Am i missing something? whats the point of using advanced armor instead of hull? from what i can gather the block itself is only 3 1/3 times stronger but it weighs 5 times more and costs like FORTY times more. why not use 5 layers of hull? it'd weigh the same and cost WAY less. and the 5 hull would take more damage than 1 advanced armor. the only situation i can think of is a small ship that HAS to be a certain size so it can only have one outer layer.
Am i missing something? whats the point of using advanced armor instead of hull? from what i can gather the block itself is only 3 1/3 times stronger but it weighs 5 times more and costs like FORTY times more. why not use 5 layers of hull? it'd weigh the same and cost WAY less. and the 5 hull would take more damage than 1 advanced armor. the only situation i can think of is a small ship that HAS to be a certain size so it can only have one outer layer.
Sometimes you want a sleek ship to fit into docking area or through Gates. Or you want extra hp near important computers to give them a little bit more protection than the decorative volume has.
But the HP don't really matter as long as it's easier to have a shield > 30% hull strength.
I did some studies of this in very recent past and figured out that for the same effective HP barrier, using advanced takes less mass and much less space, while using hull takes fewer resources and the increased space used aids against projectile/explosion penetration. That said, both are viable options.
I am so happy now mass got added. A medical cabinet now doesn't decrease your ships hp/mass as much anymore.
But is armour still only a multiplier for hp? (as a factor for received damage)
As someone has said, advanced armor gets a reduction in damage. I have a small fighter (less than 200 mass) that has cannon shots that can pierce through 2.5 blocks of advanced armor. That same shot goes through 10 hull blocks, probably more.
thanks for the insight guys. i did find something interesting while testing hull vs adv. pierce does more damage to advanced armor than punch does. but they do equal damage to hull. i tested with a 60missile/60effect array. pierce is on the right, punch on the left.
hull:
advanced armor:
id also like to point out that it took out 9 blocks of adv and 30 blocks of hull. sooooooo three layers of hull offers more protection against that particular weapon than one layer of advanced armor.
i did the same test with cannon/pierce and cannon/punch. punch only damaged one block down to 14hp. pierce destroyed one block and damaged the one behind it down to 6hp.
[DOUBLEPOST=1453579392,1453579173][/DOUBLEPOST]explosive seems to be on par with punch in this case.
although the radius with explosive was 22 vs 17 with punch or pierce. so if you max out that 17 radius with pierce then go to explosive. otherwise use pierce, it seems.
its all about those passives for armor.
If you have both then you have a damage reduction to hits to your armor bar, and you also send more damage to said armor bar.
(unfortunately pierce does not increase block damage reduction anymore like the wiki says)
If you have both, you place some thick advanced armor where you expect to be shot, about 5 blocks thick for every 2-3k mass you weigh, and then have a layer of standard on the sides where you don't expect to take damage, and have multiple layers of hull under/over that standard armor and under your advanced armor.
The basic hull spam will increase the health of the armor bar which your advanced armor blocks will simply guzzle when you are under fire.
In terms of design construction:
Have interior armors!
Place strips of advanced armor around your power lines to reduce the chance that early fight damage will cripple your power generation, and hence your weapons which you will need.
Place bulkheads of advanced armor in your ship. I usually have one in front of the core room because that is where everyone aims. Have them more concentrated towards the front, to stop cannon rounds that penetrated your front armor and would otherwise rip through the rest of your ship once the passed through that.
Have advanced armor under the front sides of the armor too. If they hit your front at an angle, and it goes through the standard and basic hull, it will have to pen the advanced as well, and usually lose a lot the expected penetration when it does so.
Have armor under your turret mounts. AI Missiles love to target your turrets so to prevent interior damage when they are blown off, add some advanced armor surrounding your turret well.
In the mid and aft sections of the ship, have bulkheads of basic hull. Not only will it add slightly more protection to an area you might not be shot at, but it increases the armor bar and reduces ship weight (weighs half of a system).
Have your RP interior be near the skin of the vessel and near the front if you need to have interiors. Have them act as spaced armor for missile blasts and as bulkheads that they need to cut through, don't let them eat up valuable system space in the rear and center of your ship.
Have missile traps!
In one of the blood and steel fights, I think it was scorpion vs a swarmer boat, the scorpion ship had decorative pincers on the front/back of it (I don't recall which way it was facing). As the missiles arced in, they were traveling slowly due to him moving away from them as they were gaining. They detonated on the first point they contacted, which was the tip of the pincers that were solid advanced. Because of the awesome damage models for missiles we have now, only maybe 10-15% of the damage went to the ship, while 80-90% of each missiles damage was wasted into space. Same with the final fight when I flew the Deimos. I tried to get the missiles to detonate on the top and bottom of my vertical ship, because they have the least amount of surface area, and thus would do less amounts of damage (plus ripping sideways through the ship would kill my power lines).
