5.3.2

[Haste]

When we rolled out armor we already assumed the mass tradeoffs wouldn't be nearly significant enough to discourage capital ships from defaulting to (the heaviest) armor upgrades, and that's exactly what they did. Limiting the current set of armor upgrades to snubs was done because they are meant to be a sidegrade system, where you lose evasiveness for an EHP boost. With the current numbers, this works -- for the most part -- for snubs, where mass drastically affects the hitrate of other players against your ship. For capital ships, it's much more complicated. A battlecruiser is not going to be hit any more (or less) by a gunboat just because it's got an extra x% mass -- it's effectively impossible to miss regardless. Even in mirror matchups between heavier ships, the difference isn't anywhere near meaningful enough to offset the HP increase. As a result, everyone and their mother runs the heaviest possible armor upgrades (if they want to win). If we just wanted to flat buff capital ships' hitpoint values, we would do exactly that.

It's quite likely some sort of armor-with-downsides system will return to capital ships in the future, but we'll need to come up with tradeoffs that are interesting, fun and fair.

As for the Akhetaten: it received a balance pass where we reviewed what equipment is lost for each destroyed collision group, how much health each collision group should have, etc. Its 800 base armor looks very imposing, but it affects only the "core" of the ship -- around the docking bay area. Everything else is a collision group with varying armor levels depending on the role we want that component to play. The Shield Generator part has always been very vital, providing both the shield (duh) of the ship, as well as having the rear-facing Main Battery mounted on it. So, it's got a (relatively) big chunk of EHP.

It's likely the Akhe will need further tweaks in the future, as limited playtesting is never going to really give conclusive results. The Consul will likely receive a similar treatment sooner or later. The Bustard needs more work, as just slapping 600+ armor on a ship that isn't "made of components" is probably a bad idea. Plus, I really want it to be good at its intended role of being a long-range, survivable docking-module-focused carrier. This means it has to be (very) bad at just mindlessly driving at lighter ships, which has unfortunately been a strength of many iterations of the Bustard.

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