- is the vengeance-skill of the advent Rapture Battlecruiser retaliating the damage before or after it is reduced trough shields/armor etc? if i use "animosity" with a Radiance Battleshio to get attention, is it usefull to put skillpoints in "energy absorptive armor", or would it decrease outgoing damage of the veangeance skill?
It is retaliating the damage after it has been reduced by mitigation and armor type and level. If something is being shot by an optimal damage type, the retaliated damage can be pretty huge....assuming the target lives long enough (ie. LRMs shooting at one of your disciples, or fighters shooting at one of your Illuminators....lots of retaliated damage, but then the target dies) Generally you will use Retaliation on your caps because that is what the enemy is probably focus firing, and they live long enough, even though they have balanced damage resistances. Maybe on an Iconus Guardian or Drone Host, if the enemy ships are focusing them.
Even though higher armor will reduce the retaliated damage slightly, it is probably a good idea to get it to make sure your Radiance has the most survivability possible....unless you are confident you have a lot of repair handy, another Radiance to play ping pong with, or are confident you have enough shield restoration / shield sharing around to keep it up.
- theres an option in the advent techtree to use tradeports for collecting metal/crystal. i had 6 oder 7 tradeports in a system that produced ~14 credits/s. as i switched the ports to gather ressources they only produced around 1,3 crystal/s (combined, fully skilled). the system had 1 metal and 2 crystalastroids. so my question is, isnt it way more usefull to let them collect money and buy all the metal/crystal from the market? does it become more usefull on systems with 4 metal/crystalmeteroids? i havent played a multiplayergame with more than 3 people so far. are the metal/crystalprices rising a lot later on?
Most multiplayer games are too short to get much use out of the tradeport resource focus. It can be profitable if you meet these criteria:
1. 4 extractors
2. very high culture worlds (core worlds with max Advent tech bonuses and starbase bonuses)
3. very long games where the small gain in income makes up the research cost
4. critical need of that resource so you don't have to buy it on the black market
5. especially worlds with planetary resource extraction bonuses
The difference is small enough that you probably won't mess with it on multiplayer games. If you find a cherry spot it could be beneficial....just multiply the additional resource increase by 5 (rough approximation of black market cost), and if that is higher than the trade value of the ports, you are getting a benefit. Just remember to keep a trade port trading so you don't break your longest trade chain. Also, don't forget that if you have a REALLY long trade chain, the ports could suddenly be more valuable again, so it is kind of map dependent.
