Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire?

capital ships have the lowest damage potential and highest SURVIVABILITY of any ship other then support frigates (repair ship, flak ship, etc)...

The damage potential is as following:
1. Attack cruiser
2. Long range frigate
3. Base frigate
4. Attack Capital ship (the leftmost capital ship design)
5. Support capital ship (the other 4 capital ship designs)
6. Support frigates, repair, colonizer, flak, etc...

Sure as a single ship a capital does more damage... but 50 logistics worth of ships will deal much more damage... a single capital ship vs 50 logistics ships is likely to win since it will survive longer, but in huge battles (several capital ships and many small ships) victory often lies on focusing on their weaker craft.

Ofcourse at very high levels the capital ships become much more potent.

I find in battles I win much more readily by focusing fire on the enemy's weakest craft first, each craft killed lowers the overall damage potential.

Shield mitigation does not decrease the effectiveness of focused firing. It provides a percent damage reduction that is on weather then shields are on or off... only bypassed by the vasari phase missles.
By researching certain tech's shield mitigation can be increased, as well as by using certain ship abilities.
So if you fire 50 damage worth at a ship with 10% shield mitigation it will take 45 damage. it has nothing to do with how many ships are firing at it.

Sometimes focusing fire on the enemy capital ship makes PERFECT sense, because you want to finish it off quickly... So feel free to do it, don't worry about any mitigation, you are SUPPOSED to focus fire.

Armor provides flat mitigation. So a rapid fire low damage weapon is very effective against unarmored targets.
EX: Weapon A shoots 10 bullets doing 5 damage each (50 total damage). a target with 4 armor takes 5-4 damage per bullet, or 10 damage total.
Weapon B shoots a single bomb that does 30 damage... it will hit that target for 30-4=26 damage... so a high armor target is better assulted with bombers and the like, a low armor target is better assulted with fighters.

The AI already automatically chooses a reasonable attack target for each ship...
That is, your bombers will ALWAYS attack high armor targets first, and the fighters will always attack low armor ones first... same with LRM and other such ships...

A ship can be a member of multiple groups... by using ctrl+# you assign group numbers
By assigning all ships to group 1, LRMs to group 2, and capitals to group 3, cruisers to group 4, etc
you can easily give orders such as "all ships attack this ship" by clicking 1 and then right clicking a ship...

Or "all ships attack this capital ship but LRM attack the flak frigates" by clicking one (select all ships), right clicking on his capital, then clicking
2 (select only LRM) right click a flak frigate (cancel current order and attack flak frigate), then shift right clicking all the other flak frigates (shit+order means "after finishing current order do this")

Not true. Shield mitigation changes based on how many enemies are shooting at it.

really? up or down?

Well either way, just rip right through it. It is overall better to focus fire as much as possible.

That is not how armor works. Armor in this game is a +5% effective durability per point of armor, a rapidly firing gun suffers the same effective penalty as a gun that fires every 5 seconds.

Having more than a few ships firing at a target pushes its mitigation to 60% or higher, so every shot that hits it does less than half damage.

actually it goes up 1% every 10 points of damage. The info is in the game files.

Taltamir thats a good explanation. Thanks for the info.

Wrong. Shield mitigation changes based on how much damage it's taking. In an interview they said it was to discourage focusing fire. Listen to the PC Gamer podcast from a few weeks back.

In most circumstances, however, it seems intuitively beneficial to focus fire regardless - even if it takes longer due to mitigation, it would still be faster than splitting up your fleet to engage multiple targets.

-HD

Somebody answer this question.

I want to know the answer myself!

The First time I tried, they went semi- intelligently, and all decided to spread out their fire (somewhat unevenly, 2 of their 4 targets were maxed at shield mitigation, 2 of the others at 15%, and several other ships not being fired at.

I tried issuing the order again, to try to see if they would spread out more, but instead, all of them began focusing fire on a single ship, and continued to fire and destroy one ship at a time, so it looks like trying to use the stacked icons to macro doesn't really work that well (unless you want to constantly suffer the 'micro focused fire penalty'.

