How useful actually is armour?

[Dr. Whammy]

if you havent, try using ion effect passive with oversized shield rechargers. You'll be surprised how much damage you can tank. Only give it enough capacity to survive a missile/high damage volley you'd expect to take. Then you'll see your shields shoot back up

I've tried it but I found that strategy ineffective for ships in my preferred size class. I've seen physically larger ships of the same mass pull it off, due to having a higher volume of internal space. They were very tanky, but they had almost no armor.

Most of my ships are equipped to counter heavy shields. Those that are rigged for anti-armor have no problem getting through tough shields as well. When I can use a Pathfinder-sized ship to drop 1m shields in 1-5 shots, I'm betting that other players can do it was well. I find that armor is a good thing to have in that circumstance.

Then again, it's not always about tanking enemy fire. Sometimes the "return to sender" option is a good way to survive a fight.

 

[GDPR 302420]

1m shields in 1-5 shots

Only 1m?

 

[silverfoe]

I've tried it but I found that strategy ineffective for ships in my preferred size class. I've seen physically larger ships of the same mass pull it off, due to having a higher volume of internal space. They were very tanky, but they had almost no armor.

Most of my ships are equipped to counter heavy shields. Those that are rigged for anti-armor have no problem getting through tough shields as well. When I can use a Pathfinder-sized ship to drop 1m shields in 1-5 shots, I'm betting that other players can do it was well. I find that armor is a good thing to have in that circumstance.

Then again, it's not always about tanking enemy fire. Sometimes the "return to sender" option is a good way to survive a fight.

alright. Do you by any chance have a dl link for the ships you use that are armor tanked? ive never really tested trying to fit two different ships with two different types of defenciveness. perhaps i could make one of your armor tank ships be even better (or worse lol) by giving it a heavy shield tank. im tbh just curious, i only make ships on gut feeling what feels good when fighting ai.

 

[Az14el]

AI is just not a very good reference for judging PvP systems, mostly because they fly predictably and without full thrust, won't utilise select fire or stagger their firing order, and won't utilize passive effects. So PvE focused ships are usually pretty different, lower engagement speeds & more durability makes sense in this case, not so much vs other players who are more clever & autonomous than a bobby AI module (and... well honestly sometimes not, you never know~)

 

[Dr. Whammy]

alright. Do you by any chance have a dl link for the ships you use that are armor tanked? ive never really tested trying to fit two different ships with two different types of defenciveness. perhaps i could make one of your armor tank ships be even better (or worse lol) by giving it a heavy shield tank. im tbh just curious, i only make ships on gut feeling what feels good when fighting ai.

Type-6 Pathfinders are already very heavily shielded for their size. There is literally no more room for additional shields, passives or weapons without a complete teardown and rebuild. When the power update is released, I'm definitely doing a few refits but it's kind of a moot point until then.

If you want to know more, PM me and we can go into further detail.

 

[El_Shanta]

be sparing on armor, liberal on hull, good advice if it weren't so bleedingly obvious.

testing should be done versus players, there's very little point "PvPing" the AI to judge a ships worth in that situation, it might be worth piloting other peoples ships yourself to attack your own build in a "ready" state if all you want to test is durability. Shields & thrust will prevent vastly more damage, but having some direct dmg mitigation is important on its own right, so long as doing so doesn't actively push you toward taking more direct hits like traditional "armor tanking" does, due to AHP mechanics too much heavy armor really does make you weaker at taking the direct hits too compared to a proper composite, which again is going to be almost all hull if done right.

 

[Mork2]

Like in the real world. Only heavily armour critical components and the direction most of the attacks will come from.

So advanced armour to protect vital components. Computers, docking point etc...

Facing where most of the attacks will come from mostly the front.

Sloping armour like a wedge provides a lot of armour thickness at certain angles.

While large guns will punch through the armour anyway a good layer of armour is good for absorbing 1 or more missile hits. This is where armour really helps. Once your shields are down a ship without armour takes massive damage from missile hits. Guns typically punch holes through armour but don't wipe away massive amounts of blocks. Missiles do wipe out massive numbers of blocks. Armour to an extent absorbs a lot of this damage. So use armour as a way to buy you time to get the shields back up or give you a bit more time to do something.

Use a lot of basic hull blocks to add lots of extra AHP. So put this on areas less likely to take attack so that you can have a light weight armour that massively increases your AHP pool. 5 blocks of basic hull has 250AHP and the 1 advanced hull with the same mass only has 100AHP. Your AHP pool with defensive effects is what makes the advanced armour so effective at absorbing missile damage.

Currently advanced armour has 100HP with 90% resistance. To destroy the adv armour block while there is no AHP left takes 1000 damage. While there is AHP half the damage that hits the block goes against the AHP pool. So to kill the block requires 2000 damage. 1000 damage taken from the AHP pool and the other 1000 damage destroys the block. So as long as you have a large pool of AHP each block of advanced armour will absorb up to 2000 damage.

Then defensive effects come in. Punch and pierce defensive effects to max out at 25% cost you less than 1.5% of your mass each. One of those effects increases the amount of damage the AHP absorbs from a hit from base 50% to 75%. This means while the AHP pools has the points only a quarter of the damage will hit the adv hull block and 75% of it will be taken from the AHP pool. So it now takes 4000 damage to kill the adv armour block as 3000 damage is absorbed by the AHP pool. The other defensive effect reduces the damage to the AHP pool by 25%. So with both defensive effects at max it takes 4000 damage to kill a adv hull block. 1000 damage destroys the block and 3000 damage goes to the AHP pool but due to the second defensive effect the AHP pool is only reduced by 3000 x 0.75 = 2250HP. Having both punch and pierce effects at 25% really makes the armour really good at absorbing damage.

 

[Winterhome]

Even with zero Armor HP, having a thick enough layer of armor where you expect your ship to be hit from (usually the nose on more maneuverable ships) is a huge deal. Some of the worst nightmares of ships I've fought against have basically been flying bricks with over 20 meters of advanced armor on the nose and around 4 to 5 meters of advanced armor on the sides. Trying to chew through the nose of those bricks of armor is better than trying to shoot through the sides, though, since if the ship in question is facing you, you're going to have to go through far more side armor than frontal armor because of the angle your shots will be hitting at.

I've found that heavily armored ships are an absolute nightmare to kill unless you have strong punchthrough meta guns designed exclusively for beating armor. It gets worse when the armor tank uses docked armor plates, ion effects, and shield drain beams. Add efficient point defense to the design and nothing's getting through easily. Internal armor protects vital system blocks from being destroyed and the most outright infuriating ships I've had the misfortune of fighting had their internals sandwiched between layers of advanced armor like lasagna, so my shots were hitting armor the entire time they were going through the target.

The whole "a good offense is the best defense" thing doesn't work out too well when your opponent's defenses more or less nullify your offense. The quickest way to kill an extremely heavy armor tank is with a single enormous missile+pulse+piercing system (which can and will be shot down most of the time), followed by punchthrough meta guns (which chew through armor HP, and a well designed cannon can penetrate all the way through the target with no trouble). Punchthrough meta guns tend to be somewhat delicate and taking damage to your weapons system will completely wreck your ability to do damage, though.

Starmade combat is a bit of a rock-paper-scissors thing. Every ship design can be countered by other purpose built ship designs. Shield capacity tanks are common and get splattered instantly half the time because of the prevalence of Beam+Pulse+Ion, Beam+Beam+Ion, etc. Shield regen tanks are less common and get splattered by high alpha weapons like missiles. Armor tanks are uncommon and most reliably get splattered by highly mobile glass cannons focused on hull damage, or by better armor tanks with anti-armor weapon designs.

Of course... Armor is expensive, and it takes a lot of effort to put armor tanks on the field. If an armor tank gets structure damage, it'll probably have to go home to be scrapped and replaced, which gets really expensive over time, but isn't as expensive as having to replace the entirety of a dead shield tanked ship.

 

[silverfoe]

The whole "a good offense is the best defense" thing doesn't work out too well when your opponent's defenses more or less nullify your offense.

I thought so as well until I saw this:

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I thought so as well until I saw this:

Those stats for the MOB were kinda grainy; even at 720p. Do we know the size/stats of either of those ships?

 

[GDPR 302420]

Those stats for the MOB were kinda grainy; even at 720p. Do we know the size/stats of either of those ships?

The ship getting turbofucked is a Vaygr Empire Despoiler Battleship.

• 500k mass
• 130m Shields + 60% ion (off the top of my head)
• High alpha damage from select fire missile turrets

As for Veiliths ship I do not know specific details other then its smaller then a Despoiler and is a similar design to Veiliths Manowar.

A bp of the Despoiler is avaliable on the mirrored google drive if you want exact stats, the link can be found here

 

[Winterhome]

I thought so as well until I saw this: (snip)

The ship being kaboomed is basically a shield capacity tanked ship spamming self sufficient turrets for offense, and it's being slapped around with missile spam. The missiles used in that would be completely blocked by 5 to 7 meters of advanced armor (outside of netcode tomfoolery which can rarely result in missiles exploding internally rather than externally), and it has more than enough space to have 5 to 7 meters of advanced armor all around including on the turrets at the cost of maybe 20mil shield capacity and some alpha damage. Even without armor HP, a warm coat of advanced armor can completely nullify the first salvo of missiles. The range is fairly short and a screen of 20 well designed point defense turrets would nullify enough of the missile strike to require several more salvos to kill it, too.

Missiles trade penetration for wide area damage and against something with relatively thin armor, they're the way to go. Coupled with their extremely high alpha damage and long reload time, they'll do the job quickly, but if they don't get through, the missile spamming ship is near guaranteed to get bumfucked by returning fire.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Did they ever fix the explosive effect radius for cannons and beams?

 

[Scypio]

Nope. And it's more like a feature, now...

