Damage priorities - Armor - Outer - Inner

Direction of fire also seems to have a noticable effect I have seen ships disengage having had their weapons destroyed but their engines not at all. In these cases weapons and engines where in the ships outer hull the only difference that was the weapons where at the front of the ship and the engines at the back. Further the majority of the hits where on the front arc of the ship as ships despite the omni directionality of weapons do tend to try to point towards and fly at their enemies only turning to maintain the set firing range if they get too close

This is very much the case of my ship designs and is true of the majority of AI built ships just make a few tests using auto complete and you will see this

Engines can be repaired a lot easier than a dead crew can be replaced and trained to the same level. Also things like shield regenerators are great on the inside hull, that way your shields keep trying to come back up and if you can take the heat off the damaged ship for a bit you might get enough shields to take one or two hits back up in the mean time.

In my mod it does have some use since it's possible to get internal damage before all the armor is gone. It's not rare that a ship leave battle with half it's componment damaged or destroyed. I agree though, in stock, if you start taking internal damage, you are most likely already dead...

Essentially you make leaky armor and shields, that is weapon damage has varying amounts of penetration versus shields or armor, so that it leaks through and can damage internal components. Kind of like the exploding panel effect in Star Trek.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Like Captain Kwok said, it's a "leaky" armor. But for it to work it needs the damage negation of emissive armor and changes to damage types. Also some stacking effects or else damage would always breach the armor. Not sure if it will still work that way with the next patch, but that's how i pulled it off.

My tactic for the IRM mod is to pack the ship with supply & Ordinance modules to try to protect weapons in the outer hull and they have to go in the outer hull in that Mod this has the secondary effect of the ships and fleets being well supplied

If you are lucky you just lose a lot of supply to damage which leaks but if you layer shields over armour you are mostly ok until the shields fail unless you get hit by something that which skips armour or shields

This incidentally makes crystalline tech nasty in the IRM especially early on as shields are slower to get than balance Mod or stock. However this ballences as the AI is well able to use them on you.

Thick armor can stop cristalline weapons in my mod. Of course, you need a lot of armor to stop even basic cristal weapons...

By design leaky armor is porous and being so allows some of the damage to migrate to inner/outer layers.

If you were to make all the slots inner or outer, then you'd simulate the damage system in SE:IV... Shields > Armor > Internals

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Having played Fallen havens IRM mod I can confirm the armour is leaky and you will generally take at least some internal damage in any combat until you develop shields when you will find that the shields leak and the armour takes damage, until the shields go down. I would also point out that damage defiantly comes off the outer hull first and is directional.

Well, it's not exactly how it works in my mod. All my armors can soak some damage, if the piercing damage is lower than what the armor can soak, no internal damage occur. I also made a formula to increase the armor capacity to soak damage in relation to how many plating you have. A single panel of armor don't stop much, but 10 can take a lot of beating before they start to "leak", and a battleship with 20+ panels can completly ignore weak weapons for a while. Also, poweful weapons will get through my armor much sooner, a massive mount can probably get through a frigate armor on first shot, but a dread will take several heavy hits before any damage start leaking in...

Suicide Junkie had produced a minor treatsie on it over at SE.net, essentially you have armor that has a penetration percent of say 50 percent. If there is 100 damage, the 1st armor absorbs 50 damage, allows 50 to pass to the next armor which takes 25 damage and passes on 25 to the next armor (or perhaps internals) etc. The more armor you place, the more overall absorption you'll get

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Isn't this more or less IDEAL? Why WOULDN'T you want armor to work this way?
in one of my threads, someone preached to my choir that armor can be penetrated BFORE it is entirely vaporized...
Troll? No, Sir, I am a BADGER!

Stock armor stop everything until it reach zero. The only way damage get through before that is with a special weapon that skip armor. But a weapon that skip armor don't damage armor at all, all the damage get through.

1. In case it was unclear, I meant it SHOULD work your way.
Had my first real battle in your mod, and was so pleased with how it worked that its going to be a post on its own...

don't worry, FH, I'm bragging on ya!

Secondly, even outside of your mod, all I'm asking folks consider is nothing complex: just that armor SOMEWHAT honor the ship component graph - "directional"

Troll? No, Sir, I am a BADGER!