So, between the HP system and shipyards....

[Winterhome]

Because of the bizarre way that the crafting configs are set up right now, armor tanking is prohibitively expensive if you use Advanced Armor, seeing as how it's 50x more expensive than Standard Armor.

It's more useful than it used to be, but I would still personally try to avoid it until advanced armor becomes significantly cheaper to reflect it only being 4x more effective than standard and 0.1 mass heavier.

 

[PriZm]

i think, if people here talk about an armor tanking ship, this doesnt mean that it has no shields at all. at least thats what i understand when i say "armor tank". its more like, this ship relies much more on its armor than a shield tanking ship. A shield tanking ship might have a huge shields caps, with a 60% ion effect and nice regen. All this is taking quite some space and power to sustain, especially once the shields start to suck power for regen. All this power/space can be used for other stuff on an armor tank. P.e. for bigger power capacitors -> heavier hits from whatever weapon is installed. The passive effects for armor tanks (piercing, punch-through) are also much cheaper to sustain in terms of power consumption.
Basically, its a trade-off. And general speaking, imo an armor tanking ship has more offensive potential.

 

[hakkarin]

seeing as how it's 50x more expensive than Standard Armor.

Omg really???

Doesn't that just mean advanced armor is intended only to protect vital parts of the ship?

 

[Winterhome]

Omg really???

Doesn't that just mean advanced armor is intended only to protect vital parts of the ship?

No. That means that it was balanced around the mechanics prior to the HP and mass updates. There were literally zero downsides to using advanced armor previously, other than the price tag.

 

[Edymnion]

No. That means that it was balanced around the mechanics prior to the HP and mass updates. There were literally zero downsides to using advanced armor previously, other than the price tag.

Yup, my last capital ship I was building before the new patches had at least a quarter million advanced white armor blocks for it's hull. I never wanted to see Sapsun again for as long as I lived I had to mine so much of it.

My current ship is using standard armor, because advanced is just way too expensive for a ship big enough where dropping a couple million more shields into it is trivial when it comes to space.