Phase missles » Forum Post by BlackWizardMagus

Have you heard of Shield Mitigation?
This thing reduces incoming damage by a high percentage when a ship receives high damage. Basically any ship receives 0.1% of shield mitigation per damage taken and loses 1,25% per second, which means that a constant damage of 12,5 DPS will keep your shield mitigation maxed.
Now, frigates have their shield mitigation capped at 60%, cap ships have it capped at 65% and that increases by roughly 1/9 per level, giving you 75% max shield mitigation at 10th level. Advent also has means of furtgher increasing these numbers.

All in all, when a ship has 70% shield mitigation, 70% of the damage you deal to it is mitigated, nullified, ZEROED.

And there go the Phase Missiles - they bypass shields AND SHIELD MITIGATION.

Every 10% of a chance to ignore shields when an enemy ship has 65% shield mitigation means every tenth of your missiles deals 100% damage instead of 100%-65%=35% damage. This means that your missiles do:
90% of your missiles do 35% damage + 10% of them do 100% damage = (Maths incoming!) 0.9*0.35 + 0.1 = 0.415 .

So, A normal weapon does 35% damage, while Phase missiles with 10% shield bypass chance do 41,5% damage. 41,5%/35% = 1.1857.

Translating this to a language of casual Sins players, a 10% increase of shield bypass chance means that you will do over 18% more damage.

Add to this the fact that you are actually hurting the enemy ship's hull, not shields (and taking out shields doesn't kill the ship while taking out its hull DOES), plus the fact that all Vasari strike craft use phase missiles...

All in all, I've killed dozens of Advent level6+ capital ships that had well over 1500shields left when they went puff under my Assailant/Bomber fire.

+1

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Translating this to a language of casual Sins players, a 10% increase of shield bypass chance means that you will do over 18% more damage.

Extending this further, the phase missile tech line gets you to a 30% chance of bypassing, and one of their support cruisers has an ability to inflict an unfortunate target for another 25% chance.

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Which is why as a TEC player, I'm going to sadly pretend that all our ships will have an Adaptive Forcefield installed.

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As N3rull and Annatar have pointed out, phase missiles are good. The reason you are not seeing ships die with their shields up is that for a regular target, shield penetration is not high enough to kill the hull before the shields are gone, but make no mistake, that shield penetration is working for you in the background to effectively kill the ship faster than it would without it because when shots bypass shields, they are bypassing mitigation and killing the hull faster than they would without. You will notice the hull has taken damage by the time the shields are down.

Now, if you fight an Advent player using Progenitor shield regeneration and Guardians to absorb damage to their huge shields, you will start to see ships die before their shields go down. I can't tell you how many times I've killed Progenitors that still had a 2K+ shields on them. Good Advent players use these tactics to constantly replenish their shields, but luckily the ships underneath are kinda fragile.

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the tactic of using phase missles to kill enmys ship is very effective when attacking advent. but if you encouter a tec oppenent with amror and hull upgrades teh ships will be very tough to destroy(at least compared to advent).also when the missles hit the hull. some of the damge is absored by the armor.i beleive the amount absourbed is the level DPS subtract the armor level. tha is EVERY second.then TEC sheilds are weak so they will be overwhelmed quickly anyway.

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the tactic of using phase missles to kill enmys ship is very effective when attacking advent. but if you encouter a tec oppenent with amror and hull upgrades teh ships will be very tough to destroy(at least compared to advent).also when the missles hit the hull. some of the damge is absored by the armor.i beleive the amount absourbed is the level DPS subtract the armor level. tha is EVERY second.then TEC sheilds are weak so they will be overwhelmed quickly anyway.

It is very effective attacking anyone...Advent, TEC, or other Vasari. It just allows you to kill an Advent ship that is damn hard to kill without it. All ships are harder to kill when they have upgraded hull and armor whether you have phase missiles or not, so what's your point?

Upgraded phase missiles cause MORE damage to the hull than a non upgraded one because they bypass shield mitigation -- in this case they hit the hull for FULL damage. Bypassing shield mitigation causes a FULL damage hit to the hull, which is valuable even if the TEC ship has no shields left because mitigation is always on.

If you really want to know how armor works, read this post:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/305565

Anyhow, since we are posting our opinions, here is mine:

Non upgraded Assailants are the worst long range frigate in the game, for the cost.

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Nope, had no idea how that worked. I don't do multiplayer, so I guess the reason I still never seem to kill a ship with shields left is because the computer isn't taking full advantage of Advent strengths.

