Crystal infused plating

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How useful is it and when should you use it?

[Army Pea]

Increases your ships HP

Useful as ships disengagement is based on hull points

[cooltv27]

its alright, the effective hit points given by armor or shields is much greater than what crystal plating gives.

[Xgpmcnp]

Usually I use them in Crisis where they completely pierce shields or armor, where I replace the pierced part by infused plating. Also if you don't have enough power for a design, you can replace a shield or two for plating to make it viable until the next power core. It's also good for hit and run tactics due to disengagement chances, or agaisnt enemies who completely pierce shields and armors.

[cooltv27]

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Also if you don't have enough power for a design, you can replace a shield or two for plating to make it viable until the next power core

you can replace a shield with an armor as crystal plating has lower health values.

it is still useful against anything that ignores armor and shields

[Xgpmcnp]

Originally posted by cooltv27:

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Also if you don't have enough power for a design, you can replace a shield or two for plating to make it viable until the next power core

you can replace a shield with an armor as crystal plating has lower health values.

it is still useful against anything that ignores armor and shields

Lower health values but it helps with various other factors like disengagement chances. I'd rather have a bit of crystal and a lot of armor than just armor, honestly.

[cooltv27]

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Originally posted by cooltv27:

you can replace a shield with an armor as crystal plating has lower health values.

it is still useful against anything that ignores armor and shields

Lower health values but it helps with various other factors like disengagement chances. I'd rather have a bit of crystal and a lot of armor than just armor, honestly.

armor lets you stay in a fight before having to disengage or being destroyed, and I would rather do more damage to my enemy. besides with the full corvette fleets I use I disengage often enough anyways.

[Xgpmcnp]

Originally posted by cooltv27:

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Lower health values but it helps with various other factors like disengagement chances. I'd rather have a bit of crystal and a lot of armor than just armor, honestly.

armor lets you stay in a fight before having to disengage or being destroyed, and I would rather do more damage to my enemy. besides with the full corvette fleets I use I disengage often enough anyways.

Depends really. If I'm just suicide running a large fleet I know I can't destroy, I'd rather disengage more to reduce the costs of rebuilding, because the longer time I'd spend fighting wouldn't be that important considering there would be less ships so the damage done would be meaningless.

[cooltv27]

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Originally posted by cooltv27:

armor lets you stay in a fight before having to disengage or being destroyed, and I would rather do more damage to my enemy. besides with the full corvette fleets I use I disengage often enough anyways.

Depends really. If I'm just suicide running a large fleet I know I can't destroy, I'd rather disengage more to reduce the costs of rebuilding, because the longer time I'd spend fighting wouldn't be that important considering there would be less ships so the damage done would be meaningless.

I generally have enough minerals that im not bothered by having to replace a lot of ships if I have to suicide into things. which happens a lot against federation fleets

[Xgpmcnp]

Originally posted by cooltv27:

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Depends really. If I'm just suicide running a large fleet I know I can't destroy, I'd rather disengage more to reduce the costs of rebuilding, because the longer time I'd spend fighting wouldn't be that important considering there would be less ships so the damage done would be meaningless.

I generally have enough minerals that im not bothered by having to replace a lot of ships if I have to suicide into things. which happens a lot against federation fleets

I mean, however good your mineral production is, it's hard to rebuild 2-3 full fleets when trying to fight the L-Gate earlier than you should. Even Authoritarians would have mineral outages after a couple rebuilds if they go all-out.

[cooltv27]

Originally posted by Xgpmcnp:

Originally posted by cooltv27:

I generally have enough minerals that im not bothered by having to replace a lot of ships if I have to suicide into things. which happens a lot against federation fleets

I mean, however good your mineral production is, it's hard to rebuild 2-3 full fleets when trying to fight the L-Gate earlier than you should. Even Authoritarians would have mineral outages after a couple rebuilds if they go all-out.

well the issue there isnt mineral production, its the L gate being open, but ya thats definately a situation that would require me to change my strategy

[MightyFox]

I love crystal plating and have used it in a lot of my games.

First level crystal plating is okay. It is about equivilent in HP to 4th level armor and sheilds, but the reason you take it is there are fewer weapons that do bonuse damage to hull, and it can combo with regenerative hull tissue.

Second level plating is awsome, but hard to find. (You have to destroy or study the crystal nexus) Its basiclay the hull equivilent of dragon scales as it gives more HP than 5th level sheilds and armor, which is already a boon, and like before, combos well with regenerative effects. The only downside is if you make it the only thing you stack, anti-hull weapons will become very effective against you.

One of my persoanl faviorite combos is all armor and forge plating with regenerative accessories. It's very tanky, and you don't have to return to the starbase for reparis all the time. Downside is it's most effective only if you go all in, that means finding living metal, nanoreplicators, and taking the repair aura for your titans. It locks you into a specific armor build, but can be very powerful, especilally with shield nullifiers from your bases and anti armor/hull weapons combos.

