Balance Mod's Emissive Armor

[Captain Kwok]

Greetings!

As you know with v1.25, the Emissive Armor ability now stacks. This has necessitated the need for change in the mod. There are two main options I can see for Emissive Armor.

The first option is have Emissive Armor function as it does now, that is with a specific damage amount reduction. The likely change required would be to decrease the current damage amount and structure in an effort to balance it against low damage weapons. A good benefit is that the emissive ability can be influenced by tech level. A drawback includes potentially forcing players to add X number of armors to make large ships invulnerable to non-mounted weapons and most fighter designs.

The second option is to change the design types so that Emissive Armor reduces each damage amount by a fixed %. So essentially the more Emissive Armors you add, the greater overall % reduction you get. The main benefit here is that it doesn't entirely discriminate against low damage weapons. The downside is the fixed % won't change, so only the Armor's structure can be improved.

[aegisx]

Tough one.

When I think of a battleship, I don't expect a fighters bullets to do any damage other than cosmetic. They should have to bring in torps/missiles. 50 fighters firing small caliber rounds at a foot or 2 of steel? Will that ever get through? I don't know.

[Baron Munchausen]

Exactly how does it 'stack'? Having multiple components of Emissive Armor with the same damage reduction level results in all those amounts of damage reduction being added together? That's crazy if true. Large ships can become invulverable to everything but the largest weapons and still carry a serious damage payload of their own.

I've been using Emissive Armor in my current Balance Mod game (because my main rival is the Temporal-tech using Xiati and it hasn't seemed to be working that way, but then I haven't been checking to see how often a hit does no damage. It's not easy to do in real-time combat.

Using a percentage damage reduction doesn't really make technical sense. If you throw 10 times the energy at it, it shouldn't get ten times more effective.

One possible fix is making the components larger. Start at 20 kt, but increase it by 5kt per level so that it gets harder to stack even while the ability increases. You'd end up with 70kt armor at level 11.

[Raapys]

I sort of agree with aegisx; perhaps high tech emissive armor should indeed make one 'invulnerable', or close, to lighter weapons. Obviously this should be offset by other factors, though; i.e. cost, space taken, less total structure, etc.

[Phoenix-D]

It doesn't stack directly, BM. The problem is its actually bugged. A DEAD piece of emissive armor will stack. A live one won't, except in the special case of armor-piercing ammo.

Because of that, I'd leave it as-is and just submit a bug report to MM so this can be fixed. It isn't just an issue for fighters: a DN can become immune to any damage under 450 points!

[Captain Kwok]

I had received several e-mails and read some comments about the emissive stacking but didn't pick up that it was a bugged effect. There should also be some sort of lesson in that I should test these things more frequently when reported. Stupid AI scripts.

[Phoenix-D]

Its not something that'd show up in most testing. I didn't believe the report on SE5.com myself until I tested it..

[Suicide Junkie]

Could it be that the emissive armor ability is surviving the death of the armor component?

So, even though the armor has zero hitpoints, it is still taking its 20 damage points off through emissive ability?

[Phoenix-D]

No. The amount of damage soaked actually goes up as more armor is destroyed.

EDIT: although..hmm. Thinking about it a little more, that might be it.The component could still be being "hit" even though it has 100 damage, and emissive applied before it goes to the next..

[Suicide Junkie]

That's exactly what I mean.

Given that components normally lose abilities when they hit 50% damage (in settings.txt), armor might have been made a special case.

A special case in which a ">= 0 hp" was used instead of a "> 0 hp".