Someone else asked on a different topic a few days ago, and now I'm wondering too; what's the Advent way of minimizing this disadvantage? Tons of Subjugators?

Oh, and thank you for the help.

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Quoting Cykur,

reply 4

As N3rull and Annatar have pointed out, phase missiles are good. The reason you are not seeing ships die with their shields up is that for a regular target, shield penetration is not high enough to kill the hull before the shields are gone, but make no mistake, that shield penetration is working for you in the background to effectively kill the ship faster than it would without it because when shots bypass shields, they are bypassing mitigation and killing the hull faster than they would without. You will notice the hull has taken damage by the time the shields are down.

Now, if you fight an Advent player using Progenitor shield regeneration and Guardians to absorb damage to their huge shields, you will start to see ships die before their shields go down. I can't tell you how many times I've killed Progenitors that still had a 2K+ shields on them. Good Advent players use these tactics to constantly replenish their shields, but luckily the ships underneath are kinda fragile.

Thank you for the Advent plug! I'm an avid advent player, though not as good as a lot of players, they are my favorite race. Yes, it is hard playing them, and i lost almost constantly until i figured out the guardian/subjugator/progenitor setup from one of the players online. But that little item has kept me alive far longer against AI than with real people. But the phase missiles are a hard line to cross. Best defense i have found is bombers from carriers, so i bring in more carriers into a fight with vasari than before. But still, i lose alot. It means going back to fighting tec more often, until i can find a way to counter the phase missiles.

-teal

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Nope, had no idea how that worked. I don't do multiplayer, so I guess the reason I still never seem to kill a ship with shields left is because the computer isn't taking full advantage of Advent strengths.

Someone else asked on a different topic a few days ago, and now I'm wondering too; what's the Advent way of minimizing this disadvantage? Tons of Subjugators?

It isn't so much a disadvantage for Advent as it is a way for Vasari to counter the advantage of a few of Advent's ships. As you stated, with normal Advent targets, shields run out before hull. That is why I was trying to explain to superfleet that upgraded Assailants tear through TEC and Advent caps equally fast (except for the Kol). The main difference for Advent is if you use the synergies between the Progenitor and Guardians, you can make your ship damn near immune to large amounts of fire of regular weapons. So the phase missile is actually the counter, it isn't Advent with a disadvantage.

Subjugators do get an ability which allows them to repair hulls, which will help, but the main thing to do is be really careful with your cap ships....if you leave them in the middle of a gravwell with tons of Assailants, you are putting them somewhere they might not be able to get away if they get focused. There isn't really a specific counter, other than killing the Assailants and Subverters (kill Subverters FIRST!), and not letting them get your cap ships. The same thing happens to everyone late game. I sure as heck don't leave my caps in the middle of 50+ Illuminators, Javelis, or Kodiaks, because I know there is a high chance they wiil get focus ganked.

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I see. Thanks much.

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Well, Teal, the most likely reason I think an Advent players would have any difficuly with Phase missiles is I think the whole game was built up on Rock/Paper/Scissors concept. The Advent, with their powerful shields, can outlast any equal TEC ship due to their advanced shielding tech. However, the Vasari are able to bypass shields(as you have noticed) and thus, can eliminate the often Weak Advent Hulls

Koda0

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Thank you for the Advent plug! I'm an avid advent player, though not as good as a lot of players, they are my favorite race. Yes, it is hard playing them, and i lost almost constantly until i figured out the guardian/subjugator/progenitor setup from one of the players online. But that little item has kept me alive far longer against AI than with real people. But the phase missiles are a hard line to cross. Best defense i have found is bombers from carriers, so i bring in more carriers into a fight with vasari than before. But still, i lose alot. It means going back to fighting tec more often, until i can find a way to counter the phase missiles.

-teal

I just noticed this....once again, fighters kill assailants, not bombers. I think I remember another thread where I said this, and people respond "we like bombers better" and I just get tired of answering.

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The only counter I have found against phase missiles as Advent is to bring in alot of Fighters and Bombers to kill their bombers and LRFs, then using my capital ships to work down the line of their larger ships with Phase Missiles You might lose a few capital ships, but if they have a few capital ships there as well, I think that the exchange is worthwhile.

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There's always Ressurection

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Captain! Our homebrew TEC shields cannot handle missile volition of this magnitude! We must evacuat- *ker-splode*

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I am exclusively an Advent player, and with all our shield boosting, regen, etc tech we have: it's not rare to see ships die with alot of shields left. Especially when you have the colony ship recharging fleet shields.

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