Questions about Armor |
Hey all, just a few questions.
1. Does it matter where on a ship you place armor (and other components, for that matter)? That is, does it make a difference if you put armor on the front end of a ship or the rear? On the upper level or the middle? If you have armor on the front of your ship, is the rear left undefended? My impression is no, but I want to be sure.
2. Emissive armor reduces damage by 5 per weapon hit (at the earliest level). Is this cumulative? ie, if you put five emissive armors on, is each weapon hit reduced by 25?

Wait....
Does Emmsive armor REDUCE damage by x, or negate any of x or less? I thought it was the latter.
edit:
And by "not stacking" do you mean the ability doesn't stack, or the components? (I. e. if I had two componetns with it would they stack, like having multiple components with +def or +off bonuses)
edit edit:
And if its the latter, does it have to be on armor? Can we give it to shield to represent a form of leaky-shields (i. e. all shields do is "dampen" incoming damage by X ammount... or do that after they've taken Y damage).
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Armor Priority
Putting multiple emissives should give you continuing damage reduction after one component is destroyed, but the way armor priority works is that several forms of non-emissive armor have to be destroyed before emissive armor kicks in.
First
It does the first, I think. The ability is what doesn't stack, so all you get is redundancy and the extra structural points.
You can stick it on anything you like. However on internal components, the ability is only checked when THAT component is hit! So if your shield generator has an emssive ability of 50, a hit of 40 points will be absorbed- but only by the generator. If the hit comes in at another angle and hits something else first, that component will take full damage.
Leaky shields are easy. Just messy with shieldandarmortypes and damagetypes.txt. Or, if you don't want it to be percentage-based, the SEIV method still works.

Leaky stuff
I *want* the SEIV type -- larger shields/armors simply "absorb" lesser amounts of punishment because they're meant to take so much worse...
oh, and smaller types can take nasty damage from big weapons they aren't meant to get hit bye.
I. E. an anti-fighter weapon is useless against a ships shields, but if a fighter gets hit by a ship-to-ship weapon its defenses simply can't COPE with that kind of energy.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
I find that this is
I find that this is typically the case even without any modifications. Fighters typically explode when hit by most weapons no matter what that weapon is, because fighter shield points are nowhere close to being up to the task and small shield generators suck.

Modding
Yeah, but modding changes the rules 
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I think fighter shield
I think fighter shield generators are supposed to protect fighters against other fighters, not against capital ships weaponry.
“Fighters typically explode when hit by most weapons", so what ? Fighters are canon fodder. Just build more fighters. 
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Feel lucky earthling ?
Fighters.
“Fighters typically explode when hit by most weapons", so what ? Fighters are canon fodder. Just build more fighters. 
But i think mounted weapons should get increasingly worst at hitting fighters, but they are just as good as the stock variants. Alternatively, this game just allow too many fighters per carrier, it's insane how many you can load on each one...

Space opera fighters
I agree, but SE-V combat engine seems to be designed to mimic the classic space opera genre, which is based on WWII naval battles where in some occasions hundreds of naval aircrafts fought on both sides (See Midway or Leyte Gulf for example).
To my opinion mounted weapons should not be able to engage fighters (they represent the ships main guns, 8 inches calibre or above) but non mounted (non seeker) weapons (which represent medium sized guns such as 6 or 4 inches) and (of course) point defence weapons (which act like machineguns and light canons) should.
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Feel lucky earthling ?

Battleship tactic of WWII
Just my two cents but. In WWII Battleships and Heavy crusers would fire there large guns at the water in front of attacking Torpedo Planes. This force Torpedo Planes to ver off or crash in the the giant water spouts which would bring down the planes. Big guns can be used against fighter not easly but thay can work.
Fighters
I am certain that fighter’s shields are only meant to defend against other fighters and point defence in the same way as fighter armour. The main problem with the number of fighters you can cram on a carrier is the rate at which they will deplete the carriers and later the fleets supplies particularly ordinance.
Personally I prefer fewer larger fighters armed with weapons which don’t eat ordinance but you still have to work on your cargo Tl alongside your fighter tech, to avoid the swarms of fighters being launched and then running away because they cant fire due to lack of suply or a carrier which can only limp along after the first battle as its now out of supply.
That said fighters are nasty and perhaps there shortcomings are only by way of ballence

The whole supply ordanance
The whole supply ordanance thing is a "problem" (or M$ style feature) of the game. In my opinion it is too limiting, but then again it affects my tactics playing the game. I tend to dedicate entire planets in front line systems to resupply depots 5-10 resuply depots in a system can look after a fairly large fleet with no problems.
As with the rest of the game its all about swings and roundabouts. Firing big guns at fighters is good for knocking out a couple but due to slow reload times and the use of large amounts of ordinance and supplies makes them ineffective, however faster firing point defence weapons that are cheap or free to fire are very handy. I am just annoyed they have taken away the really quick firing PD gun in 1.17
(or maybe have just moved it higher up the tech tree)
A possible idea is to have
A possible idea is to have the progressively heavier mounts having a decrease in chance to hit alongside the existing (certainly in the Balance mod) bonus to damage. Those heavy mounted guns should struggle to aim at highly mobile enemies (fighters being the extreme example), whereas it's logical to point them instead at the heaviest and slowest of your enemy's ships. Since those heavy enemy ships have an increase in chance to be hit due to large size, I imagine that could pan out well, and would make more of a distinction between the heavy rounds traded between capital ships and the regular fire between frigates, fighters etc.

This is already taken into
This is already taken into account by making smaller targets so much harder to hit (by default), it would only really work if you could balance out the gun by having it also differentiate its targeting ability against different size ships. Reducing the chances to hit with bigger mounts against big ships would just make having bigger mounts pointless.

Just to explain... and my .02$
Just to explain my comment, the reason fighters have to worry about being hit by ship-to-ship weapons instead of anti-fighter weapons is I'm going to make EVERYTHING harder to kill -- fighters will actually be able to absorb a ship-to-ship weapon, and I don't want that so I'm going to make their defenses much less effective, if I get it working right.
edit:
Oh, and having larger mounts have higher hit penalties makes sense, they'd have more trouble hitting anything -- its just that since hitting larger ships would be so easy for them, they wouldn't notice it as much there.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.




Armor reply...
Armor placement does not matter. Directional damage only applies to inner/outer components.
Emissive Armor is NOT cumulative.
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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod