When writing another post, this thought hit me, like Youzy's mum roller skating off a cliff which I was standing under. Look at the absorbent column in SIP's lovely table. http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=10646 Now obviously we can see that all resistances are a little low, so perhaps increasing that a touch wouldn't hurt. But the main issue, and this has become especially apparent in the latest version because of P. physics becing awesome, is the MGs. As far as I can tell, MGs move infinately fast (black hole alert amirite?). And yet absorbent has 0 resist to them. Reactive, which is the all round health pumper, has greater resists. Wat?? Absorbent should have high resistance to A.P. MGs. Similar to rails.
It does make sense for the speed mod to affect bullets. Mind you, Absorbant is also lighter and cheaper than other armors, and VERY much lighter than Reactive. It does have a weakness to DU, but so do Reflective and Reactive. (Be more aggressive in spreading damage to all sides of your absorbant tank.) I think it's a stronger armor than most, or at least has the potential to be. The popularity of physics and its overpowered reflective armor steals the show, and I think skews what empires players expect from their tank's armor. (Not that it's any good against DU either.)
Reflective has that weakness, but I think it kinda works, personally. Though you're right, that could be done too. Currently reactive and absorbent are very ballanced in terms of plates lost to total plates possible, but remember that a LT will have 2 plates on all sides of both reactive and absorbent, so this can sometimes give reactive a big bonus. Anyway, I think it would be nice from a ballance and tactical point of view to give absorbent something other than rails.
I think the biggest problem of absorbent armor is the overpowered reflective armor. In my table I have calculated with the average angle modifier (0.5). This means that the damage is reduced by 25%. I guess that in real tank battles the real damage reduction ofter closer to the maximum of 50%. Would be nice if the developers could display the average damage reduction. So I would keep absorbent as it is and only reduce the health of reflective armor to 65. Then tanks with absorbent armor will have more chances against APCs with reflective armor and DU. Another possibility would be to move DU to mechanical. Then we will see more composite + DU APCs, which are powerful but also expensive. And for late game you have to control most of the resources, because else your team will fail because of no resources left.
I'm pretty sure that the maximum is only 50%. Else I would detected in my tests, that I can't kill a tank from a certain angle.