 

[EricBlank]

Ive found thick bow and front-end advanced armor will help absorb some serious impacts, especially helping to dissipate damage from missiles since their damage is being spread out over a huge number of armor blocks. Cannons not so much, a strong cannon will of course pierce right through armor of any thickness and start damaging systems, if only a little bit, and beams are somewhere in between since each phase of the beam will probably hit different blocks, but can still have great penetration. And i think pulses, if you ever get the chance to use one effectively, will straight up bypass armor since the point of origin of the pulse can be placed behind it. Super fiddly to get those to work at all against moving targets theyre just about useless.
Its definitely better to use hull elsewhere, and to have PD turrets and strong shields behind that armor to prevent missiles hitting in the first place and absorb a hit or two before armor even comes into play.

Prioritize the bow and front half of the ship on long axes or where its shape makes it easy to land a hit at that spot, and critical internal components. I even divide larger ships into subsections with internal armor bulkheads. Even if a missile destroys systems in one section, it has to go through another bulkhead before damaging the next. With the point of impact probably being farther away where it hit the now-destroyed systems or hull, its damage to that bulkhead is greatly reduced. It could then take a second or even third missile hit to destroy systems behind that bulkhead.

I also like to surround the bases of turrets and their rail components to help prevent them getting knocked off right away. Pd turrets stop being useful once theyre knocked off.

 

[Mork2]

The faction block is the toughest block in the game due to its very high resistance. However you can only have 1 per entity. On every part of a turret I include a faction block usually in front of one of the rails or docking parts.

 

[Asmodium]

i don't plan to incorporate armor in my ships well not much probably as stated by others enough to protect vital systems for a little longer unless i specifically make it to be a slow space tank

 

[Dire Venom]

Ive found thick bow and front-end advanced armor will help absorb some serious impacts, especially helping to dissipate damage from missiles since their damage is being spread out over a huge number of armor blocks. Cannons not so much, a strong cannon will of course pierce right through armor of any thickness and start damaging systems, if only a little bit, and beams are somewhere in between since each phase of the beam will probably hit different blocks, but can still have great penetration.

Quite a useful post thanks!
That got me thinking about ship design, and about designing your ship so that shots through systems over-pen and do minimal damage.
I could see system tendrils with their own shielding being quite difficult to damage but quite space consuming.
For now I gues I'll stick to internal shielding for components. That seems to help prevent shots just tearing through my ship and allowing areas to regen while the ship is still under fire.

 

[Cluwne]

Asmodium
It sounds a lot like shields are good for high-energy fast attack ships, while armor gives ships lots of staying power at the cost of maneuverability.

If Schine wants us to put down less system blocks so much they could increase the the stats, power cost included, or change the whole system to become more centralized and less of a "filler block".

Which would have the side effect of, possibly, ships having less shielding overall and/or using armor more for survivability in large-scale conflicts.

 

[kulbolen]

oh hey i made that video lol

so, fact is, shields are better than armor, and both suck tremendously compared to guns.

Do we know the size/stats of either of those ships?

yes, a 200k ship blowing up a 503k mass vaygr despoiler. target has 130 mil shields, 60% ion, 34mil ahp, 105mil shp.

The ship being kaboomed is basically a shield capacity tanked ship spamming self sufficient turrets for offense, and it's being slapped around with missile spam. The missiles used in that would be completely blocked by 5 to 7 meters of advanced armor (outside of netcode tomfoolery which can rarely result in missiles exploding internally rather than externally), and it has more than enough space to have 5 to 7 meters of advanced armor all around including on the turrets at the cost of maybe 20mil shield capacity and some alpha damage. Even without armor HP, a warm coat of advanced armor can completely nullify the first salvo of missiles. The range is fairly short and a screen of 20 well designed point defense turrets would nullify enough of the missile strike to require several more salvos to kill it, too.

this is wrong. armor is underpowered and that same volley would destroy 6+ layers of advanced and eat whatever was inside. also, decoys are a thing. in all tests, no amount of traditional pdts, of any design, have had any noticable effect on the incoming dps. beamspam is even worse, but its a lot harder to setup, has less range, causes more lag at large scale, and isnt usually necessary.

Missiles trade penetration for wide area damage and against something with relatively thin armor, they're the way to go. Coupled with their extremely high alpha damage and long reload time, they'll do the job quickly, but if they don't get through, the missile spamming ship is near guaranteed to get bumfucked by returning fire.

this is also wrong. the ship still has the same defensive options available as the target did. it may or may not survive return fire, depending on like 8 billion environmental variables.

That got me thinking about ship design, and about designing your ship so that shots through systems over-pen and do minimal damage.
I could see system tendrils with their own shielding being quite difficult to damage but quite space consuming.

this is right. the best pvp ships ive seen use a similar method where everything not required to touch is dispereed into cloudlike strands. its not pretty and doesnt much resemble a "ship" though.

"alternative defense" methods work a lot better than the games intended defensive mechanics do. from avoiding damage, reducing damage, removing incoming fire, etc.

this doesnt matter much as a lot of this is about to get changed up with game balance updates.