The Plague (Subverters, Boarders, and IDs, Oh My)

[Zereth]

inigma said:
Has anyone ever tried boarding and subversion as an overall fleet doctrine before? Did it work well?

Thanks to the ease of getting self-destruct devices: No. I haven't played with psychic much, but it seems the only way the Plauge would work long-term is to hope that it shoots out the self-destruct devices before the boarders arrive. There's also the fact that all boarding parties on a ship are expended in an attempt to board, regardless of how many are actually needed.

[inigma]

There's also the fact that all boarding parties on a ship are expended in an attempt to board, regardless of how many are actually needed.

Are you sure? I was running the simulator multiple times and I believe my boarders were able to board several times, even after failed attempts.

Forcing self destructs on enemy ships sounds like a nice idea for The Plague. It fits right into their theme.

[Zereth]

That's how it's always worked for me. Form what I understand, the simulator isn't a 100% reliable indicator of what will happen in actual combat for some reason.

[Fyron]

It is a confirmed feature that all boarding parties are lost in any boarding attempt, successful or not.

[inigma]

drat. well, how does one get them back?

[douglas]

Actually, its small size makes emissive armor less likely to be hit. It's just that when it does get hit, it's not tough enough to survive the hit.

A component's probability of being hit is directly proportional to its structure. Emissive armor has 50 structure, Crystalline has 150, so any individual piece of emissive armor is 1/3 as likely to be hit on any given shot as any given piece of crystalline armor. If there are 10 crystalline armors (minimum to get maximum immunity) and 1 emissive, each hit has a 1/31 chance of hitting the emissive armor.

Going with my usual combination of having 2 backup emissives, hitting an emissive armor when everything is still intact has a probability of 1/11. Once one emissive is destroyed, hitting another is 1/16. On average, it will take 11+16+31 = 58 hits with weapons that do less than 180 damage to destroy all 3 emissive armor components and bring the damage immunity down to 149. Meanwhile, the presence of emissive armor is taking 30 damage off of every hit the ship takes.

[Suicide Junkie]

douglas said:
Actually, its small size makes emissive armor less likely to be hit. It's just that when it does get hit, it's not tough enough to survive the hit.

Unfortunately, that only applies to internals.

Components with the Armor ability are killed weakest-first.
There is a very slim chance of stronger armors being taken out early, but in the vast majority of cases, the tiny armor dies first.

Leaky-armor does not have the armor ability, and so it counts as internals. That's why large leaky armors get hit more often.