At what rate does mitigation degrade? If it's based upon damage taken, rather than # of ships or other things than there's no benefit to not focusing fire, as it will still reach mitigation at the same amount of HP lost. The only exception to this would be if it degraded at such a rate that a few ships firing could not raise the mitigation.

Flak frigates allow fair deal of micro. But the way you assign targets, not sure how the computer handles it. For the most part I click on the 10 stack then turn of stack view, and queue attack with shift on each individual icon in the empire tree. But this is for fighters/frigates other than flak. Flak need to be positioned just right to do the most damage, because of their firing arcs. They are a pain to micro and they will pick fighters/bombers over LRMs, that's why you need to assign targets. One rogue squadron from enemy capital can cut your damage potential by a lot, and it makes you flak run around the map like they are crazy.

"mitigation is defined in the player file.


shieldData
shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage 0.001
shieldAbsorbDecayRate 0.0125
shieldAbsorbBaseMin 0.15
shieldColor ff8FD81D

in other words 10 damage causes mitigation to go up 1%."

quoted from: DeadlyShoe

Shield mitigation does nothing to decrease the value of focus-fire. Why? Because it doesn't really matter whether a ship is hit by 30 shots fired by one weapon, or 1 shot fired by 30 weapons. The mitigation increase is the same, so the curve of damage a ship takes as you whail on it is the same. It doesn't matter whether I cause 30 damage from one ship, or 30 damage from 30 ships. Shield mitigation will ramp up at exactly the same rate, because it's not triggered by number of attacking ships, but by the amount of damage taken. The curve does not change no matter how many ships attack that one ship. If the objective is to decrease the value of focus fire, the developers should consider why this doesn't happen in real life:

1. Weapons are not equally effective at any range. Longer-ranged shots are less effective than shots fired at short range.
2. Damaged targets are not as dangerous as undamaged targets.

These two factors are what promotes the focus-fire paradigm. The shield mitigation mechanic does nothing to change this. Because a ship with only one hitpoint is as effective in dealing damage as a ship with full hitpoints, until you kill something, the amount of damage you are taking is the same. Because firing a shot at maximum range is as, or nearly so as, effective as firing a shot at point blank range, you do not deal greater damage by firing at closer targets. These two factors combined make it optimal for a force to focus all fire on a single target, in order to kill it and thus reduce the incoming damage output. If these factors were changed, focus fire would quickly become a situational move much like it is in real life.

Shield mitigation does nothing: Although on paper, your DPS will be higher because the shield mitigation values will be lower, shield mitigation REALLY just means it's harder to inflict damage on damaged target than it is to inflict damage on undamaged targets, creating a weighted curve on "hitpoints" instead of a linear one. But this changes nothing, because a ship with one hitpoint is as combat-effective as a ship with full hitpoints! All it does is inflate the "true" hitpoint figure of a ship. If after a ship has taken 300 damage, hits to it deal half as much damage, then the first 300 hitpoints it takes will require maybe 450 points of damage to do, while the remaining 2700 hitpoints would require you to deal 5400 damage or more, as that value increases. That just means the ship is capable of actually withstanding more actual "dealt" points of damage than is visibly apparent from its hitpoint display.

Since shield mitigation actually has no REAL effect on focus-fire, this is why it seems more intuitively effective to do it anyway: Because it IS. If I use focus fire and you just fire at ships randomly, I will most likely wipe out your entire fleet without you being able to kill a single ship. This is certainly the effect I've observed vs. the AI in stat graphs: The AI uses undirected fire, while I pick off and destroy by focus fire. The AI's damage dealt to me is about two orders of magnitude less than what I have done to him: He hasn't ever come CLOSE to killing even a single capital ship, and each individual AI has a fleet twice the size of mine. I have, at no point, ever felt in danger of actually losing a ship, while the AI's undirected fire tactics are getting him slaughtered in situations where he has the larger force.

"The damage potential is as following:..."

