Emissive armour - what is it used for?

[Barnacle Bill]

>The volley of a fighter group counts as
>ONE! damage, i.e. forget about emissive
>armor, even a group of 2 fighters will not
>be stopped by it.

I'm not sure this is correct. Read on for why...

I recently played a game in which I created a new tech area for a beam weapon that has a size of 10kt, with damage per turn per kt of hull space used comparable to other weapons. The idea was to be able to create "balanced" small ship designs even in late game (you need a shield, ECM, combat sensors, 6 engines and a solar sail and the little guys don't have room for all that plus any weapons). Anyway, this resulted in a smaller amount of damage per individual weapon, but if the damage from a volley is treated as one shot it should not make any difference (10 points each from 4 weapons fired together = 40 points from one weapon fired by itself). I found that this was not the case, at least against crystalline armor (which adds a given number of damage points out of every volley back into shields).

I had an exploration squadron of 3 battlecruisers equipped with large mounts (15kt) of mt new toy. Ran into a ship equipped with crystalline armor. Blew his shields away, then found that every weapon hit added back into his shields the amount of damage my weapon did - first shot after his shields went down put them back up and every subsequent shot knocked them down, then put them back up by the same amount. That ship was basically invulnerable to my weapons!

It appears to me that every shot in a volley from a ship is resolved separately. They clearly are for "hit or miss". It appears that the special armors (at least crystalline) treat each weapon as a separate shot, and it also appears that special damage effects of special armors are cumulative if multiple armor systems of the same type are installed.

Maybe all the damage from a fighter group volley is treated cumulatively, but that does not appear to be the case for ships.

[Puke]

quote:

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Originally posted by Noble713:
Stealth armor is NOT useless.
...
I agree, though, that Scattering Armor is crap.

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not at all. late in the game, everyone will have sensors that can easily detect ships with stealth armor, so it loses its value quickly. think of scatt armor as armor plus scanner jammer. I put a scanner jammer on every ship, and when you figure that every ship needs armor too, one piece of armor and one scanner jammer is only 10 units smaller than the scatt armor, AND the scatt gives you the defensive bonus.

its definitly worth carying one point of scatt if your enemies already have scanning devices that can detect level2 cloaks.

[Puke]

double post, i suck.

[This message has been edited by Puke (edited 08 January 2001).]

[Baron Munchausen]

I made Scattering Armor useful by adding Emissive Armor ability to it. So, it's a Scanner Jammer, it boosts your defenses (or would if the game calculated properly) a bit, and it's just as good or better at deflecting a certain amount of damage from your ship. Why not? Isn't it "a highly reflective material"? Also, the AI is not real bright about cloaked ships so the stealth armor an also be very useful, especially early in the game.

[jowe01]

Scattering armor is only useful when you play against human players. Or does anybody really think that the still-pityful AI accounts for your designs in any way whatsoever ?

[Sinapus]

Hm.. maybe armor should be one of the non-weapon components that can be enhanced in future mods. I checked the component enhancement text and noted a "none" catagory for weapon type. You -might- be able to modify the standard armors so they can be enhanced like weapon mounts. Eg, large armor with twice the weight, but three times the structure.

Would make heavier warships better protected. However, emissive armor's abilities would have to await another patch to enhance it's abilities and make it useable again.

Just another idea.

[HAL]

quote:

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Originally posted by jowe01:
Scattering armor is only useful when you play against human players. Or does anybody really think that the still-pityful AI accounts for your designs in any way whatsoever ?

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Actually, I believe the AI accounted for my designs. I stated in a separate message that in my latest game I had to resort to missile dancing with the computer just to slow it down. With in 10 turns and 5 battles it had started throwing ships with point defense at me. None of the computer ships had mounted it before then.



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I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

[Marik Wahoooka]

I also get the impression that the AI is reacting to me. I met a race that packed DU cannons. They met fiery death by tactical nuke. When I actually moved to invade them, I ran into ships with Cap Ship Missles lvl 3. It seemed that they had switched from using particle weapons to outpacing me in missle tech.

Could just be a natural progression in the AI's research tree, but I dunno...

[Tomgs]

The AIs are all scripted there is no reaction to your designs. Its a nice illusion though, after the AI started using point defence earlier I at first though that also but even if you design ships with no missles the point defence still appears on their designs. And DU cannons are the first default design for all the races except maybe the Terrans because its a starting tech. Terrans are always missle crazy .