Balance Issue: Mitigation

How about just getting rid of the silly mechanic and adding some "anti-focus" factors that mimic the real world, such as damage and/or accuracy that scales with range to the target and a reduction of combat effectiveness (rate of fire and/or accuracy decrease) for damaged ships?

Well that might be great later on. For now, we should work with what's there and not ask for things that would overburden the developers.

You know that ships in group together will focus fire automatically I hope.

Honestly, what?

1) It rises based on the amount of damage taken (and it drops about 10x faster than it rises)

2) A ship at min mitigation takes a ton more damage than a ship at max: 100 damage shot with 20% mitigation = 80 damage taken. 100 damage shot at 60% mitigation = 40 damage taken, or 50% damage reduction.

With your proposed +15% mitigation, at 75% (or 85% for some ships), a 100 damage shot would do 25 damage, a 37.5% damage reduction from 60% mitigation, and a ship at 85% would take 15 points, or an exta 62.5% damage reduction. Tack on the Advent's +6% to the 85% (Radiance has a default 70% cap, so +15% from your suggestion and +6% from Culture would be 91%) and you take 9 points of damage or an extra 77.5% damage reduction (using 60% mitigation as base).

Considering the post is titled "balance issue" I'm quite amused by the rather poorly thought out suggestion.

I agree. The reason focus fire is so important is because a ship at 1 HP is still just as effective as one at full HP. And even moreso, a ship at 1 HP can be repaired!

10 ships vs 10 other ships. One fleet micros, the other does not. The microed fleet focuses fire and kites any that get too damaged. As a result, the non-microed fleet looses some ships while the microed fleet does not, which further tips the scale of the battle into the microed player.

First things first, shields encourage focus fire. Why fire on 100 targets that are all charging their shields when I could focus fire on 10 targets and negate that advantage for 90% of the enemy's forces? Second of all, low projectile speed and useless husks discourage focus fire. If a ship becomes disabled at 25% hull (but doesn't blow up), and if firing takes a couple of seconds to reach the target, the person focusing fire will waste a few seconds of shooting as the target is already down and furthermore, even when destroyed there is still ammo in the air.

Increased accuracy for lower range would also help. If everyone is focusing fire on my capital ship and it falls back, luring everything closer to the rest of my fleet, that other fleet should take even more punishment.

If I ever get off my bum, I'll develop a stack attack mechanic for Civilization 4, and from there a fleet mechanic for the space mod in it. And ships will loose effectiveness as they take damage.

I do think mitigation is a good mechanic to prevent focus fire. It does encourage the use of repair units and certain defensive cap ship powers.

I just think it needs to be tuned so that it works as intended. The AI also needs to be tweaked so you can target types of units without being forced to focus fire on one of them at a time, without excessive, even impossible, levels of micro.

I think mitigation limit will need to go up, as people are starting to use larger groups to overcome the effects of mitigation.

If it's true as some are saying that large frigate groups can bring down each capital ship in a few seconds, then this is a serious problem.