So i was fitting out a conquest the other day and was trying to make it good and was failing. So i went and changed tactics. Instead of even half attempting to get its shield to a reasonable level i slapped heavy armor on it. And it worked a lot better and i felt dumb for not having seen it before.
The reason for this is obvious, the less armor you have the more valuable that heavy armor is. And similarly the worse your shield the less valuable that attempting to shield tank is. And, similarly, better the higher armor damage being done(to a point) I did some basic armor value calculations and came up with some handy tables
No Skills: Mark IX Autocannon vs Heavy Armor. Armor survival time increase as a percentage.
Base Frig Dest Cruise Cap
100 300% 700% 1100% 1700%
200 100% 200% 350% 500%
300 50% 125% 200% 288%
400 50% 100% 158% 217%
500 33% 72% 111% 144%
600 29% 58% 83% 113%
700 23% 42% 65% 87%
800 16% 34% 53% 68%
900 16% 32% 45% 61%
1000 14% 25% 39% 53%
1100 10% 22% 34% 45%
1200 11% 22% 31% 42%
1300 10% 18% 28% 38%
1400 8% 17% 26% 33%
1500 8% 17% 24% 32%
1600 8% 14% 22% 30%
1700 6% 13% 20% 27%
1800 7% 13% 19% 26%
No Skills: Hephaestus Assault Gun vs Heavy Armor. Armor survival time increase as a percentage.
Base Frig Dest Cruis Cap
100
200 100% 200% 300% 500%
300 50% 100% 200% 250%
400 33% 100% 133% 200%
500 50% 75% 125% 175%
600 17% 50% 83% 117%
700 29% 57% 86% 114%
800 22% 44% 67% 100%
900 18% 36% 64% 82%
1000 15% 38% 54% 77%
1100 20% 33% 53% 73%
1200 11% 28% 44% 61%
1300 15% 30% 45% 60%
1400 13% 26% 39% 48%
1500 12% 23% 31% 42%
1600 10% 17% 28% 38%
1700 6% 16% 25% 34%
1800 9% 18% 26% 32%
As we can see the conquest at 1200 base armor has 61% better survival time vs the Hephaestus Assault gun and 42% better vs the Mark IX. Whereas the Onslaught is 32% and 26% respectively. This is particularly important when you've got D-mods. A conquest can get down to 600 armor after D-mods, for 114% and 117% increased effectiveness!
Now, these are percentage values necessarily because its particularly hard to figure armor survival times given how hard it is to simulate hitting the same point on armor (and whether or not that is even possible) so there is loss of efficiency as armor values go down due to the raw survival time value being higher. I think i can get to a value that represents that(it will still be dimensionless but will reflect a fixed point rather than the floating point that the simple % does) but can't quite do it yet due to time constraints on my posting.
Anyway. The comparison here is of course to the effect of shields. In particular hardened shields. The value of hardened shields is very simple. Its 33% of your effective capacitor given that Dissipation > Usage. So for a conquest this is 20,000/1.4 * .33 = 4000. For an Onslaught this is 17,000 x .33 = 5610... For an Odyssey this is 4950(and only 1000 armor base!)*. For a Paragon this is a whopping 13750! The Atlas and Prometheus Mk II's are also good candidates with 2640 Hardened/750 base armor for the atlas and 2887 Hardened/1300 armor for the Prometheus. These of course increase as you slam more caps on your ships(which you should be doing if you have the space) and it also decrease when you're shooting more flux/second than you're able to dissipate.
My conclusion, at least with regards to this one ship, is that the conquest is better off armor tanking primarily and only sometimes maybe using its shields to absorb hits(specifically high armor damage hits) and otherwise then flux dumping in order to force an opponent to take hits/vent first (as the conquest will probably win the vent race due to its huge base dissipation)
*Odyssey is special case though. Opportunity to vent is a significant contributor which can multiply this value and the Odyssey has one of the best vent cycles for a capital in the game.
