Sa'vasku weapon of the day report

Well we had a game today of S vs S. Wasn't supposed to be that way but
no one else brought fleets and I figured since the rest said they would
I didn't bring my earth fleets. 

So we ended up with two almost identical S fleeets. 1 SDN, 1 BB, 3 HC, 4
DD. One fleet ran regular shields and one fleet ran deployable armour.
Neither fleet had fighters. I was the only player that had played S
before.

Game was fairly uneventful except for a all or nothing move on my part
where I max thrusted my damaged BB (first row, most of second) and my
last cruiser (undamaged) past Corey's fleet placing my detachment behind
him and Brian's infront of him. Next turn Corey rotated his fleet to
face me thinking Brian would move past him which he didn't, leaving
Brian's entire detachment behing Corey's force. Needless to say I lost
the BB but the cruiser survived and Brian's SDN annialated Corey's SDN.
Game was called at that point.

Breakdown of deployable armour. 

It goes down a lot.
Everyturn it was up and the ship was shot at it went down. So it
absorbed 5 damage plus whatever it saved as a level 1 shield. Oh the 3
ships I had mounted with them I lost 2. In one case the shield saved the
vessel from 10 damage (went down twice, I had power in the repair pool
waithing though and got it back up without a turn delay) and about half
that again as a level 1 shield. The second ship it was only usefull for
the first few shots before it went down and the ship was destoyed that
turn.

>From what I saw in this game the armour has the potential to absorb a
lot of damage if the ship isn't too shot up each turn. I'm not sure who
came off better, the regular shield ships or the armour ships. Having
the shield go down quickly is detrimental to the health of your
construct but as long as it only gets hit a little, and you keep power
allocated to repair it it's pretty handy. 

Some points about playing with it. If you're expecting to get hit you
have to keep power in the repair pool for it. It's too handy not to fix
right away. What's in my mind as maybe not right yet is the cost, it
maybe underpriced, I don't think it was too much in this game but I have
to play with it more on different size ships to find out, and having it
come back at full power when repaired. I was actually hoping that it
would go down every turn it was shot at so I could repair it and have it
full power next turn. Though at a 50% change of repair I don't know if
that's good odds. Perhaps if it was unrepairable. If unrepairable I'd
cost it much cheaper though. 

Right now it doesn't seem too unbalancing and it does give smaller ships
more flexability and durability. I'll be doing more play testing on it
coming up.

Jaime