Problems with "New" Organig Armour.

[Mylon]

I think the Baron was talking about in-combat damage, not post-combat damage. The fix to regenerate armor after combat is quite obviously the latter. If what he says is true, then Organic's armor regeneration ability is crippled because:

1) Armor only regenerates when a piece is destroyed, not when a piece is damaged or at the end of every combat turn.

2) Armor can only be regenerated by restoring a broken piece, not by removing partial damage.

3) Armor can only be regenerated once and/or once regenerated does not contribute to other regeneration (I'm not clear on this one).

[oleg]

Yes. before there were two bugs/features, one working in favor of OA (accumulating point before damage), second against (no partial healing).
More or less they balance each other - extra points from former were offset by lost points due to later. Now, OA will give you far less regenerating points than you can expect by just looking on OA numbers. There've been not many complaints about OA before and one can deduce people are more or less satisfied with play balance. Now, OA is weeker and hence need some modest boost, either more damage points or more regeneration - my favorite.

[geoschmo]

"Partial damage"? What is partial damage?

Every component in the game as far as I know gets partial damage restored at the end of combat. This is whether it's organic armor, or not. Unless you guys mean something else besides partial damage.

Organic armor is different in that instead of having ot go to a reapair bay or space yard to repaior COMPLETE destruction of the component, it can be repaired if there is at least one functional piece of organic armor left on the ship.

The bug was that if the destruction of that piece occured near the end of combat, it didn't have time to heal and wouldn't do so until sometime during the next combat. The fix is that now instead of that, at the end of combat all roganic armor will be repaired immedietly, IF there is a functioning organic armor component left. THere still has to be a functioning armo comp left. That much hasn't changed.

Geoschmo

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Taera:
Well no, organic armor is a useful piece of defense because of its regeneration rate- its a shield and shield regenerator, both in 30kT and it costs ORGANICS. I like the introduced change because it makes sense, and increasing regen instead would make it realy overpowering.
I though would like to see changes being made to its counterpart, Crystalline Armor which is realy underpowered in anything but its low cost.

I think you need to take a look at the relative numbers for organic armour when compared to shields. Phased shields V give 9.4 shields per kiloton. Organic armour III gives 5 damage resistance per kiloton. With a shield regenerator V, you get 6.25 shields per kt, and a regeneration of 20. With Organic Armour III, you get a regeneration of 30.

The old style organic armour, which was not imbalanced, managed to build up a regeneration pool of around 150 - 300 kt per piece before weapons fire began. That put it on about an equal level with shielding. Now, if regeneration only happens once the armour is damaged, then stops once it is repaired, the armour needs to be made either stronger from the beginning, or have its regeneration rate increased so that it has a chance to regenerate once the firing has begun.

[geoschmo]

I think the point is that organic armor was not supposed to be equal to shields. It's got advantages to shields in some areas, and deficencies in others. This "advance regeneration" or whatever was pretty clearly a bug. It wasn't described in the description of the components. It wasn't totally clear for a while what exactly was happeneing. It took some smart people a lot of testing to figure it out. And it wasn't all that well docmented as "features" go. Most people that didn't play roganic races a lot had no idea, and I'll venture a lot that did play organic races weren't really aware that's what it was doing.

By all means if you want to mod in a higher regen rate, you are free to do so. But I disagree that a change should be made to the stock data files jsut to maintain the status quo. Organic armor still has quite a bit of value. It just might be a different value than what some people have grown accustomed to.

Geoschmo

[spoon]

The most important aspect of OA is that it costs you no minerals to build. Even without any regen ability whatsoever, it would still be amongst the most important tech (if not THE most important) that you get from choosing the Organic Racial trait.

Regenerating lost armor after battle is like icing on the cake...

-Spoon

[Taera]

Organic Armor is not supposed to be the best armor in the game, hence the low cost. Same as with crystalline. It is supposed to be something "different" and it is, only the regenerate-after-combat makes it worthwhile in my eyes. And for the defense/per/kT remember that in fact the armor is vulnurable only to two weapons - NSC and CSC while shields are vulnurable to Shield Sapper & Distruptor, NSC, PPB (normal), with a total of 4 - double. Shield Sapper is extremly powerful weapon if used against shields and one this makes the organic armor cost the racial points - remember that 30kT of organic armor ships would build at least 1 turn faster than those using normal armor, especially if it is some kind of more advanced scattering/stealth/emmisive armors. Crystallines are good here too because AFAIK they are the cheapest armor aviable, and the 15-to-shields works as good as emmisive armor if there are any shield regenerators.