Crystal tech bugs in BM 1.11 -- very ugly.

You greatly underestimate the effectiveness of Crystalline Armor. You're suppose to have a high ratio of armor to shields on a Crystalline ship - it's the best setup. You'd expect at least 5:1 for the maximum return.

The constant changing of the way Emissive Armor works is annoying. I'll have to check if it's emissive ability is being applied for each armor the Crystalline Shard/Torpedo has to travel through. It does have 95% penetration versus armor, but if the emissive armor ability is triggered each time, then that is sort of a problem.

Organic and Crystalline Weapons are only slightly underpowered versus regular counterparts. That's because their ship hulls have special abilities reducing damage and maintenance, so they are a bit hardier and you can build more of them versus a normal empire.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

It's not the Shard Cannon that is broken, but the way that the Emissive Armor ability is being applied. As I suspected, it's due to the emissive effect stacking. Each time the weapon passes through the Emissive Armor, it triggers the damage reduction ability. If there's more total emissive ability than damage from the weapon, no damage is done. How it probably should work is that if it is a weapon that damages armor, then the emissive effect should be applied - or perhaps just a single instance of the emissive effect.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Hmm... Emissive Armour stacks in v1.58... Er, do we know if it's "reduce damage per shot" or "reduce damage per second"? As in, if you had a theoretically 1000 guns which all couldn't penetrate the Emissive effect individually, would some get through if they all shot simultaneously?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Just to clarify, it's not stacking together in the sense that all the emissive ability is totaled and it's applied in a single swoop. If it's normal damage, only emissive armors that are being actively damaged are the ones that will provide emissive ability. Usually this will be just one armor, unless you destroy one armor panel and the damage carries over to a second armor panel - then you get the emissive amount triggered twice. However, with armor skipping weapons the damage passes through all the armors, thus triggering all the emissive effects and possibly allowing no damage to occur.

The emissive ability is applied to each weapons hit. It doesn't matter if they are simultaneously or staggered.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Ahhh, I see. Hmm, so any initial ideas on how to deal with this? Or should we just wait and see what v1.61+ (seeing it'll be released soon-ish) will do to Emissive Armour? Maybe bug Aaron to change how Emissive works again?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Just for clarification. Lets say there is 100 damage attack and 10 EA's with 10 reduction.
How does it progress?
Is it:
First aromr hit:
damage 100, reduced to 90, 86(85) continues, 4(5) dealt to first armor
Second armor hit:
damage 86, reduced to 76, 72 continues, 4 dealt to second armor ...
...

or its:
First aromr hit:
damage 100, 95 continues, 5 dealt to armor, reduced to 0
Second aromr hit:
damage 95, 90 continues, 5 dealt to armor, reduced to 0
...
?

i don't know whether it rounds up/down/clasicaly, so i gave two options in firs example line (later i was lazy to do this).

Wouldn't the easiest solution be that armor skipping weapons skip armor 100% ??

Example 1: 100% Skip Armor

Emissive Armor 5 x 100HP with 10 emissive each
Shard Cannon: 50 Damage and 100% Skip Armor

The Shard Cannon passes through each armor, but each armor subtracts 10 damage from the hit. After the 5th armor, there is no damage left to apply to the inner hull. The target ship becomes invulnerable.

Example 2: Normal

Emissive Armor 5 x 100HP with 10 emissive each
Capital Ship Missile: 150 Damage

The Capital Ship Missile strikes the first armor, losing 10 to the first armor's emissive ability. The 140 remaining damage destroys the first armor with 40 damage left. That 40 damage is applied to the next armor and loses 10 damage to that armor's emissive effect and does 30 damage to that armor. Overall damage is 130.

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No. 100% is even worse! It triggers every single emissive armor, and if there is more emissive ability then the damage amount - no damage ever reaches the inner hull (example 1). At least at 95% or less penetration, you'll do some minor damage to each armor and eventually reduce the emissive amount if you can survive that long.

I e-mailed this to MM. I recommend that either 100% penetration types should not trigger the emissive effect, or better yet, only to apply the emissive effect once (even if multiple instances) per hit. The latter option is better for mods with varying penetration percents for damage types.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Another option would be to have armor penetration % apply to the emissive amount. So if I have 40% penetration, emissive armor with 10 emissive effect would only have 6 (60% of 10) against that weapon. 100% armor penetration would completely negate the emissive effect.

Or, have the emissive effect only apply to damage dealt to the armor itself. So if I had 100HP emissive armor with 10 emissive effect and hit it with a 40% armor penetrating attack for 150 damage, that component would take 60% of 150 = 90 damage - 10 = 80 damage taken by the emissive armor and 60 damage passing through. No matter what the emissive amount, armor penetrating attacks would always pentrate by their listed % since the emissive effect would only really be protecting the armor.

A blatant stop-gap measure could be to increase emissive armor to the 20kt benchmark of the other 'special' armors. While not actually solving anything, it does at least halve magnitude of the problem.

(My own tweaking tends to do this to the emissive and 'heavy' armors anyway, partly so you end up with special armor weight parity - that is, you can swap out one for another without fiddling.)

You are right Kwok: I didn't know that and therefore this bug has nothing to do with BM but is present in all games!
IMO it is clearly a bug that emissive armor has any effect on weapons that skip armor 100%!

Note that letting Armor piercing weapons to skip any armor will cause other problems:

If stealth armor gives bonus to defense by making the ship harder to detect, why would that bonus be lost against armor piercing weapons?

The bonus for stealth and scattering armors are automatically added to the ship's combat defense value. It's not applied per hit as emissive armor is.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod