Reflexion on cruiser amor

Name______________________Cost_HP___DmgAbsorable____Weight____Power
Cruiser Armour______________136___ 0_____64______________92_____
Cruiser Armour II____________220____0_____88______________72_____
Cruiser Armour III___________ 243____0____105_____________120 _____
Cruiser Lightweight Armour___268____0____102_______________90_____
Cruiser Minimal Armour________89___0_____39_______________66_____
Powered Armour_____________207___0____102_______________79______3
Ultraheavy Armour___________261___0____126______________160______
None________________________0___0_____0_________________0______ ² gives a slot on your ship

Here are my questions.

Either you want armor or not

IMHO there are 3 options :
a/ You build a tank ship
b/ You build a DPS ship, with or without shield of the qulaity you deem appropriate ==< you don’t need armor
c/ You build a 'filler" ship and a little armor is appropriate

Case a/ UltraHeavy Armor, or UltraHevay armor as an alternative. If scenario asks conditions, sometimes Armor3 is needed
Case b/ None seems good
Case c/ You will want one or two plates of armor I, II or powered depending on your budget and spare power

amIright ? Of course I am in case c/ at msot 10% of the time

Do you think that all armor types have their places ? Did I miss something ? Are tank ships “cheating” ?

If you never want a tank ship to move, and never want a damage-dealing ship to be at all survivable to fighters/after shields drop/in no-shield environments, and you don’t have any ships that can’t be meaningly classified by that system…

What’s a ‘filler ship’ anyway?

You almost always want enough armor to bounce fighter weapons. It vastly improves the survival time of your cruisers against fighters, and you usually only need 1 piece of armor for this. Its a good idea to have this on every ship if fighters are a concern. A single piece of powered armor backed up by a repair bay can hold off fighters almost indefinitely.

On larger hulls you may need the superheavy armor instead. It just depends on how many modules you have installed. On the smaller cruisers powered armor is usually enough to get you about 7-8 armor rating. Thats good enough for fighters while still giving you plenty of room for the big guns.

Tank ships arn’t cheating - armor balance, such as it is, is entirely built around tank ships. That’s why it’s so discouragingly expensive to just slap armor in empty slots.

There is one more good reason to equip your cruisers (and frigates, for that matter) with armor, even as Tribe.

Radiation weapons. As long as they don’t hit the hull, they are pretty much useless.

One piece of armor is fine, its usually enough to take care of fighters, but trying to make an armor tank to bounce even beam weapons is extremely expensive to do. Probably not even worth it.

Most beam weapons are nigh-unstoppable armor demolishers. But it can be worthwhile to armor yourself past the cut-off for cruiser lasers, for instance.

On this same sort of topic, I just tried to make an empire ship with really high average armor (I think it was 78) and yet it still got blown up? was this ‘lucky shots’ because I thought that if the average armor was higher than the weapons penetration numbers the shots would bounce off? (ie the ship’s armor’s too thick to lose).

Yes. There are rare critical hits that do damage to armor despite resistance values (I think they behave the same way against shields, but I’m not sure). This means that given enough time, any armor tank will be broken by any weapon, though the accumulation of damage is vastly slowed. This tends to be particularly important when using laser fighters. On the defending side, it can be almost totally negated by a repair system.

2% of hits will break through armor resistance to do damage to the armor no matter how high it is. If you are building an armor tank then including a repair module or two is well worth it. It will extend the armor significantly when it is only getting damaged by critical hits. Shields don’t get damaged at all by weapons that don’t have enough shield penetration.

Against fighter attacks on a cruiser you usually only need a single armor module backed by a repair module and it will last nearly forever.

Armor by itself is fine, but it doesn’t last long. Armor plus a repair module, assuming the armor value is higher than the armor pen of the weapon, is almost invincible.

At least until the repair module runs out of spare parts. :smiley:

That makes sense, thanks guys. I’ll have to start experimenting with this.