Is it even worth putting armor on a Rebel Minotaur if I’m just going to put 1 slab of lightweight cruiser armor on?
The only thing you can say for sure is that It will absorb 102 damage. The rest depends on your setup.
The resistance benefits of armor are divided by the number of modules you have on the cruiser. Minimalist designs will have higher resist values.
If you’re filling that cruiser’s 15 slots up, a single plate will put you at 6.8 resist, which is only enough to bounce pulse (not laser) fighters for a short while.
I’m using 3 High Resist Shields so thats where the majority of my tank comes from.
My Minotaur has 2 Crusier Beam, 2 Cruser Pulse Lasers, 2 Cruiser Lasers, 1 Power Plant III, 1 Power Plant I, 3 Reflective Shields, 1 Lightweight Cruiser Plate, 2 Supercharged Engines, and 1 Reinforced Crew Bay, it seems to do well against all the default computer challenges minus the Tribes one, I’m just wondering what you think about it. I think it might need to be modified a bit but I haven’t found a cruiser more effective for me in the missions. Its as slow as a imperial Star Destroyer in the old X-Wing PC Games, with near the firepower.
If you aren’t going to get at least 10+ average armour, don’t bother with it at all.
Generally, the benefit from armour comes from it’s ability to reflect fire, not from the damage it can absorb. If you just want more HP, get it from modules that give you other benefits, like engines or guns - armour is an expensive way to buy HP. So it’s important that the average armour is significantly (about 25% more seems ok) over the armour penetration of the weapons you want it to defend you against.
i.e. 12 to 15 is nice against fighters. 60 to 80 is nice against missiles and plasma. Forget about trying to defend against the cruiser beam laser (hence why this weapon is sprinkled through every deployment I make, it only takes a couple of these in your fleet to be able to break ‘armour tanks’)
I amended my design a bit I switched out the Power Gen I for a Reinforced Power Gen II, and for the Armor Slab I swapped that out for a Reinforced Hanger Bay, or a Nanobot Repair Center, depending on the model. I was thinking of a Camo Field because they have nice HP bonuses, but they need them or they die while they can’t fire back, they do die anyways if they are on a slow cruiser. Maybe I should swap the Armor Slab out for a 4th Reflective Shield? I hear Rebel Armor isn’t to great anyways.
Shield and 8 or 12 armor is usually what I go to defend from fighters.
Shields and Armor are so expensive that its pretty much uneconomical to field a lot of well protected ships :-. Better to spam as much DPS as possible and kill the enemy before they can kill you.
I take it you do that on the biggest cruiser you can, I can’t imagine you having that many slots on anything other then the largest cruisers, do you even have enough slots to put engines on?
i guess he meant armor rating 
Your probably right.
Yes. Two armour modules is usually enough to get around 8 to 12 average armour, which makes a huge difference versus fighter swarms, but is pretty irrelevant versus anything else.
Lately I’ve tended to put a few ships with 2 or 3 armour modules, light shields, and some repair modules, on the edges and in front of the fleet. These ‘catch’ fighter swarms and take them away from the battle line. Much cheaper than armouring everything, while going a long way to preventing people walking all over your challenge with a fighter swarm.
I wouldn’t put the camo shield on anything but a tank. Time spent not firing is not good, and it’s expensive.
Camo shield does make for fantastically durable Tribe tanks - between it’s massive HP and Tribe’s +100% HP bonus, who needs shields or armour to soak enemy fire… Not useful on ships that actually fight back - since fire is distributed relatively evenly between modules - which means that ‘extra’ HP of the camo module just means your ship is left floating around the battlefield with no weapons or engines…
Stryder: I’d lose the armour, take off the two supercharged engines, and mount three lightweight engines. Should be a fair bit faster, maybe cheaper too.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the same boat I’m in.
The only thing that shields protect against are armor breaking beams, otherwise they pop too quickly for 150-200 Space Monies. 
3 Shield Generators seems to offer me a better tank then Armor at least for playing the rebel’s based upon my few days of playing, maybe I should shove 2 slabs on and a advanced armor repair unit. But 3 shields regenerate real fast, even while under some degree of fire, so that small amount of shield protection is actually a deceptively large tank, if you group like 3 of them together, even if your not using fast recharge shields.
