Crandaeolon

Generally agree with OP except for the following caveats: Anyone massing siege frigs is either filthy rich (in which case they'd probably deserve to win anyway) or dead. Sure, a huge number of siege frigs can kill a planet by surprise, but if surprise happens, your scouting failed in which case you deserve to burn. And, given equal economic development, you should be able to defeat anyone whose fleet has loads of siege frigs. I dunno about swarms yet. Yeah, maybe the RPS system

[quote]What I don't understand what this has to do with focus firing, how the shield mitigation ramps up to high levels, etc. Can someone explain this in more detail?[/quote] Shield mitigation is an anti-focus firing measure. As ships take damage, their mitigation % increases until it hits a cap. This percentage is reduced from all incoming damage, regardless of the status of shields (a ship with collapsed shields still benefit from mitigation - in this sense the name is a bit misleadin

Nope, you didn't get it. Phase missiles are basically a damage increase when focus firing. Poster #9 has the right idea.

Gave it a quick test. 10 Assailants took about 40 seconds to kill a lone Garda Flak Frigate without phase missiles, with 30% phase missiles it took 24 seconds. (The Flak's damage mitigation quickly ramped to 57% in both cases.) Right now I'd say that Phase Missiles indeed defeat damage mitigation, which makes sense. That's their main selling point, and makes them pretty much equally useful against all races.

[quote]According to the manual mitigation also works when the shields are down! damage to the hulls is STILL mitigated by shield mitigation. This means there is absolutely no mitigation benefit unless it specifically bypasses mitigation and doesn't say so.[/quote] It's impossible to know if this interpretation is correct, unless someone peeks into the data files or tests it extensively. Phase missiles might negate mitigation too, for all we know. In any case, they're next to wo

Phase missiles would make sense if they can pass damage mitigation, but can anyone actually confirm that this is the case? Remember that damage mitigation is effective even when shields are down (they use "emergency generators" or somesuch to keep mitigating damage to the hull.)

Assailants are LRM equivalents. They probably lasted longer because Illus didn't target them; ships generally try to target enemies that take the most damage from their weapons. Anticapital weapons do only 75% damage against light armour. Anyways, against just Illuminators you would have done fine. It was the Progenitor / Guardian shield bubble that you had problems dealing with. I suggested a couple of Subverters earlier because they would have made the two Progenitors easier to kill w

Does the Devastator ability disable bomber weapons or only fighters? If it does disable bombers, even a low-level Dev should be able to keep their weapons disabled for a good 30-45 secs. Would be interesting to see the replay, could you please upload it?

Watched replay. The Illuminator guy had 70ish illus, 2 motherships and a handful of guardians. The fleet was tightly packed in guardian shield bubbles. OP had a mixed fleet with few hard counters (handful of fighter squadrons) and NO antimatter, shield or ability disruption (Interference not researched, no Subverters). OP's capship zergs ahead and dies instantly, forces dribble in, carrier group gets too close. Fighters distracted by bombers and other targets. I wouldn't call

[QUOTE]I've never experienced a crash in live singleplayer or multiplayer games, but always get a crash at same exact points in time when viewing some replays. Other replays pose no problem. This one, for example, always crashes at 6 mins 32 seconds.[/QUOTE] False alarm, it's an older version replay. Maybe some of these other crashes are version or mod issues too? Does the game display a warning if the host's version differs?

Huh. I have a similarly specced system (though Athlon / Nvidia), and I'm pretty sure framerates get far below 20 in big battles and large games. Maybe it's a processor issue then. Does anyone know if the game is optimised for SSE2?

I've never experienced a crash in live singleplayer or multiplayer games, but always get a crash at same exact points in time when viewing some replays. Other replays pose no problem. [link="https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?skinid=3&libid=72"]This one,[/link] for example, always crashes at 6 mins 32 seconds. Minidumps sent to support.

You guys can run battles of 100+ ships per side without stutter? Or 4-6 player games with fleet caps nearly maxed out? Coz I sure can't at similar specs without severe slowdowns.

Well-written, finely presented suggestion there, good job. However, I wouldn't jump to /sign it at once. The way I see it, micromanagement should have some kind of reward, otherwise there just isn't that much stuff to do in this game due to the powerful interface and queuing abilities. I'm trying to say that the combat AI should be good enough to "do the job", but not even nearly at 100% efficiency. Even a moderately skilled human being should be able to do a better job. With m

Simple solution for fleet cap: keep current system, but add (empire total population) / 4 (or whatever) to the cap.

It's probably the message log window overlay activating that causes the slowdown. If your overlays in general take so much CPU time, you can't probably fix that either. :)

Yes, pressing ALT causes slowdown too. However, not when zoomed very far out. Strangely, the notifications at bottom left of the screen ("Ship production at X complete" etc.) don't seem to cause slowdown for me. Also, simply activating the "Show Names" option in User Interface does NOT cause slowdown. However, activating the "Tactical Grid" option DOES cause slowdown. So... whispers from other races and other text in that area = slowdown; Info cards = slowdown; Diplomacy / Research / Un

Does your game also slow down when messages or infocards appear on screen? It so, it might be related to [link="https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?forumid=408&aid=175638#1457487"]this.[/link] It appears to be a common issue across a wide variety of configurations.

This kind of stuff comes into mind: - Looking into text rendering frame rate drop issue - Increasing AI tolerances for retreating (especially when defending homeworld) - Adding active AI to replace dropped players - Fixing lobby join/leave channel messages - Making PJI more effective (2.5-3x increase from current?), increasing area a bit - Adding some unit cap, for example per total population of empire might work I'm kind of undecid

Same problem here, Athlon XP 3200+ / 1,5 Gig RAM / 7600GT (driver 169.21) / XP SP2. It's particularly painful on such a slow machine; game runs pretty well without messages on screen but as soon as one appears, it slows to a crawl. Once the message goes away, it speeds up again. Kinda weird.