Ship Design for Dummies, weapons, armor, shields, oh my!

[geoschmo]

The subject has come up and frankly I don't have a good answer. I know what I do, and I have a feel for what I see other people do in games. But I don't have any good method of determining subjectively what is best.

So how do you design your ships? Frankly I tend to go balls out all weapons and little or no armor or shields. I will use stealth and scattering armor for their defensive bonuses, and on very large ships will start to put some high level phased shields on them once I have them.

Prior to that it's all about the guns. The strongest ones I can find and cram as many on there as I can. I might use a single shield as anti-boarding if my enemy is big on that. The normal armor I almost never use unless I need to fill a hole in a ship and nothing else fits.

I will grant that my method may not be particularly wise. And given my record in PBW games this is as good a reason as any as to why I lose more then my fair share.

I tried to do some simulations just now and with ships of similer weapons (Destroyers, DUC3's) one having armor and the other not. There did seem to be an advantage in performace of the armored ships at first glance. I haven't quite worked out the best ratio of guns to armor, but I did get some results that suggest some amount of armor is better then none, as long as you don't use too much to where you are pitifully outnumbered in the number of gun barrels.

However, upon reflectionI don't think my test was that conclusive. It occured to me that if one player took the time and research to develop armor they might not have equal weapons tech. So repeating my tests with destoryers with one with all DUC 3's and the other destroyers with armor and DUC 2's. In that test it did not seem to matter how much armor I used, the DUC 3 no armor ships did better.

So, it appears at least from my test that given equal weapons some armor is better then none, but armor will not make up for a deficency of weapons tech.

So how does an aspiring galactic emperor put this knowledge to use? Can anyone affer me some further enlightenment? Perhaps someone has developed a method of mathematically analyzing the problem rahter then brute force modeling?

And what about shields? There is just so much to consider....

Geoschmo