[suggestion] Planetary Mitigation.

This change would require that Seige Frigates get an even bigger buff then what they need now. It does not sound necessary top me personally, but it could make a big difference. interesting.

Absolutly not, like JuleTron said, Siege Frigates are in need of a buff already. If planetary bombardment becomes harder, then Siege Frigates are gonna require a MAJOR buff.

I'm not sure if I'm clear on what you're suggesting. How would a planet recieve mitigation from bombardment? What would justify such a thing? Don't the planet defense upgrades already handle this. I'm not sure what you're suggesting.

Please elaborate.

The closest technologies in Sins that "mitigates" bombing damage is the TEC's Shield Generator (reduces planetary bombing damage by 30% unupgraded, 50% with level 1 Superior Planet Shields, and 80% with maxed Superior Planet Shields) and an Entrenchment artifact.

If i understand correctly, planetary mitigation would be like Shield Mitigation. It would be more beneficial to attack multiple worlds then to focus fire on 1 planet. (I'd like to reinstate that I am oppose to this idea!)

Upgraded planets already take forever to destroy without alot of wasted resources with siege frigates, why would you want it to take longer?

What would happen with the cap abilities that kill planets - e.g. egg suck?

You also have failed to realise that while spreading out the forces would in theory kill them quicker due to less mitigation, those spread out seige frigs would die even quicker due to lack of protection...

Leave it as it is - planet are hard enough to kill as it is. If you lose them to quickly, maybe you should buy the health upgrades so it take 2x, 3x or even 4x as long to kill them. Surely enough time to get a fleet there. Plus they are fixing the auxilary gov issues supposedly....

Because planetary mitigation would happen in complete, desolate isolation from all other potential changes to the game.

With mitigation, planets will gain a minimum amount of time that they can be expected to hold out. No matter if you send 2, 5, or 20 siege frigates, the planet will be able to survive a few volleys due to mitigation.

Currently, 10 siege frigates are 4 times as good as 5 siege frigates. Think about it. Double the siege frigates take twice as long to kill, and are doing twice the damage during the time. With mitigation, 10 siege frigates will still survive twice as long, but will have diminishing returns on damage. This means they won't be gaining exponential planet killing potential as you add more, the curve gets flattened a lot more.

With this change, siege frigates gain a LOT more flexibility in being balanced. This means siege frigates can be buffed without causing undue issues in the game. That's the main idea, to provide a comfortably sized balancing platform for a siege buff.

Yeah. So what? If you are pushing so hard that you can secure multiple systems at once, good for you. But if you want to kill a planet FAST, you will have a harder time than before.

Capital ship abilities would have to be tweaked such that they also are affected by mitigation, or they'd race miles ahead in siege power. Percentage damage such as hysteria and drain planet would need changes so that they (drain planet) can't be used to gain undue benefits.

You mean like, in terms of fluff? Okay, how about this. Uhm...

Planets are big. As a planet gets bombarded, the atmosphere begins to fill with high energy fallout and interference. The increasing chaos on the surface makes so much commotion that the siege ships can't find or target essential structures. As such, more shots end up being less accurate than a single ship capable of making making precise kills.

Also the facilities have force fields that mitigate just like space ships. The end!

A possibility is that planets can have increased mitigation caps with improved infrastructure. Such that a base planet would have up to 30% mitigation, but may increase up to around 65% at max level. These caps won't matter very much if you have a tiny assault, or a single large hit (novalith cannon), but will make a big difference against a siege focused raid.

I dont see the need for this, perhaps you can explain? What are these siege focus raids? You mean what AI uses? Trivial to defeat at best, no player will do this because it does not work against anyone with a brain.  As is you already have ability of the starbase to prevent the planet from being destroyed, so what else do you want?

While I'm pretty much neutral on the idea, if it were to be installed I'd suggest it was tied into the emergency shelter planetary upgrades. Whether this was by-level (So higher level shelters allowed more mitigation or suchlike) or static is a balance concern.

At the same time, while I'm neutral on it being in the game, I'd love it if this were possible. Modding possibilities galore!

To elaborate, a siege focused raid would be one where the player attempts to do as much damage to a planet as quickly as possible. Given current mechanics, with the proper abilities a planet can be glassed in less than a minute. The main idea of mitigation would be to increase the minimum time required to kill a planet, but to keep the maximum amount of time roughly the same as before.

So basically some sort of shield mitigation for planets? Well it would work out but it's hard enough to tweak it to satisfying levels. It may have two outcomes, either the player doesn't care and leaves a bunch of siege craft there or always comes with overwhelming force. I think regular techs are enough to protect your planet for a good amount of time, I see taking planets quickly is a reward and it shouldn't take as long as killing a big fleet backed up by a starbase. The planet is basically defenseless, if it would take part in its own defense then I'd agree to make that aspect more effective. Perhaps they could make any offensively used tactical slot adding 1-2% more mitigation but I'm not sure about that.

The whole point of mitigation is that it's a soft counter to overwhelming focus fire.

The main reason though, is that the damage of a siege attack increases by the square of the number of ships; more siege ships do more damage while lasting longer. In addition, planetary defenses are linear, while fleet strength grows exponentially. This means that a fleet with siege ships has a huge zone of being underpowered. Yet, since small enhancements compound extremely fast, siege ships can quickly spill over into being overpowered. By adding mitigation, the extremes of siege ships being TOO good or TOO pathetic become mitigated(pun intended), allowing for a far greater range of moderate effectiveness.

Unfortunately, to go further into detail means using a good deal of math. Basically, the idea of mitigation is to make siege ships stronger on the low end, and weaker at the high end, which is something that can seriously help their balance.

you could do this right now

reduce frigate bombing damage by 50%

add a DPS ability to siege frigates to make up the lost damage

limit the stacking of the DPS ability to 4 or 5