Help:Gameplay Guides/Armor Guide

Basic guide to how much armor to use, what armor to use, and what to focus on.

Damage

In order to understand armor, we need to first understand damage.

Each ship will have a certain amount of internal health and each component of that ship its own health pool.

Without armor, all damage is directly dealt to these, with armor things get more complicated based on the damage types.

Damage Types

Damages comes in 3 types.

• Regular - Which is blocked directly by armor. 10 regular damage vs 10 armor will result in nothing happening to the ship.
• Chipping - Which destroys some of your armor, weakening it and enabling critical hits on that face of the ship. 1 point of chipping damage destroy 1 m³ of armor, so the thicker the armor, the less chipping will occur.
• Shredding - Shredding damage directly removed layers of armor from the face. 1 point of shredding gets rid of 1 layer of armor.
• Critical - A critical hit will ignore all armor, applying its damage directly to internals.

Weapons

Kinetics

Kinetic weapons will deal roughly 70% of their listed damage as regular damage and roughly 30% as chipping.

The listed damage value for a kinetic is assuming 0 relative velocity. If ships are closing on each other, the damage will increase; if they're moving away, it will decrease.

Missiles

There are many varieties of missiles, which deal 3 sorts of damage.

• Kinetic - Penetrator and Fragmentation missiles which hit their target will do damage as if they were a kinetic round based on their weight and relative velocity. Explosive missiles only deal 10% of the expected kinetic damage. Other warhead types don't deal kinetic damage at all.
• Personal - The listed damage of the missile will then be applied to the ship. The % listed as applying to armor is chipping damage.
• Burst - Nuclear and antimatter missiles will also deal burst damage which falls off at r². This damage is 100% Shredding.
• Fragmentation - Rather than rolling for critical hits once, they roll once per 5kg of warhead and apply the ratio of crits to non-crits as their critical damage.

Lasers

Lasers do a set amount of damage, but the value of the armor is first exponentiated by 1.5, then multiplied based on the lasers stats and distance. They use the Gaussian beam equation with spot size to determine the multiplier.

Example: a 24 cm green laser will deal 8-12 damage.

At 400km it has a 89% multiplier, so it will be completely blocked by 6 points of armor (6^1.5*0.89 = 13).

At 600km it has a 201% multiplier, so it will be completely blocked by 4 points of armor (4^1.5*2.01 = 16, while 3^1.5*2.01 = 10.4).

Lasers will do chipping based on their armor penetration, with 1/1000 of their armor penetration being the chipping rate. so the 24cm Green Laser at 600km will cause 0.2% chipping. This chip ratio is hard-capped at 25%.

Note: 0DR*1000000000 is still 0 DR, which is why every side of a combat ship needs to be armored.

Particles

Particle weapons will do the listed amount of damage, with armor treated as a divisor based on its stats and thickness, which means their damage cannot be completely nullified like other weapons. They also have a doubling range, at which point their damage is halved.

Due to how much damage alien particle beams do and the amount of armor required to stop it, it's not worth attempting to prevent this damage until you have access to Hybrid Armor, at which point the values needed to stop lasers are more than enough to handle particle too.

For reference, a 2 slot Alien Particle Beam needs 30 layers of Steel armor, the best Exotic-less armor vs particles, to stop and this is too expensive for any ship.

Plasma

Plasma deals primarily chipping damage at [TODO] rate.

When massed, such as when you're fighting an alien station, it can grind down the relatively small nose sections of ships, but will take a long time to do any real damage by itself.

Steps of Applying Damage

Once an attack hits a ship, we go through the following steps.

1. 1 - Calculate critical hit chance(% of armor chipped away / total volume).
2. 2 - If a critical hit occurs, apply damage directly to the ship's health.
3. 3 - If no critical occurs, apply chipping to armor value.
4. 4 - Apply shredding to armor value.
5. 5 - Subtract current armor value from regular damage, apply remaining to the ship's health.

Armor

Now that we know how damage works, we can look at armor.

Given the amount of damage and chipping they do, no ship will stand up to either kinetic or missile hits for very long. So, we focus on the weapon types we cannot PD.

Plasma we can't do anything about, but it will take a long time to matter.

Particle beams can be ignored if we're armored up against lasers.

Thus, damage from enemy lasers are the main armor consideration.

What type of armor to use?

Human armor is basically a straight upgrade as you go up in tech costs because you want the lightest armor per layer you can afford to buy.

The main path is this: Silicon Carbide -> Composite -> Foamed Metal -> Nanotube -> Adamantine

In practice, most runs will go from the initial armors to Nanotube to Adamantine and end there.

Technically, there's also Exotic and Hybrid armor. These are better, but are so expensive that it almost never makes sense to use them.

