Your WP defence: Mines, satellites or bases?

[StarShadow]

Suicide Junkie said:
The simplest way to make stock armor competitive with shields is to simply remove the weapon mounts.

That way, Normal armor with one or two emissive plates is better than shields vs mesons or long range APB, but weaker against point blank APBs, or WMGs and other high damage per hit weapons.

My intention was to make armor a viable replacement for shielding. To that end my (best, lvl 8)armor has 80kt structure, starting at level 4 armor becomes 'self-healing', not enough to help during battle, but after battle the armor plates will all regen (if any are left). Finally, I changed emissive armor so that it's no longer an armor and will negate (eventually at lvl 9) up to 40 damage.
Both to make it more useful in the late game, and to simulate that a well armored ship also armors it's internals as well.

It might sound over-powered but it's offset by the fact that crystal and other armor-skipping weapons become an extremely major threat. The Ionic Dispersor (engine killer), also becomes a major threat (shields block it, armor doesn't). Repairs can take longer due to large numbers of armor plates requiring replacement (if ships get stripped of armor in battle).

Personally I think it works out pretty well, and adds a bit more variety to the game. I got pretty tired of everyone only using shields all the time. It also made the (AI)crystal races into cannon fodder, with no one using armor their main weapon was practically useless.

Oh, and I wanted to keep weapon mounts....I like them too much.