Does anyone used Crystal-Infused Plating? Worth it?

[Kalemenos]

If I take a corvette, and add plating, it takes the place of a slot which could be used for armor or shield. These are the numbers:
(With CI Plating) Hull: +65
Nanocomposite Armor: +100
Shields Lvl III: +125.
Losing 100 Ar or 125 Sh to get 65 Hull... is it worth it do you think?

[Elitewrecker PT]

It's worth it if the enemy is using penetrating weapons, which should also become more likely as shield/armor repeatables accumulate..

[God of Snacks]

Yes it's worth it. Not on corvettes though. My ships slots are half armor, 25% crystal, 25% shields. except corvettes since they only have 3 slots, they use 2 armor 1 shield

[Bumc]

You'd use it late on battleships against shield/armor ignoring enemies, but now shield/armor hardening + actual shield-armor seems better, and benefits from repeatable tech.

Early game on smaller ships doesn't seem to make sense really, unless I'm missing something like safer escaping (when you don't get one-shot past the escape threshold).

[Ryika]

From what I can tell, against the AI the main benefit of Plating is that it's pretty cheap, but that's about it.

The AI basically never uses enough penetrating weapons to kill your ships before its other weapons have gone through your other types of defense with no plating present, so you don't really benefit much from it even in the case of using penetrating weapons.

A setup of armor and as much shield as you have energy for will do better in almost all cases. Or, since most AIs spam auto cannons due to their high tooltip dps, you can also go full armor as a blind counter.

[CrUsHeR]

IIRC - they were very good before patch 3.6. The improved version you get from defeating the "crystal ball" entity was almost mandatory.

Now after their nerf they are so bad, they barely pass as early game gadget.
I believe that is because:


1) They added Shield/Armor Hardening mechanics, giving different means of defense against piercing weapons (however these are very limited for ships with 1 Aux slot)

2) For the same reason, the hull bonus techs have been nerfed. Example the Improved Corvette Hulls have something like +100 or +200, now they give 10% which equals +20

3) Additionally the smaller ship size hulls were nerfed, at least the Corvette. Perhaps to make room for the Frigate, which doesn't really have a spot of its own yet (besides dying all the time)

And i believe the devs wanted to see more attrition, because fleet designs following the new weapon types tend to have abhorrent casualites.
Example you go all out on Shield Hardening, replacing the Afterburners. Then you have slow ships with poor evasion which can't catch up with fast ships. And they are much worse once they run into enemies not using piercing weapons.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Elitewrecker PT:

It's worth it if the enemy is using penetrating weapons, which should also become more likely as shield/armor repeatables accumulate..

I would have said this is true before 3.6, and specifically against players and the AI empires that use penetrating weapons, since the AI doesn't switch to them later. But now with armor/shield hardening, it's probably better to counter penetrating weapons with that rather than adding a bit more hull.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Originally posted by Elitewrecker PT:

It's worth it if the enemy is using penetrating weapons, which should also become more likely as shield/armor repeatables accumulate..

I would have said this is true before 3.6, and specifically against players and the AI empires that use penetrating weapons, since the AI doesn't switch to them later. But now with armor/shield hardening, it's probably better to counter penetrating weapons with that rather than adding a bit more hull.

That requires the aux slots though.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Elitewrecker PT:

That requires the aux slots though.

Yeah but it's way stronger than crystal-forged plating

[Terijian]

isnt infused just a weaker version of forged

[Kalemenos]

Some of you mention "hardening." If I add a "shield hardening," my shield number doesn't go up for that ship. What does hardening do?

[God of Snacks]

shield hardeners and reactive armors prevent them from being penetrated by weapons that normally would. IE Missiles are supposed to ignore shields, with shield hardeners, they theoretically wouldnt (some of them)

[Oakshadow]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

Some of you mention "hardening." If I add a "shield hardening," my shield number doesn't go up for that ship. What does hardening do?

It adds a percentage damage reduction to bypass.

In other words, if you have 50% shield hardening, and someone uses a missile that deals 30 damage, 15 of that damage will still get absorbed by the shield while the other 15 will bypass. It's not going to completely prevent damage getting through to your hull / armor.... but it can mitigate quite a lot of it. Particularly since most bypass weapons don't get any bonus damage against what they bypass... also they tend to have lower damage over all then other weapon types.