Alien Lasers

Enemies Alien lasers come in size 1 to 4, much like human ones and the cannon is a lot stronger with a 4 slot battery being worth around 1.5 slots of cannon that can shoot out further. But, their top lasers are much better than human lasers with x-ray flankers being the new menace that heavy plasma frigates once were.

Alien flankers are the ship types that will go off on the sides and you need to care about side/rear armor against. Line ships will stay in the main fleet, moving forward, and you want a lot of armor pointed at. In testing, I've found that flankers rarely move closer than 300km, typically staying at the 400-600 band, while getting within 400km of line ships means something has gone wrong and they're going to tear through you because going from 400 to 200 will triple the amount of armor you need, even assuming you can ensure they only hit the nose.

Type	Hull Class	Weapon	Max Range
Light Flanker	Gunship, Escort, Corvette	1 slot(256 cm) cannon	800km
Heavy Flanker	Frigate, Monitor, Destroyer	2 slot(512 cm) cannon or 4 slot(384 cm) battery	900km
Light Line	Battle Cruiser, Dreadnought	3 slot(768 cm) cannon	1000km
Heavy Line	Lancer, Titan, Mothership	4 slot(1024 cm) cannon	1000km

Important Breakpoints

You'll want this much armor on a face based on what you expect to be capable of hitting it to avoid taking damage. Building up towards a value will reduce the damage per hit to 0.

MR = max range of when they ship is capable of shooting at you, regular values assume you have to worry about alien lasers at the 400 km distance. For flankers, this means they're in the far side of the cone, around a 45 degree angle to your ship, hitting side armor. For line, it means nose armor.

Regular values assume you have to worry about alien lasers at the 400 km distance, with full flank hits at that distance.

Very important breakpoints will be bolded

• 1 - Without 1 point, the weakest enemy ship, even a 1 slot orange battery, can simply destroy you. Only use 0 if you're positive it will never face fire.
• 2 - MR light orange flanker, MR light violet flanker
• 4 - MR heavy orange flanker
• 6 - light orange flanker, MR heavy violet flanker, MR light xray flanker
• 10 - light violet flanker
• 15 - MR light orange line, MR heavy xray flanker
• 20 - heavy orange flanker, MR heavy orange line, MR light violet line
• 25 - heavy violet flanker, MR heavy violet line, light xray flanker
• 40 - light orange line, MR light xray line
• 50 - light violet line, heavy xray flanker, MR heavy xray line, MR light gamma line
• 60 - heavy orange line, MR heavy gamma line
• 80 - heavy violet line
• 90 - light xray line
• 125 - light gamma line
• 140 - heavy xray line, safe bombarding
• 200 - heavy gamma line

How much can I afford?

The more armor you have, the worse your ships were perform.

A rough heuristic is that you don't want to drop any ship below 2mg of cruise thrust, or spend more than 30% of the ship's mass on fuel. If you want a ship able to reliably intercept ennemy fleet on orbital trajectory, you need at least 15mg of cruise thrust.

You'll need to check your enemy's combat stats to figure out which you need, but generally you'll need to be ready for Orange lasers in the 2020's, Violet until ~2037, and X-Ray beyond that. Gamma is, thankfully, very rare.

Side armor is also a fascinating question for this, as you can see, you aren't going to armor up against x-ray flankers without breaking your bank. They need to die before they get a chance to shoot you.

Quick recommendations

All of the following are structures as Nose / Side / Rear

• 6/0/0 - Suicidal missile ships to deal with early surveillance ships.
• 20/2/2 - Non-suicidal missile ships that're dealing with small enemy ships.
• 40/2/2 - Missile ships that need to kill large enemy ships from max range.
• 60/10/10 - Your first line ships which will spend time duking it out with the enemy line, when flankers are not able to be killed quickly. Luckily, this is within the Battle Cruiser + Burner Drive meta. Lancer + Burner will need Adamantine Armor or utility modules dedicated to EV and Thrust.
• 80/6/6 - Fleets where you need to take out alien stations without dying. Technically possible with BC + Nano + Grid(but your low cruise velocity will be painful), but you really want Adamantine along with Helicon or better, especially for Lancers which are just too heavy.
• 80/20/20 - This will let you ignore any flanker less than heavy violet or x-ray. BC + Burner can pull this off with Adamantine Armor. You really want H-Orion or Antimatter/Fusion.
• 140/6/6 - Standard for deep space end-game fleets when the aliens are running x-rays. You cannot allow any flanks from x-ray weapons, so skimp on armor and kill them. It will also allow you to bombard any base to death.
• 140/25/25 - As above, but you ignore non x-ray flankers. Almost never worth it.
• 120 Hybrid / 6 Adamantine / 6 Adamantine - This is needed to ignore the strongest particle beam.