Yes, stacking shields - especially fast recharge shields - can be great. The problem comes if the opponent’s ships focus fire effectively. When you get five or more cruisers focusing fire on one, the shields usually go down very very fast - but you need them to stay up a fair while for them to be cost effective compared to just getting hp via more weapons/engines.
If you’re up against a dense formation, shields are of questionable value, beyond the minimum to reflect laser and rocket fighter fire. If you’re up against a looser formation, shields start looking a lot more interesting.
That stacking is true for frigates, too, who have the recharge rates to nearly keep up with the big boys. I think I’m finally starting to understand Empire.
So with my Minotaur design you think I should can drop 2/3rd of my shields and go with 2 armor slabs and a shield or can all 3 shields and go for a 2 armor slabs and a Advanced Armor Repair System?
Its a slow ‘sit in front of long range stuff’ thing right? Your best bet might be 2 Shields, 8-12 armor resist and a repair unit. Once one of your shields go down you’ll start taking damage to your hull so the repair unit will cover that and laser fighter spam. 2 shields are pretty good for mid range combat but you can go 3 if you really want to.
Well if I’m just going to plunk own one slab what is the point? My latest model of cruisers have .30 speed and 3 shields, they have mainly cruiser lasers with a single beam laser to bust down armor, I usually do take some losses but, in the single player missions they seem like they are powerful ships admittedly that maybe the 4 cruiser laser batteries talking but… and then again they aren’t really well rounded ships, if there is a Anomaly that takes down your shields you pretty much have to make a alternate design. actually I could plunk down 1 slab of ultraheavy and a armor repair unit, but I have to sacrafice 2 hardpoints to use as utility slots, and I can get a speed of .31 or so too, but they don’t perform as well.
I have ships like that. My main one is a .29 Panther Cruiser with 4 engines, and 1 slab of armor to put it above 8 and laser fighter range with 4 cruiser lasers and a support weapon. It doesn’t need a repair unit since it’ll get to the enemy before the fighters break the armor. It doesn’t need a bunch of shields since cruisers on the opposing ships would tear them down ridiculously fast. It costs 2.5K as opposed to my 3k+ variants with heavy shields but perform just as well.
The point of putting 1 or 2 pieces of armour on, to get a cruiser to ~10 average armour, is to stop your fleet getting mauled by fighter swarms.
You really can’t judge the quality of a ship by how it performs in the single player missions, those missions are a piece of cake compared to what you see in challenges. In particular, the fighters are usually very badly deployed, and often weak designs.
Challenge yourself on Caspian with a fleet of 300 speed 2.68 rebel laser fighters (Icarus, laser, power I, engine II, engine I), set with the following orders:
Attack Frigates: Priority 100%, range 100
Attack Cruisers: Priority 1%, range 100
Cooperative, Vulture
Without armour on your cruisers, you’ll likely find you lose a big chunk (if not all) your ships, quite quickly. It’s amusing how many challenges on Caspian that this simple deployment will defeat, even though it’s only deploying a third of the points available.
Well the thing is I play rebel almost exclusively, they are my choosen race (I like how there ships look especially the Minotaur) so armor isn’t really a strong option for me (at least I think I read somewhere that armor is weak for rebel players feel free to correct me though if I’m wrong) and I’m likely to try to counter those fighters with other fighters. If rebels are weak with armor it certainly suggests why I have a hard time making a armor tank that outperforms a shield tank in the games I play in, and I have played and beaten a couple of 3 star challenges plasma spam being one of them, though I like to fight diversified fleets at least with fighters and cruiser if not also with frigates, though I don’t use frigates often either, as of late. Though I have made one Armor Tank that worked when I needed it,in that last mission against the Tribe where there is a anomaly that keeps your shields from working, it worked pretty well, it had a nanorepair station to repair the adv. armor repair station which repaired of course the armor, a bit of a regen tank in its self. And granted a good Tribe challenge could have probably floored me if they used the same restrictions.