Having small bits of reinforced sections that stick out and detonate missiles on their really small surface area is a great idea. The front of the Washtenaw is in a small point and we have found that with testing it takes missile pretty well, with only 25-35% of the missile rated damage being applied to the shields. And when the shields drop, the missiles hits and blows away the decorative standard armor and that leaves the advanced armor underneath that to maintain the pointed front profile.
Shape of ship is the number one factor however, for the survivablility of an armor tank.
You need to have a slim profile. Not only does that cause for potentially some shots to miss, but then you have sloped armor.
Say you have 5 blocks of armor covering the systems from the side. If hit from the front, thats 5 blocks of armor the shot needs to travel through instead of one when hit from the side. (visits CC and pulls a ship from the front page) Take Jerry_Brinefield 's Raider class corvette for example: the ship is a needle point and the enemy can see ALL the side armor from the front. However, the side armor they see on jerry's ship is a hepta followed by 3-4 wedges. That's probably 5 layers of armor if not more that they need to pen if they are shooting at the side from the front. If it is 2 thick, then that increases to 10 layers. Three thick and your looking at 15 layers to pen from the front. And assuming that Jerry's corvette has forward facing guns, it will be facing you constantly with it's front (so it can shoot you) or swinging around to face you if you are trying to get behind it.
Needle and delta shaped profiles are superior to all other shapes when armor tanking. Conic or triangular causes the side armor you needed to have anyways contribute to the fight as thick sloped armor, and it helps with a slim profile that enemy shots might miss you more. You want to have your front surface area be as small as possible in comparison with your other faces so the armor you place their will be used and not wasted. You will need less internal armor as well.
Their are downsides to needle and delta shapes. You will have less volume for your box dimensions as other ships. You will need to sacrifice the durability (armor) of your ship from attacks at different angles in order to maximize the pain they need to endure when they need to remove blocks from your front arc. Take the thick armor other people put on the sides and rear and put it on your bow. Your ship will have a tendency to be really long, with narrow Y and X axis's and you will need to place more thrust into rotation than other ships will.
because of your super long tapered side, while you are unkillable from the front, if their is two or more ships attacking you, your at an immediate disadvantage. Beware of the MSU's (Multiple Small Units), don't be suckered into a fight because it looks like you outmass them all.
Because of your reduced internal volume due to your ship shape and the armor you placed on it, you will have to sacrifice some system.
You cannot sacrifice your punch and pierce defensive effects because they are what makes armor effective and usable in a fight.
You might not be able to sacrifice your thrust, as you need a lot of it to make sure you can strafe left/right/up/down to avoid their face and turn to keep your face on them. Just because your and armor TANK doesn't mean you should act like your slow, you should try to juke as much as possible. Try spinning, that's a good trick. Don't let then hammer a hole into one spot of your armor to reach the juicy systems inside of it. Don't let them ignore the rest of your armor, be mean and make them remove your armor layer by layer.
Because of that, you are left with power, shields, other passives, docked equipment, and weapons. Power regeneration is usually easy because it is just box dimentions. Power storage you will need to shave some millions off of, so your ship will tend to be more of a DPS style ship than a alpha striker. I will get back to that in a moment. You will also find that you only have room for a token amount of shields, maybe only 1/10th the amount other people have. In this case I would recommend plenty of regen and a docked injector that can supply a small amount of shields to eliminate the 'SHIELDS DOWN (10 sec)' penalty. Advanced armor is your shields now, and basic hull is your shield capacitors. Your shields are their to protect you from the first strike until you get close and under missile range. Shield drain beams are also a fun option, not as your main but as something you click as your shooting your machine guns.
Because of the fact that power storage is space heavy and power regeneration is not, your armor tanker will be best optimized as a DPS buzzsaw boat. Max out as much power regen as you can, and add the biggest cannon-cannon-punch weapon that you can afford. You probably wont have the space to add multiple weapon systems (like a cannon-cannon-ion with a cannon-cannon-pierce) so your gonna take the biggest gun and strap the best multi-role gun on it credits can buy. Punch. Punch deals additional armor damage with no downside to shields, and shield drain beams, if installed, ignore ion while topping your depleted shields off with their own.
Drain+Pulse means you have a tick every 5 seconds, for 30 seconds, so you swap to your machine gun for the 4 seconds in-between the ticks while managing your power to avoid any outages.
Now, due to the fact that you will most likely have a main gun that the size of a ship-class above you, coupled with the shape and build of an armor tanker, your plan should be to get in close, maybe have some small missiles to fire off as you close the gap (they should use up all of your low power capacity per shot) and wreck there face. Being in close means your juking movements will be many degrees more of change than the same movement at 5km out.
(if someone standing in front of you takes 10 paces to the left, you need to turn your entire body nearly 90 degrees to track them, while if the same person took ten paces to the left at the other end of a football field, you need to only adjust maybe half a degree to keep yourself centered and looking at them.)
Being in close means you are putting significantly more stress on them as your in their face instead of sitting still 10km away calmly lobbing missiles out the hatch. You get to control more of what part of your ship they get to shoot at, and maybe make them miss more.
