How much armor is enough armor?

[Hellfire]

Even thick-skull Paradox learned that numbers and systems must be clear and in the open. Not these devs. Anyway, since I'm free to put on ships any amount of armor without any reference, do more experienced playres know how much armor is enough armor to have my ships reliably withstand a decent amount of alien fire?

[TargetLost]

i started with what the autodesign for space superior suggested:
5 - 5 - 20 (admantide or how it is calleD)

but that seems a bit weak and your ships get rip apart much too fast.
So I doubled it in mid game:
10 - 10 - 40

That looks pretty optimal to me. They hold well given you have a good point defence,

I am in end game and tried
15 - 15 - 60

But that doesn't seems to make any significant difference anymore.

So for me I would say 10 - 10 - 40 is just fine.

[Veniczar B. Fontana]

Originally posted by Sunny:

Lern to fight manuall.
50 side and rear is massive overkill to weight.
10 - 10 if you know what to do in space combat

There are 8 or 9 point defence arrays on each alien platform. With a limited number of ships for economical reasons, it was impossible to destroy all of them before having one of these arrays in my flank fire arc. By the way they were meant to be slow to minimize this risk.

So yup I knew what I was doing. Protecting the flanks to avoid being destroyed by any flanking shot, armoring the rear in case I'd have to perform a full stop.

Some people send 40-50 suicide ships with missiles at a station, Stalingrad style, I destroy these with 5 finely tuned dreadnoughts.

[TargetLost]

Thing is.. if I have more than 10 ships in my fleet the overflow enters the battle one by one whenever one ship is lost... (i believe there is a slider for this in the settings? my PC somehow set that automatical and yes it is an older one)

Pretty pointless to me to have more than 10 ships becaiuse of this since th enew entry is far away of the goup. Also it makes haveing smaler ship a no go for me since they take a battle slot. I ended up haveing fleets with Battleships and dreads only and always not mor ethan 10 in total. And yes I can destroy alien fleets including the heavy protected space station but not without losing one or 2 ships.

[Soul]

Armor is a trap to waste resources. I'd rather have 100 barely armored agile ships than 10 heavily armored ones that can barely move. I regular run fleets over 50 battlecruisers primarily by mid game. Sometimes its worth it to make a superheavily armored Titan to tank stations thats about it though.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

Originally posted by Hellfire:

do more experienced players know how much armor is enough armor to have my ships reliably withstand a decent amount of alien fire?

here is your answer,

design your ship without armor

now look at your Cruise Acceleration.


for interceptors in LEO you want around 75

for siegecraft you can deal with 15.

as for DV you want enough to do the job intended - by the end of the game my ships were designed with 2600, that was almost enough. but 60 is "good enough" to get somewhere and refuel in the mid game

Combat maneuverability (as of this writing) is pointless anyone that says otherwise is trolling. along with anyone putting more than 30 ships in a fleet since thats the cap...

distribute your armor, as such, 50% of your weight of armor up front, 35% on the lateral and 15% on the rear

the lateral and rear are just there to soak up stray shots of plasma that get through your PD net. remember to tuck in your radiators. and use 1 slot lasers in addition to a PD laser i find work best to stop all but plasma getting through.

the optimal group of dreadnoughts is 15, no more no less. Expect to lose one dread per alien station you encounter and rebuild / reinforce appropriately

the optimal group of battlecrusier (interceptors in LEO) is.. two groups of 5 - first group encounters, second group actually fights, don't chase with tons of DV

you only need those 3 fleets to win the game, anymore you run into bugs that make you lose ships as "reinforcements" any less and your PD net cant keep up.

you will need a victory fleet, that intercepts ships in space at the end of the game if you don't dare leave earth undefended at that point.

[Hellfire]

Many thanks, almost the kind of answer I was looking for (you still didn't give me your estimate of how much armor is enough armor)... before I had met another systemic crash, one of the countless, and this time rewinding the game by three autosaves didn't work. I think I'm done with this game, too much ♥♥♥♥ to put up with, at some point the effort is not worth anymore.

[corisai]

Funny how many players here never tried to assault Alien Orbitals (because of their opinion "armor isn't important" ).

Originally posted by Hellfire:

Many thanks, almost the kind of answer I was looking for (you still didn't give me your estimate of how much armor is enough armor)...

A good rule of thumb (based on how's chipping working) for frontal armor is 150% of max damage you're gonna to take. So ~70 frontal armor is bare minimum to assault enemy stations because of their plasma.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

Originally posted by Hellfire:

Many thanks, almost the kind of answer I was looking for (you still didn't give me your estimate of how much armor is enough armor)... before I had met another systemic crash, one of the countless, and this time rewinding the game by three autosaves didn't work. I think I'm done with this game, too much ♥♥♥♥ to put up with, at some point the effort is not worth anymore.

