Shield recharging components question...

[jimbob]

Yes, but there are nonstandard weapons like the null-space weapons. He's now sunk the king's ransom in CA into his starbase, and your weapons all bypass! Unless I'm misunderstanding the way null-space weapons work, he's hooped

Oh, and as an afterthough, presuming you have no null-space weapons, the starbase (or any other vessel) would do well to have both a ton of CA and a modest amount of OA (organic armor). Then if you do manage to punch a shot or two through, the OA will fix up any failed/destroyed CA. Thus the complementing advantages of picking more than one racial trait... not that I ever pick crystaline

[oleg]

There is another way to deal with the stockpile of CA - If you take the whole piece of CA in one shot, it will recharge only the overhead damage.
CA III has 150 points. If you hit with 200 weapon, it will blow up one piece and only 50 residual 50 will be channeled to shield. Of course in most cases you will have some shields to sap before getting CA itself in one shot, but basic idea when fighting CA is bigger is better !

Another good anti-CA weapon is time distortion bust. Once you get several levels in temporal weapons and mount TDB on light cruiser or bigger, you can eat heavily armoured crystalline ships alive. 4x shields damage makes a mockery out of CA. CA is in no way unballancing, it just add new interesting twist to SE gameplay.

[ September 05, 2002, 02:39: Message edited by: oleg ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by jimbob:
Yes, but there are nonstandard weapons like the null-space weapons. He's now sunk the king's ransom in CA into his starbase, and your weapons all bypass! Unless I'm misunderstanding the way null-space weapons work, he's hooped

Oh, and as an afterthough, presuming you have no null-space weapons, the starbase (or any other vessel) would do well to have both a ton of CA and a modest amount of OA (organic armor). Then if you do manage to punch a shot or two through, the OA will fix up any failed/destroyed CA. Thus the complementing advantages of picking more than one racial trait... not that I ever pick crystaline

No. Organic armor only regenerates itself. You can create other component families that use armor regeneration, sure. But they will also only regenerate themselves -- other components of the same family. You'd have to mod special armor to use both abilities to get that effect. And if you did, I think everyone would consider it unbalanced. Only Emissive Armor 'shares' its ability with other armors. And that's nasty enough now that it always takes damage 'off the top' before the damage is applied to any components. Combining Emissive and Crystalline armor is nasty and very powerful in the hands of a clever player.

[ September 05, 2002, 04:07: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]