Here are some specific attack-for-supply ratings calculated by this formula -

(Damage-Per-Second * 10)/Supply Cost

Cobalt Light Frigate: 19

Javelis LRM Frigate: 27.5

Percheron Light Carrier(w. Bomber Squad): 20.5

Kodiak Heavy Cruiser: 18

Kol Battleship(Basic): 10.25
Kol Battleship(Level 6 w. Gauss Turret & Bomber Squad): 20.6

Marza Dreadnought(Basic): 10.9
Marza Dreadnought(Level 6 w. Bomber Squad): 17.45

Sova Carrier(Basic w. 2 Bomber Squads): 13.16
Sova Carrier(Level 6 w. 5 Bomber Squads): 25.38

So Capital Ships are quite lousy when they are new, but after leveling up, they become dangerous. Especially carriers, because strike craft seem to have a hellish damage-dealing ability. And the Sova gets these results with TEC bomber squadrons, which are the weakest.

"Shield mitigation does not decrease the effectiveness of focused firing. It provides a percent damage reduction that is on weather then shields are on or off... only bypassed by the vasari phase missles.
By researching certain tech's shield mitigation can be increased, as well as by using certain ship abilities.
So if you fire 50 damage worth at a ship with 10% shield mitigation it will take 45 damage. it has nothing to do with how many ships are firing at it."

10 Damage = 1% Shield Mitigation increase. So 50 damage = 5% Mitigation = 47.5 actual damage.

"Armor provides flat mitigation. So a rapid fire low damage weapon is very effective against unarmored targets.
EX: Weapon A shoots 10 bullets doing 5 damage each (50 total damage). a target with 4 armor takes 5-4 damage per bullet, or 10 damage total.
Weapon B shoots a single bomb that does 30 damage... it will hit that target for 30-4=26 damage... so a high armor target is better assulted with bombers and the like, a low armor target is better assulted with fighters."

Nope. This has been hacked over elsewhere. 1 Armor provides a 5% increase to effective hit points. In other words, if you do 100 damage to a target X with 5 Armor, then 100 damage is 125% of what will actually damage the ship, resulting in 80 actual damage. The Armor system is completely different from the Shields system.

Armor Types have nothing to Armor or Shields. They are completely independent and are set on a unit-wise basis, and do nothing but add modifiers to the total damage hitting the armor. A Vasari Bomber has Light Armor but has a rating of 5, while a Vasari Skarovas Enforcer heavy cruiser has VeryHeavy Armor but has a rating of 4.5.

The entire system is amazingly complex, now that people have dug up the figures and revealed the machine that runs underneath the flashy graphics.

Not true. While the shield mitigation goes up at constant depending on damage, it goes down based on time. So 1 ship firing 30 times will take a lot longer than 30 ships firing once, and over that longer time the shield mitigation will drop more.

Of course, if you take the slower route, the shields will have more time to repair.

So:
Focus fire:
+Less damage wasted on shields repairing.
+Lower enemy dps quicker
-More damage wasted on shield mitigation
Distributed fire:
+Less damage wasted on shield mitigation.
-More damage wasted on shields repairing.

So working out which is more effective, and where the sweetspots are, will require a fair bit of number crunching in Excel.

My guess is that focus fire is still effective for the same reason it is effective in other RTS: you reduce the enemies damage ability quicker.
Shield mitigation probably only cancels out the shield repair. Thinking about it, without shield mitigation focus fire would be ridiculously dominant. You'd only be fighting the shield repair of one ship instead of several.

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, focussed fire is the way to go. As soon as you are doing much more than 12.5dps to a target, it's shield mitigation is going to cap out anyway, and at that point you might as well just pile on more firepower. With higher dps, you'll cap out the shield mitigation sooner, but I doubt this is a major factor. Really need to crunch through the numbers to check though.

What does make a difference is the different armour types. You'll get better returns using appropriate types against appropriate enemies because their effective dps will be so much better. So the best way will be to have all your units of a particular type focus fire on the enemy unit they are most effective against. Which is what I think the AI does anyway, which makes me think the devs have already crunched the numbers and the time it takes to reach the shield mitigation limit isn't important.

It does change - don't forget it decreases itself 0.0125/s.

Consider 4 vs 4 ships - each with 1600 hull, no shields, 50dmg/4s, no hull rr to simplify things. Shield mitigation is 0.6.