[Belhedler]

Nothing special or hard to figure. This game is pretty binary to mix-max. This works the best for whatever you face and FE/AE are a perfect example of use:
- kinetic (50%+ shield damage, -25%+ armor damage): counter with armor
- energy (50%+ armor damage, -25%+ shield damage): counter with shields
- missiles: guardian, but who still uses missiles nowadays?
- anti-hull: counter with shields usually as anti-hull also means anti-armor at the same time for most weapons
- xray and other long range shield/armor passthrough: counter with plating
- short range shield/armor passthrough and aircraft: counter with range
- small evasive ships: counter with PD/aircrafts unless they are equipped with short range passthrough in which case prefer destroyers/cruisers with M/L decent tracking weaponry
- beware/trick of/with -100% shield from pulsar systems, may use a special fleet and starbase packed with energy weapons and full armor/hull anti armor/hull, utilities go to regen, better aim and/or afterburner
- in the current version, I found aircrafts of AE escorters to be deadly to my corvets and destroyers so beware of that because as even having more plating won't do much of a difference as the hull is quite low on these after all.
- unless you have Leviathan DLC plating goodie, you won't be as efficient in plating than you are in armor/shields especially late game.
- since it's very rare to boost plating in the game, the single strategic resource that gives +20% (Neutronium ore) is a must have if you can. Just below Living Metal in matter of importance I'd say. It's likely mostly you, and your federation if you are part of one, will benefit from it in your game. Third and fourth desired resources should be both +20% armor and shield strategic resources. They are a bit more common and less of a critical resource for fights. Remember that plundering such resources from ennemies might mean you actually increase by 40% your force power (20% removed from your ennemy plus +20% added to yours)
- be mindful of distances of use. Anti-armor weapons usually have a mid range. Only XL slot has long range.
- be mindful of attack rate. Low attack rate is quite easily countered by having a designed unit take the hit while you retaliate just after that. Using a defensive starbase for that purpose proved to be most effective mean of use for that strategy as my battleships would destroy the ennemy ones in retaliation of starbase taking first hits and having ennemy dangerous weapons on CD. Works especially well against Titans.
- for tanky units you have either full high shields or regenerative high hull/armor depending of what you are facing.
- reconfiguring your fleet units is easy by using the ship manager to change/add your ship templates, then use the fleet manager to swap templates for new ones and then upgrade (reconfigure) your navy to apply your new/updated templates

Shields cost the more in energy power. Armor and plating cost no energy. If you load too many shields it's likely the base energy production won't be enough and you'll need a capacitor as one of your utility slot.

I've just destroyed a navy worth 500k of an hostile technologist AE in several successive 'assaults' with roughly a navy of 300k, most encounters were by luring then defending a system of mine stacking Bulkwark of Harmony bonus and +10% damage from specific starbase building. It ended up with less than 10% loss on my side. I did not have any pulsar, living metal nor any military strategic resource to chease it further through. Playing tall as its downsides for that.

[kyorinrin]

Originally posted by Belhedler:

- missiles: guardian, but who still uses missiles nowadays?
- anti-hull: counter with shields usually as anti-hull also means anti-armor at the same time for most weapons

It's entirely possible that I'm wrong, but don't disrupters completely ignore armor and shields? Therefore Crystal Plating (more hull) is it's counter. Between that and increasing your odds of disengaging without getting destroyed I wouldn't say a little bit of Crystal Plating is a bad thing.

And I hope that missile bit was sarcastic, because last I heard missile corvettes are still a thing, you just take a lot more heavy losses (and thus WE) in the long run due to not being able to disengage as well. They still kill about the same.

[cooltv27]

disrupters are a pretty bad weapon, ignoring armor and shields isnt enough to make up for the little damage they do

[Belhedler]

Originally posted by kyorinrin:

don't disrupters completely ignore armor and shields?

If you check the damage count you'll see that it goes from about 145 on a decent L kinetic + M energy weapons destroyer to... 18 with disruptors alone. What a joke. However, while I discard disruptors, Arc emitter is good against small numbers of large ship (battleships and higher). Pretty much all ennemies hull is their weakness. If you have a weapon with a high enough output damage then you should consider making part of your force a hull only annihilation force. It is efficient enough to deal the Titan's massive shields and armor.

Originally posted by kyorinrin:

They still kill about the same.

Not in my game. Regulator AE literally wiped these units without any effort at all. I'm stacking battleships against it as it's by far the most efficient to deal with it. Anything you'll face from mid to end will be packed full of PD counters. Don't even bother. It's not worth unlocking the missile tech tree for that (torpedoes are on an other tech branch) or you'll cripple your repeated tech options on the long run. You're actually doing yourself a favor of not providing any target to the ennemy PD and thus making these slots totaly wasted for them. A combination of high level kinetic and energy is good to deal with pretty much anything. I'd go with devastator destroyers against corvettes if I where to find some which is pretty much saying never after some time.