Make Ship-of-the-Line class have more armor/shield slots than the Artillery class

[Leonardo333]

Lets call armor/shield slots components
Best explained in an example,
Right now Battleship Artillery Bow has 2L weapons and 3 components /// Broadside Bow has 1L 1M 2S and 3 components

This setup makes mono-fleets of only Artillery Battleships more powerful so Broadside Bow is useless and ignored by players, only to be used by AI who a too dumb to know 2L beats 1L 1M 2S every time with superior range and damage output

I have a simple fix that is extremely easy to patch in

Make Battleship Artillery Bow has 2L weapons and 3 components /// and Broadside Bow has 1L 1M 2S and 6 components

Number of components may need to be 5 for balance, I'm not sure

This will increase the survivability of Ship-of-the-Line class since he can have more armor and shields.
Kinda like a choice, do I be a Tank or range glass cannon?

 

[NotAYakk]

Bow is a bit of a bad choice for this, it is where the cool X slot weapon goes.

The problem is that X and L slot weapons win the meta. Part of this is because doomstacks of fleets and high offence mean that you can't actually close range towards the end of the game.

Adding more armor and the like isn't bad, but that only really works well if you revamp the meta significantly. And even with 2x the armor and shields, halving long-ranged firepower probably isn't worth it.

The devs are completely revamping combat right now; so the L-slot meta is going to collapse I suspect. Which makes balance issues around it sort of hard to deal with.

...

I do like the idea of different ship sections having more impact. Making it concrete, like more slots, probably works better than a passive modifier (+50% armor or whatever), because people can understand it.

When I first read your suggestion, I was thinking about combat computers. Sadly, I don't know how I'd justify a combat computer granting +% armor or shields fiction-wise.

 

[Leonardo333]

The bow was but an example, yes X slot is better but since it is such a mega large weapon, it should provide even less armor and shield component slots.

Im not saying these short ranged tanks will be better than the artillery, but sure better than what we get now. right now the smaller weapon slots are absolutely pointless. That's why I think this choice is better balance.