Remove Starting Nyline Armor

Please remove the starting Nyline armors that were added a little while back. They're totally pointless and annoying.

TheHand wrote: you know i think they are usefull for noobs. means hauling less about, but i thin they should remove the nyline requirement and just make it credits like the 1/10 basics

If they were made to not require any mineral then that would be one thing, but as long as they require a mineral, any newb can make a 1/10 armor with 1 100% resist out of any mineral. In fact, I think I'll write a guide on how to do that.

(First draft)

All players begin with the capability to produce armor with more than 100 points of resistance. These can be all in one damage type, or divided between several damage types. However, adding more damage types does use more points. More importantly, you lose points when the materials you use for each of the three layers don’t match the desired properties. The further off of the mark, the more points you lose.

Let’s start by producing a single-mineral, single 100-resist armor:

First, open the Armor Designer. Choose a damage type. For this example, let’s say Impact. Set it to 100. This means the armor will be completely immune to Impact damage, but it remains vulnerable to the other five damage types.

All new players start with an armor ratio of 1:10. That means anything lower is just a waste and anything higher is phenomenally expensive. This doesn’t mean you’re limited to plate sizes of 1 though. You can use any plate size, and just set the Hit Points per Plate to ten times the plate size you chose.

For this example, set the Hull Usage per Plate to 1 and the Hit Points per Plate to 10.

Now choose a mineral you currently have access to in abundance. Set all three layers to the same mineral. All three layers should have a quantity of 1. This means each plate will use a total of 3 units of whatever mineral you chose. This is the lowest quantity of minerals per plate possible.

You should now be able to name your armor and press the Submit button for a cost of 15 million credits to research, with a production cost of 110 credits, and a production time of 3 minutes and 40 seconds.

If you research that, you’ll end up with a copy of Beginning Impact Armor, only this armor will use minerals and Beginning Impact Armor doesn’t.

Let’s look at ways you can improve on it:

First, make sure the three layers are locked with a quantity of 1 for each layer.

Let’s say you want the armor to be produced faster. The bottom portion of the Armor Designer is all about trade-offs. Try lowering the Production Time by one second. If you didn’t have the quantity of materials for each layer locked, then they just increased to 635 materials per layer. Clearly you don’t want that, so change them back to 1 and make sure they’re locked so they won’t change again. Now it says, “This design is impossible to comprehend.” It says this because the Armor Designer isn’t smart enough to divide trade-offs between Research Cost, Research Time, and Production Time. If you’re not in a hurry, try locking Research Cost and Production Cost. This leaves only Research Time unlocked. Now it should say the design is possible. Continue lowering the Production Time and you’ll see Research Time increase very quickly. You can adjust any of these as long as you leave one unlocked.

Many people are perfectly willing to increase the Production Cost per plate. Keep in mind that this also affects repair costs.

Here’s another thing you should know: When it comes to designing armor, you should really never use 1 HU per plate, because for any plate size, you can set the materials per layer to half of that. So, change your Hull Usage per Plate to 2 and your Hit Points per Plate to 20. Leave your material quantity per layer at 1. If you get an error, try raising or lowering Production Time. This change just halved the quantity of minerals the armor uses. People often design very large plates using this method to use on facilities to reduce overall production time and credits.

Ok, so that’s all good, but when you get into combat, this armor is still no better than Beginning Impact Armor. So, it’s time to look at resistances.

Try increasing Pierce using the up arrow to raise it by 1 with each key press. Watch the Estimated Armor Integrity. If it drops below 100%, your armor basically becomes useless. Go as high as you can and still keep the integrity at 100%. How high you can go will vary dramatically depending on which mineral you selected. This is because each damage type desires different properties. If you can’t go very high with Pierce, set it back to 0 and try raising Beam.

As you increase the armor’s resists, you’ll notice the costs at the bottom increase very quickly.

Another thing you can do is set the two resists you want to 100, and then click on the Set button next to each layer. Doing so will sort the Mineral List. The minerals with the properties that best match your chosen resists will be listed at the top.

To improve beyond this point, you’ll need to use multiple minerals. You can start by using the best mineral you have available for each layer, but you’ll see much more improvement by using two or three minerals to create alloys that match the desired properties. However, using alloys will increase the quantity of minerals required per plate immensely. It’s worth it though if you can get two resists up to 100.

To create alloys, you’ll want to write down the desired properties for each layer while you’re in the Armor Designer. There’s no way to look them up while you’re in the Alloy Designer.

Impact/Thermal armor, with both at 100, is one that all players should have for facilities. This greatly improves survivability against bombs.

On a last note, there are many Specials that will improve your armor making capabilities.

bump

Nice guide!
As far as removing them, I agree, there are way too many of these things which a majority of players will never use. However, I would suggest removing only the x10, x1000, etc. Leaving the base armors (1/10), like beam, burn, chem, etc, at least gives players a starting point, and demonstrates up front that there are different types of armor. We could probably put right in the help file how to redesign one of these designs to have more HP but use more hull, that's a 5 step process: Open Design, Change HP, Change Hull, Submit, Research.