Armor Upgrades - How do they REALLY work?

[Antonio]

I see a lot of people still aren't familiar with how armor upgrades work so this thread should clear any misconceptions you have. Armor upgrades do not increase your base armor by X amount. Instead, they add a percentage damage reduction equal to ((X-1)/X)*100% where X is the amount of armor "multiplied" as per armor upgrade description. This applies to all armor upgrades, capital ship ones included.

For example, say you have a ship with 100k base armor. An Armor Upgrade which multiplies your armor by 2.5 means your overall survivability increased 2.5 times. Throwing that number into the equation we get ((2.5-1/2.5)*100% which is 60% increased damage reduction. Surprise surprise, 250k-100k (difference in increase by just multiplying the base armor) divided by 250k (total result) is exactly 60%.

Practically this changes nothing for a casual player. Damage reduction or multiplication give the same result in the end so it doesn't matter how it's calculated in most scenarios. However, if AUs were calculated by multiplication, nanobots would be significantly weaker. Have you ever wondered why 2 identical ships with different armor upgrades consume the same amount of nanobots to repair their hull? The answer is damage reduction.

For instance we have 2 Scyllas with 300k base armor. One of them is armorless while the other has a CAU VIII. Right now if you drain both down to 50% hull, they'll consume 150k/600 nanobots (600 is the value of 1 nanobot repair) which equals 250. Fair enough, we're used to it by now. But if armor upgrades increased base hull, a CAU VIII scylla that's drained to 50% hull would consume 150k*4/600 nanobots which equals 1000 nanobots. It couldn't even repair fully to 100% and you can immediately see how weaker nanobots would be.

To clarify an issue in this recently created thread, by removing nanobots from a ship and adding it to the base hull the overall survivability does not change. The only few things it does is it reduces instakill chance and makes you unable to benefit from instakilling someone yourself (you can't tractor the nanobots). Repair ships gain more value and repair cost goes up a bit. Seeing as transports often get instakilled and instakill someone once every blue moon, this'd be a flat buff to transports. Anyone complaining that it nerfs transports either didn't know about this or can't accept the reality of how certain mechanics work on Discovery.

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