Then standard ACs should have died as any other primitive technology and the game would be far better off.
If you don’t mind my asking, Scotty, how do you value Hardened vs Ferro-Lam? Seems like FL is harder to evaluate, since it very much depends on the guns people are shooting back with, but I generally prefer it to hardened, in part because FL doesn’t gimp your speed and PSRs (not that I get to use either much).
For Hardened: it depeneds on how it's used. A 'Mech that has Hardened armor that isn't exceeding its effective armor on any locations is
wasting Hardened armor. It is a tool designed explicitly to allow a unit to surpass previous limits of durability. The Hammerhead isn't maxed armor, but it doesn't need maxed armor because it has
significantly more armor than any 45 tonner ever could have had without it. The Amarok, on the other hand, has Hardened Armor and then.... does absolutely nothing with it. It exceeds half points on two locations, both arms, by 1 point each. It would have been nearly identical to just use Standard Armor, but without the PSR or MP downsides.
For Ferro-Lamellor: it's ****** good. It provides protection against every single hit in the game that isn't a Re-Engineered Laser, and it does a *minimum* of 20% more and up to 100% more in the case of things like SRMs. In order to come out ahead in a comparison with standard armor you need to mount approximately 80% of max coverage, which is heavier than the equivalent especially in Clan Ferro, but you gain
so much from it for practically no downsides at all.
Comparing Hardened to Ferro Lam directly is difficult to the point of being impossible. Ferro Lam is the kind of armor that
should be standard in the hypothetical perfect future, but Hardened offers advantages over it in a few key places. Even if Ferro Lam works *perfectly* against nothing but SRMs and AC/2s, that's the only way it can match maximum Hardened, so there will always be a place for Hardened that Ferro Lam just can't quite reach. This is honestly the genesis of a good tradeoff, and I'd like to see more of both.
Perhaps more directly, a hypothetical Hammerhead 2 that wasn't designed for export and instead used Ferro-Lamellor would be significantly more dangerous than a Hammerhead (Standard) but wouldn't likely outstrip it in durability. There would be a space for both in a given force.
