I know that repair modules will be limited in the new version, but I wonder what people have figured out so far about the armour penetration and such. I’ve been experimenting with ultraheavy ultrarepair ships and they still got exploderated by some ships in cliffski’s scenarios - and oddly, sometimes it was the “Easy” scenario that opened them up. Anyways, I found a couple things:
The red “armour absorption” doesn’t necessarily mean that none of the damage is getting through - I’ve found lots of ships that can be taken out by fighter lasers after a sufficiently long period of time. Sometimes it can take a very long time though…
Plasma is good at doing damage to shields and regenerating hull. Doesn’t tend to be very accurate so this can take a while.
Fusion Beams vs. armour (even with tons of repair modules) == cry. Now, make sure these are the fusion beams - they fire a white blue beam, not the red one. Not sure why, since the stats aren’t especially better than Cruiser Beams, but it’s pretty hot knife/butter effect. They don’t have good shield penetration though, so you’ll need something else to peel away that layer, but once you’re through, they don’t have much trouble breaking the armour modules to unrepairable levels. Does the fusion beam have any special powers not listed, or is it just that extra bit of armour penetration (or shield penetration?!) that does it?
Any other weapons people noticed crack open ships that rely on gobs of armour and repair?
I think there is a chance to penetrate armour like a sort of critical hit so even the most heavily armoured ship with nothing but armour will see blips of damage being caused. Fighters are good for this simply because there’s a lot of them and crits happen more often. Perhaps the crit rate is different for each weapon.
I’ve seen a single ship with tons of armor take 35+ fusion beams for over a minute with no damage, as far as I can tell right now armor is winning the battle against weapons by a long shot. I kinda wish it was the other way around since then it’s not a waiting game until you run out of patience but rather an orgy, if short lived, of destruction.
I invite anyone to try the challenge “four tanks of the apocalypse” if you need any confirmation that armor needs to be fixed.
As of right now, if you pile armor modules in all but a few of the ships slots the armor value is higher than any weapon’s armor penetration. The only damage than can be done to these ships is now the random chance (about %3) that a shot with insufficient armor penetration will do damage to the armor. Right now three repair modules will repair faster than an entire fleet can damage for 99.5% of fleets.
It is possible to defeat this fleet, but it requires a fleet with maximized damage per second that also manages to absorb/avoid all the tank ships can dish out.
EDIT: Not my challenge, though I have spent a few hours trying to crack it. I had it 98% to 50% but my ships divided their fire so I never got through either of the last ships.
EDIT2: Co-operate order is not strong enough. I have 28 ships surrounding one, with a 65 min weapon range and they are firing at distant ships well outside their max engagement range of 100. I guess that’s two separate problems, but I’m on a complaining streak
I tried it with my fleet. You didn’t kill any of my ships, and after I destroyed the fighters, it was 100% v 75%… a never ending battle ensued. You couldn’t get through my shields, I can’t get through your armor.
I tried that one a few times, and got to the same impasse each time; even with a fleet full of proton-beam equipped ships firing constantly I couldn’t break any of those tanks. It would be interesting if ships were able to determine whether their fire was having any effect, and switch targets accordingly, especially if it was done in conjunction with the coordination order.
It is possible. I did it with a full fleet of frigates with:
4 rapid fire lasers
1 ECM Missile launcher (not necessary)
1 Crew II
1 Micro Crew
1 Shield II
1 Frigate Engine III
Since only a small portion of the damage gets through the shields, regardless of armor penetration you have to do as much damage as possible in the same amount of time. The rapid fire laser is weak, but fires 4 times a second (I believe fire interval is in ms) so ends up doing 20 dmg/sec at very close quarters. Simply have the frigates engage at ~150 and they can fire at their target but be within their target’s blind zone. The ECM missile can’t hit anything that close, so it hits the other ships preventing them from firing at your ships. The ECM isn’t really necessary as it takes ~3 hits to get through a shield II and they aren’t nearly accurate enough against frigates to get three in a row.
That being said, I’ve been stuck in a stalemate in this challenge at least 4 times, every ship firing every weapon, but not enough concentrated firepower to destroy one of the armored monstrosities. It is beatable, but it takes the better part of 30 min on 4x speed. The armor breaks the game at this point.
For some reason I only recently noticed different types of explosion feedback. Now, I’ve only been playing this game for a few days mind you (about 10+ hours so far) so I am still learning a lot. I wanted some confirmation on a few things though.
Is a red glow-type explosion signifying a ‘hit’ on armor that did no damage or damage to armor?
Is the fire/smoke-type explosion signifying a ‘hit’ on armor that did do damage to armor or hull?
When your defense stats say ‘% damage absorbed by armor’ is a higher number better or worse?
Thanks… I swear I never noticed the red-glow type explosions till this morning. I was using my federation ships that I’ve been updating with unlocked modules and playing earlier missions more and I’ve noticed that some of my ships now seem invincible for a long time but also some of the enemies ships it seems I can no longer hurt. Even on ‘easy’ mode of first scenario some of the (not sure if they are alliance cruisers or frigates) alliance ships I can only hit with ‘red-glow’ explosions.
Armor is less awesome since 1.05 because armor repair modules only have finite resources. The 3% chance of always penetrating just means damage gets done to the armor, not that it necessarily gets through to the hull.
Unfortunately, at the moment, the explosive effects on a ship are not a very good measure of whether actual hull damage has occurred. This may well be improved.
Are you planning on fixing/changing armor? It doesn’t seem very balanced to have a build where you don’t have many weapons but you’re just this side of invincible until you run out of repair resources which I suspect will take a while since you only take 3% of hits as armor damage.
I’d think something like that will be changed when we get to more balancing. Right now shield are basically a log function where the more you add the less you get out of them so they really plateau out. Armor is the opposite where the more you add the better it gets so once you reach a critical point your ship becomes ridiculously hard to destroy. Right now I’m pretty happy how shield work (could do with more information on how reflectivity works with multiple shields). Armor on the other hand seems a bit cheap if abused, but maybe slightly weak if you just use a little of it (maybe not weak, maybe just right. I haven’t tested it enough).
As of 1.05 version it is possible to crack armour. I won those tanks challenges posted by Erlandr, however the time spent for this on max speed was quite long. My ships have a ECM beam. Looking at how this module works I was wondering, why it breaks down weapons systems only? Shouldn’t it break all electronics?
My idea is to make ECM influence all modules that might have electronics in them: engines, repairing systems, camouflage, weapons etc. This way a knocked up ship will gain damage quicker (of course multiple armour penetration rate must be balanced). An area effect ECM weapon could even knock out fighters making them an easy target while they drift in space with disrupted engines.
It will make more sense for ECM and Anti-ECM modules.
The current bug where repairing is instant means that lots of small hits, even ovr a short period, don’t even have the chance to overwhelm the repair rate of repair modules, So while it is now possible to deplete the resources of a “tank” ship, it’s almost impossible to destroy UNTIL it runs out of repair.