Emisive armor (in BM)

Emissive Armor started stacking in v1.25, but the v1.03 BM numbers were not adjusted to reflect this. They'll be decreased somewhat as to avoid situations where smaller ships are unable to damage the ship's armor layer. As an alternative I might change Emissive Armor to abosrb a certain % of damage instead by adjusting the damage types.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Please don't! IMO, that would defeat the purpose of Emissive Armor altoghter.

Emissive armor ought to be more effective against smaller weapons and less effective against large weapons. If it's equally effective against all weapons, then what's the point?

If the armor absorbs a percentage of damage then its usage is no different from normal armor. Here's an example:

Lets say that you have normal armor with 100 structure points. Now lets say emissive armor has 50 structure points, but 50% damage reduction.

Obviously they're exactly equivalent. You would pick one or the other based purely on cost. There are no tactical situations in which one is better than the other.

As emissive armor works now, though, there's a definite tactical reason why you might want it (or not). It's particularly effective against fighters, for example, but not very useful against huge weapons (like Incinerator Beams).

The fixed percentage would work along the lines where each armor reduces the damage amount by X%. So the more Emissive Armors you add, the greater % reduction you get - but the treatment is scaled to the incoming damage. So there are decisions to be made about the amount of Emissive Armor you want or can afford to add. A downside would be that the % per armor reduction would be "fixed" and couldn't be improved with tech, only the armor's structure.

The problem with a set damage amount reduction per armor is that it may be too biased against smaller ships and fighters in practice and forces all players with large ships to add X number of armors because it makes them invulnerable to fighters or non-mounted weapons etc. It's advantage is that you can easily manipulate the damage reduction amount by tech level.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Emissive armor should be left as-is, maybe with the ability amount reduced a little, until the bug is fixed. (the bug being that it only stacks when the armor components have been destroyed. I shoot up your armor and it gets better? WTF?)

Ok, well that nugget of information changes this problem then.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I did some testing as well, and found something curious.

I created this (max tech) crystalline baseship:

1 Massive Mount Shard Cannon (288 damage skipping armor)
24 Emissive Armor (-15 Damage per)
1 Master Computer
20 Quantum Engines
1 Solar Sail

I set two of them to fight each other, and found that their weapon only did 121 damage per hit (decreased by 167), and that ONLY to armor. Their hits did consistently less damage (consistent with what you were seeing above) until they were both left with 1366 and 1367 armor respectively, and had run out of ordnance, at this point they were only doing a single point of damage to each other per shot. No structure was ever damaged during the battle.

I haven't yet tested with null space weapons and the like, but at first glance it appears that emissive armor can cancel armor piercing capabilities.

Speaking of AP weapons, in my game shard cannons damage (normal) armor too... I tested a frig with a level 6 cannon (60 damage) versus a ship with normal armor, and it did 19 damage to the armor and 41 damage to the structure per hit. Is this a bug too?

It's not a bug. The armor skipping weapons do small amounts of damage (10% per armor I guess) to armor. It's a bit of a holdover from the earlier days when a ship with no structure but armor couldn't be destroyed by armor skipping weapons. That changed when a ship with no structure automatically blew up. I kept it in though since it kind of made sense that the slug would make a hole in the armor etc.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Then you do have a problem, Kwok. Emissive also stacks in armor-piercing hits (I don't think THIS part is a bug, just the works-when-dead thing).

What happened with that baseship was this:
1- 288 damage hit. Hits first Emissive component. 15 damage removed, 27 damage to armor, 246 goes on.
2- 246 hits next armor component. 15 damage removed, 23 damage to armor, 208 goes on.
3- 208 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 19 damage to armor, 174 goes on.
4- 174 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 15 damage to armor, 144 goes on.
5- 144 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 12 damage to armor, 117 goes on.
6- 117 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 10 damage to armor, 92 goes on.
7- 92 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 7 damage to armor, 70 goes on.
8- 70 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 5 damage to armor, 50 goes on.
9- 50 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 3 damage to armor, 32 goes on
10- 32 hits next armor, 15 damage removed, 1 damage to armor, 16 goes on.
11- 16 hits armor, 15 damage removed, 1 damage to armor. End.

Total damage to structure: 0. Total damage to armor: 96. This is less than the damage Warren Piece was reporting (121), but I think that's because my little simulation here rounds to the next integer and SE5 might not, or a difference of in what order the emissive ability is applied.

Just checked out, crystalline armor works perfect, at least =)

Emissive armor is fine the way it is except make benefits lower as armor is destroyed

But if it end up making the ship invulnerable, there is no point using anything else. When i ported my mod, i seen a freighter getting half damaged then it became invulnerable to enemy fire. I managed to fix this but this is not supposed to happen, especially after armor get destroyed...

How about just reducing the emisive amount and limiting the armor to a certain percentage of hull space. You could also reduce the structure amount to make it less favorable when up against heavy weapons.