50 nose and 35 lateral and 15 rear armor is what my end game antimatter ships ended up with -Thus the Formula, 50/35/15 % based on your current DV and cruise speed you can tolerate.

for reference, i used to do the 40/10/10, and would loose 2 or 3 dreads per station, (in groups of 15) the AM ships never lost one, the lateral armor prevents the stray shots that get around the nose armor. the rear armors never came up as damaged, but "10" was getting killed on lateral, so the 15 makes them 50% more effective.

the AM ships never lost a ship even to the stupid reinforcements bug of appearing inside their station, it simply tanked it rather well.

i am waiting for the next patch to start "game 2" as it were myself, the bug that kept my autosaves from working was i "think" the number of garbage in LEO reached like 3 and i kept trying to remove 6, which i believe crashed the game... when i chose to skip that event the game continued.

with a decent cruise speed - the fusion ships ended up with 15cruise and would take around 6 weeks to travel anywhere in the system, and that was sufficient enough (due to 2600 DV not cruise speed)

[corisai]

Originally posted by Fairin the Drakitty:

for reference, i used to do the 40/10/10, and would loose 2 or 3 dreads per station, (in groups of 15) the AM ships never lost one, the lateral armor prevents the stray shots that get around the nose armor. the rear armors never came up as damaged, but "10" was getting killed on lateral, so the 15 makes them 50% more effective.

I have a bad news for you :)

You lose ships not because of 10 sides armor as sides hits are very rare in case of station fights. You lose ships because plasma guns chipping your frontal armor.

50 frontal armor is also somewhat low against stations but I guess you're using plasma and that's saving you (as plasma being a best tool against stations).

Still expect losses against enemy Battlestations.

[wei270]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Fairin the Drakitty:

for reference, i used to do the 40/10/10, and would loose 2 or 3 dreads per station, (in groups of 15) the AM ships never lost one, the lateral armor prevents the stray shots that get around the nose armor. the rear armors never came up as damaged, but "10" was getting killed on lateral, so the 15 makes them 50% more effective.

I have a bad news for you :)

You lose ships not because of 10 sides armor as sides hits are very rare in case of station fights. You lose ships because plasma guns chipping your frontal armor.

50 frontal armor is also somewhat low against stations but I guess you're using plasma and that's saving you (as plasma being a best tool against stations).

Still expect losses against enemy Battlestations.

actually in my experience coil are best option against stations are long as you can saturate their defense.

however if you don't know at what point you can get that saturation you will die a horrible death.

[OrangSemut]

Originally posted by TargetLost:

Thing is.. if I have more than 10 ships in my fleet the overflow enters the battle one by one whenever one ship is lost... (i believe there is a slider for this in the settings? my PC somehow set that automatical and yes it is an older one)

Did you change the max ships setting? The default is 30 ships (in total). You will go over that number if you're attacking an alien station with a defending fleet. I had that problem and I changed my max ships setting to 90 vessels.

My siege battleships and dreadnoughts mount 75 and 170 armour, respectively. Anything less would be iffy with the amount of plasma fire they take from alien defences. They are not the fastest of ships, but they don't need to be.

Since I like a nice, slow plodding approach with the nose pointed towards the aliens, I skimped on side armour. The BBs only have 5 and the Dreads have 8. I rely on killing the defending alien ships before they can slip by.

[Kuro]

You need point defence phasers, I put 4 on dreadnoughts and 2 on Titans. That you have to watch out of enemy Frigs and corvettes flanking you. My ships armor is like 10-20 in back 4-5 on sides ad 20-30 on front. I have less for my frigates and corvettes. I'm currently fighting with 120 ships vs 180 Aliens ships in a 90k doomstack and winning. Alien kinetics is absolutely stupid and would destroy like 1/3 of your ships before they even start firing lasers, after that, the fight is pretty even

[Veniczar B. Fontana]

Originally posted by Kuro:

You need point defence phasers, I put 4 on dreadnoughts and 2 on Titans. That you have to watch out of enemy Frigs and corvettes flanking you. My ships armor is like 10-20 in back 4-5 on sides ad 20-30 on front. I have less for my frigates and corvettes. I'm currently fighting with 120 ships vs 180 Aliens ships in a 90k doomstack and winning. Alien kinetics is absolutely stupid and would destroy like 1/3 of your ships before they even start firing lasers, after that, the fight is pretty even

Yes it works very well against most alien ships. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure you can even win with half your ships. Cause the alien ship designing skills are just so low..

However against ships or battle stations with plasma... 30 armor will block the first hits but repeated shots will destroy you easily. Cause plasma can't be intercepted by PDs.

If the aliens add more plasma ships to their fleet in later build of the game, you'd have to change your layout to include at least 50 frontal armor. Good news is : with endgame thrusters, 50 frontal armor is really not a problem.

[ulzgoroth]

Alien plasma damage is low. It's pretty easy to counter with armor, and you don't need all that much unless they bring out heavy cannons or batteries.

It can chip armor. It's not great at it, but better than lasers, and if there's a lot of it and you're winning slowly (like attacking a ring station probably) that's likely to become a problem.


Really everything you need to know about armor levels is the strength of incoming weapons. And the only thing about that that's at all hard to understand is how lasers work. Lasers multiply effective target armor by a factor that scales with probably the square of range. Values at 1/2/500m are listed. So at long range even a few points of armor can block lasers. At close enough range, you need enormous amounts of armor. Have at least a little armor everywhere so that you can survive long-range laser fire!

[Veniczar B. Fontana]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Alien plasma damage is low. It's pretty easy to counter with armor, and you don't need all that much unless they bring out heavy cannons or batteries.

It can chip armor. It's not great at it, but better than lasers, and if there's a lot of it and you're winning slowly (like attacking a ring station probably) that's likely to become a problem.

As of now only alien stations can do this, you're right. I was just imagining what well designed alien ships might do. Like having a few ships with heavy plasma weaponry, or even dedicated dreadnought firing only plasma instead of firing only missiles like they do now.