Being in close means your cannon-cannon's will be more effective, and you can out-damage as they wait for their weapon to reload.
HOWEVER, DON'T RAM THEM (unless you have a logic pulse-cannon-pierce bayonet equipped (pierce does full shield damage on pulse and missile weapons btw)
Ramming them causes the server to lag and screws with both your field of views, then you have to reacquire each-other and reface your ships at one another. This is all wasted time that your machineguns are not shooting, while his missiles and other alpha strike guns are reloading! Don't let them ram you either! As tempting as it is, it's a big downside to your DPS boat while the missiles continue to reload through the lag.
Last point:
Be mindful of your armor bar. Most ships are basically dead when their shields are down. Your ship is dead when the armor bar depletes, and it doesn't regenerate. When your shields are down and your tanking hits to the hull, your structure HP should never fall below 90% before your armor bar is depleted. If it does, you probably were outplayed or something was built wrong, and your ship needs more testing btw. Because both of your effects deal with buffing the armor bar, once it is gone you will crumple fast, no matter how much armor is left. You will start taking over 4 times more damage to your ship than you were being dealt before, and that will start to remove blocks quickly.
While you have 4x damage mitigation (instead of the 2.5x you can achieve with shields) and will always have more Armor HP than shield HP of a ship of similar size, (and you should be dealing more damage faster than any ship of your size class as well), you lack health regeneration like that of shields and will need to scrap your own ship after a fight anyways and rebuild it. While their are 3 weapon effects that deal more damage to armor than the one effect that counters shields (ion effect), you see more of the ion effect than pierce, punch, and explosive combined usually, and ion is more of a hard counter to shields while the other three reduce the armor tanking effectiveness but don't counter it completely like ion does to shields. And having the token amount of shields with good regen and a shield supply to ignore shield out phases (and keep your rechargers in the game longer) diminishes the effectiveness of people using pierce weapons on you.
That's just some of my advice when making armor tankers. It takes significantly more thought and more testing than other ships when building, and should always still include some shields. It also rewards you with some of the strongest and most durable vessels in starmade when built right.
Make sure you give your targets full pierce/punch passives when shooting at them! :P Also 100% pierce missiles still damage shields, almost no reason why to use overdrive over pierce unless you want the additional shield damage overdrive brings. No reason to use explosive effect on missiles because punch and pierce increase blast radius as well as other goodies. Try a Cannon+Pulse+10%Explosive effect though.
Okay, good. I'll add a few musings of my own that may occasionally apply.
First, make use of 'empty' hull space to fit your interiors. I know having windows on your ship's exterior is considered sacrilege by some... But having all that 'air' in your crew quarters and transporter rooms be hull-side instead of taking up prime weapon module space can add an extra bit of space efficiency making mixed RP/combat ships even more attractive. It can be difficult to do this without making it look like there are houses growing out of your ship but with some practice it will look nice.
Second, scaffolding. It deserves a weedle bit more attention. It's not armor and doesn't add/draw from the AHP pool. It has the same block HP as a hull block, an equivalent resource cost, and a fifth of the mass. If you REALLY need to shave off mass without presenting a bare weak-point for the enemy to exploit then scaffolding is a good alternative to traditional armoring solutions. It is only half as protective per block as hull but the difference in effectiveness narrows against high alpha weapons.
Third, warheads. Yeah, yeah, they do no damage. Until you look at the armor bar which took a... Strangely large beating. It is likely a bug, but at the time of my testing warheads were channeling almost all of their damage into the victim's AHP bar. You still need to make an effective delivery system and ensure they aren't taken out by omnipresent turrets or swarmers. I'm not saying use them. But do be aware of them and if you are armor tanking and see a warhead drone charging you, do toss a shell at it. Getting rammed by a 25x8-warhead multistage torpedo can easily shave millions off your armor bar even if it doesn't break the armor blocks themselves.
If it doesn't add to AHP pool, it's still 2.5 times HP. You just have to make sure, all scaffolding dies before your AHP get drained. Looks like a messy bug.
You also have to care for not blocking turret lines of sight too.
If it doesn't add to AHP pool, it's still 2.5 times HP. You just have to make sure, all scaffolding dies before your AHP get drained. Looks like a messy bug.
How does structure health work again? Is the structure health of the block how much is added when placed, or how much is removed upon death? If not, how much is removed? MrFURB halp
Would be cool to have the most actual one in the wiki.
Posts randomize their position based on search input and newest post - no good way to recover valuable information if it requires to be up-to-date. confusing to newbies too.
How does structure health work again? Is the structure health of the block how much is added when placed, or how much is removed upon death? If not, how much is removed? MrFURB halp
Structure is separate from the block's own health. Armor gives 5 structure points, decorations usually give 10, and most systems give 100+. That much (multiplied by the bonus/penalty for amount of system blocks) is removed upon the block's death.
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