly to use.

Am I still missing something maybe?

Geoschmo

[rextorres]

I have started using Emissive so I want to make sure I understand it right.

Em Armor III has 50 structure and negates 30 damage from EACH hit.

So in the worse case on the first hit your em armor gets wiped out right away and its a wash because two Armor IIIs have eighty structure points equal to the 50 + 30 from the em.

If the em survives however then it negates another 30 points on the next hit so effectively you've just added 30 armor (or emissiveness) to your defense.

So if you can afford it emissive armor is much better than regular armor.

Also I haven't tested but I thought fighters now shoot individually instead of as a stack - is that true?

Please clarify

[ September 03, 2002, 19:12: Message edited by: rextorres ]

[rextorres]

On further thought probably a combination of regular and emissive armor would be best. I'll leave it up to the probability experts - but my guess would be 1 per x number of armor or even just 1 per ship.

[geoschmo]

The way I see it the emmisive armor is only any good until your enemy starts using weapons that are more than 80 points per shot. Since you only get one emmisive ability per shot, after the first 80 points the additinal armor is only got a 2.5:1 ratio, while yor regular armor has a 4:1 ratio. And the emmisive armor is five times as expensive on a per Kt basis. Five times as expensive for an armor that is only as-good agasint smaller weapons, and worse-than agasint more powerful weapons. I am not math major, but that doesn't add up to me.

Maybe one piece of emmisive armor per ship would be good, since you then have a decent chance of it depleting several shots before it is destroyed. But even then the best it ever gets is the same ratio as regular armor. It's never better than regular armor. I see no point to it unless you are facing an enemy that has weapons weaker than the combined value of the em and structure of your armor.

Geoschmo

[ September 03, 2002, 19:43: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[oleg]

Originally posted by Q:
Are armor skipping weapons affected by the emissive armor ability?

Armor skipping weapons are completely immune to EA ability. Even if you mod some internal component (like proportions EA) to have this ability.

[Spoo]

The way I see it the emmisive armor is only any good until your enemy starts using weapons that are more than 80 points per shot.

But it should also be noted that one EA on a ship grants its ability to all other armor on the ship, effectively adding 30 HP (for EA III) to ever other piece of armor until the EA is destroyed.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Spoo:

quote:

---

The way I see it the emmisive armor is only any good until your enemy starts using weapons that are more than 80 points per shot.

But it should also be noted that one EA on a ship grants its ability to all other armor on the ship, effectively adding 30 HP (for EA III) to ever other piece of armor until the EA is destroyed.

---

Which I did note in the very next paragraph. But even that is of limited use. Once your enemy starts hitting at much over 100 per shot (not very long) the combination of one em value and two or three emmisive armor strutures minus their em values reaches a point where the strength per KT of space used is greater for standard armor.

There is some value I admit in using a single piece of Em armor and several pieces of standarad armor, but cause you get a small reduction of each shot until the em armor is destroyed as you say, but the effect I think is negligeble and very dependant on chance. You have a percentage chance of losing your em armor on the first shot and then you have just standard armor. Which I guess is no worse than my idea, but I don't see much advantage to it either. And you pay the same cost as 5 standard armors for the same KT of that one Emmisive armor.

Geoschmo

[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.