Quick question: does a ship’s armour rating affect the chances of enemy weapons landing a critical hit?
eg, if a ship has 35 armour resistance, will fighter lasers have less chance of landing criticals than if it has 20?
I searched the forums for an answer but couldn’t find anything, so thanks in advance to anyone who can give me a definitive answer (I’m 99% sure it’s ‘No’).
short answer: no
long answer: yes
having more armor makes you able to withstand more of the crits,so that helps a tiny bit… ofcourse the only way to make your ship somewhat immune to those is using repair modules,in sufficient quantity to cover the amount of incomming damage
Thanks Thunderbird, that’s pretty much what I thought.
Playing Survival mode over the past couple of days has really got me trying to hone down the perfect repair module / armour ratio for long battles - on the one hand, I hate spending all that cash on Ultraheavy armour that gives me a huge & fairly unnecessary resistance value…on the other hand, the more of it I have, the longer I’ll keep the rating high enough to only take crit damage from fighters.
well,from my experience,you just have to mix…
heavy shielding combined with enough armor and some repair got me through most situations… and in the end… you dont really need whole that much of firepower to take out the bad guys providing you can survive anything they throw at you… i usually get eaten by fighters from the inside out when my nanos run out and fighter screen dies… never quite been good at that part…
Heh, that’s exactly my problem - nothing hurts me apart from fighter crits.
In that case you should use Tribe, since they have the best fighter defense in the game.
The “best ratio” is actually to maximize the amount of repairs while minimizing the amount of armor. The reason to go above is because damage tend to come in waves, so it create a bracket for the repair to work with.
But they don’t have Nomad missiles 
actually no they dont
the amount of hull HP bonus and the tribe repair modules,along with penalties towards other defences,while making them more effective in short term,make tribe more vulnerable to prolonged strikecraft attacks
in other words,you cant do resists that good so you get eaten from the inside out sooner,plus you cant permatank that good with shields… they die out sooner and you lose the shield regen
Nothing prevent you from getting to 12 armor with Tribe. You just need 3 ultraheavy instead of 2. After that you get to repair them with Tribe Repair which has over 2x the supplies as a nano repair. 3 ultra + 2 tribe repair is going to out tank another race with 2 ultra + 4x nano.
By the end of the day, armor strength hardly matters. It’s all about armor resist and repair supplies.
you still have to consider the “external” tank… other races are better at those…
not to mention my personal opinion that tribe racial weapons mostly suck 
This game only has 2 race specific weapons that are indisputably “better” than the universal one (Nomad Missiles and Fed Fusion Beam).