Focusing group (let's call them FG) will be doing 50dmg/s, upping shield mitigation significantly. It's simple series - when you sum it you fill find, that you need: 16 seconds to cap mitigation doing ~545 damage during that time. Remaining damage will be dealt in 53 seconds, with mitigation capped at 60%.

That's total 69 seconds to kill a ship by FG. SG (spreading group) will be dealing damage at no mitigation penalty at all. That's 69 seconds before first SG ship goes down. And 4*50*69/4/4 damage total, 862 per FG ship. So we're now at:

FG: 4 ships at 738 hull
SG: 3 ships at 1600 hull

After next 69 seconds

FG: 4 ships at 216
SG: 2 ships at 1600

After next lest than 69 seconds

FG: dead
SG: 2 ships remaining

Funny, I always thought that shield mitigation would ramp up in a non-linear curve, because a linear increase really doesn't make any sense at all for reasons already stated. So we've got a counterintuitive AND dysfunctional mechanic, a bit like the armour value that doesn't reduce damage taken like in practically every other game out there.

Ultimately both of these things affect mostly the amount of time it takes to get a damaged ship repaired and its shields regenerated, as opposed to just increasing hitpoints to achieve the same longevity in combat. It's just more incentive to get a focused-upon ship to retreat, which actually increases micro rather than decreasing it.

Edit: reply to previous poster:

Base mitigation is always 15%. I think that alone would change the end result. And, you do have to take hull and shield regen into account, not to mention that a real fight usually has a lot more ships per side and also all sorts of combat support like repair ships or shield regeneration ships.

@soltyspl, how is possible to make the same amount of damage to 4 ships FG by 3 ships SG? Calculations are totaly wrong. Besides there is no hull and shield regen too. And... FG group will up mitigations to 60% too becouse this factor depends on amount of damage received not amount of ships. Make math again and You see that SG group is dead

shoot ships that repair first.
They further reduce your effective damage dealt so you'd want them dead in any case.

This is untrue. There is a base mitigation of 15% that is always in effect.

In this particular case, focus firing has no real effect, positive or negative, both sides would end up very near death. If you added Hull Regeneration that would favor the FG. If every ship did more damage, or even if every ship did less damage, that would also favor the FG. Support/Repair ships would also help the FG. If both sides had more units, that would also favor the FG.

Your example happens to be the best possible conditions for the spread fire group, and they only narrowly win, changing any of the values I mentioned puts it back in favor of the focusing group.

Weird. Maybe it depends on how many targets are already in the range of fire for a given ship?

I could imagine that if you targeted the LRM stack, and none of the LRMs were in range, each AI vessel might pick the closest one to target; whereas if none of your ships have to move to fire on multiple targets, they might behave differently.

. . . what changed between the first time you gave the order and the second?

FG will make SG up their mitigation. The other way - nope, because shieldAbsorbDecayRate will cover that, in this case.

That's the whole point behind this example. Lack of hull rr, or shd rr is a simplification for the sake of this example. Of course, it can be factored in, and depending on ship composition and their stats, will yield different outcome, or not.

Calculations are good, although I should have used sum from 0 in one place. It barely changes the numbers, or the outcome.



Yes, you're right. I forgot that, but the outcome is still the same, with a bit different numbers.

Main weak points of my approach is lack of shield and hull r.r. - both, with focused fire, will work against SG group.

I might do more complete check, including shd and hull r.r. - but a bit later.

Ah, I'm glad I wasn't talking crazy before about how shield mitigation doesn't really work as intended by the dev's. It's nice to be validated.

So the conclusion I think we can all see now is that the mitigation formula needs to be reworked in order to encapsulate IronClads original vision of less focus firing.

As it stands now mitigation could be replaced by recalculating hit-points, shield-points, hull regen, shield regen, and weapons damage and rate of fire. This make mitigation in its current form redundant. It's possible the mechanic was implemented late in development as a quick-fix means to prolong combat and help make it more manageable. As recalculating and balancing unit stats would have been a pain to do in comparison to a simpler global solution that gets the same result.

It's a shame mitigation can be largely ignored for the most part as it's an interesting idea. It's just not implemented well. This is probably a mechanic that will evolve through patching and or mods.