Durikkan

[quote]Consider 4 vs 4 ships - each with 1600 hull, no shields, 50dmg/4s, no hull rr to simplify things. Shield mitigation is 0.6.[/quote] [quote]SG (spreading group) will be dealing damage at no mitigation penalty at all.[/quote] 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 wo

Since my results showed no difference, I'm wondering if the OP lost a trade station without realizing it, or just had a bunch of trade ships die in the time before he looked at the income again.

Can you upload the replay someplace so I can take a look and try to figure you what happened?

I just tested it and the phase gates do not affect your trade income at all, the white line is still the same path and you still make the same amount of money.

[quote]Question: does a stronger culture (with more culture techs researched) push back an opponent's weaker culture?[/quote] Yes, if you have a lot more culture tech and a bunch of stations in one place, I've seen it lowering morale at enemy planets 2 jumps away, and that place had a morale station.

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

If he has a ton of capital ships in a system or lots of broadcast towers, it can essentially neutralize a single culture attack.

If you have multiple selected, the total number of fighter squadrons is listed, maybe you got confused (it confused me at first)

you can queue production based on research that's pending, and research on research stations under construction, I'd say that's a fair amount better than most games, but yes, taking the resources when it is built might be nice.

[quote]really? up or down?Well either way, just rip right through it. It is overall better to focus fire as much as possible.[/quote] 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.

[quote]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.[/quote]

Maybe try copying the entire file from a cap ship and then powering it down manually to where you want the ship to be?

[quote]s it better to build a cap ship right at the start to take systems rather than fleets of small corvettes?[/quote] Considering the first one is free, I generally build it first before any other combat units, even.

[quote]If you let the AI manage targets then they tend to not focus fire and will pick targets based on what they do the most damage to.[/quote] This has not been my experience when I've been playing, and I just jumped into a system where the other player had 14 ships and me with 12 light frigates, left to do their own thing, they focused fire on one enemy ship at a time, target after target. [quote]Pretty sure that the shield mitigation applies to missiles that phase past the

Well, one thing about this whole thing is that the Vasari have that technology that allows them to partially ignore this gameplay mechanic. Preliminary tests seem to indicate they gain a large advantage by focus firing with their % chance mitigation attacks. I don't understand why an anti focus firing mechanic should only strongly apply to 2 of the 3 races, with the third able to mostly ignore it if they wish. Against that crazy advent capital I talked about before with 85% max mitiga

As best as I can tell, Shield mitigation's primary purpose is as one of the many things that helps players who aren't playing as well. Having a smaller fleet would mean that your ships are taking more damage, so all their shield mitigations would be higher, so they end up taking less damage than they would. (Personally, I'd rather just get crushed than fight a losing battle for an hour and a half though)

[quote]No matter how many captial ships your fleet has, if your enemy creates a drone type of fleet with fighter and bomber squadrons, well it'd be a good fight, but eventually the drone fleet will win.[/quote] Because apparently, when your capital ships are attacked by fighters, they get distracted and don't go after the carriers and just wait politely for the fighters to go away? :P

Maybe what they need to do is just add some more levels to the ship cap, 2800 at 80%, 3500 at 84%, etc, since it seems like the cap is far more of a problem than money on the huge levels.

Well, This game is weighted very heavily towards the rts side and not much toward the 4x side. I think of it as about 95%/5%.

For future reference, the increase in power would be 1.08 * 1.1575 = 25% increase in power. So yes, they are more expensive in power with no upgrades, but, they have more abilities, they can turn faster (a tiny advantage, but one nonetheless), since they have fewer ships, their shield mitigation would be higher on average, so they would be taking less damage than the other team, they're still only worth 100 xp to the enemy, so your units would feed their capital ships less, etc.

As far as I can tell, it goes down a little bit each second, and goes up every time the ship is hit, not sure if it is dependent on % damage or anything. I've noticed that a single capital ship firing at a target can max out that ship at full shield mitigation, so it seems like it's not worth it at all to avoid focusing fire. I'd even say focusing fire is the best tactical strategy at the moment. If you're some sort of micromanagement god, you could have your ships engage

[quote]I believe shield mitigation only applies to damage being done to the shields and armor only applies to damage being done to the hull. At least that's what seems most logical, could be wrong though.[/quote] You'd think so (I thought so), but that's actually not how it works, Shield mitigation is always there, the manual talks about reserve generators that keep the mitigation going.

Level 10 capital ship = 75% + 4% (shield tech) + 6% (culture), they can get to 85% mitigation on their home turf, unless the game caps it somewhere. I hope it does, otherwise a level 10 advent capital has around twice the durability of a level 10 capital of any other side.

It seems weird to me to have shield mitigation *and* armor mitigation. Some poor soul using an anti-heavy weapon on the hull of a well positioned advent capital ship would only do: 50% (Anti-heavy vs cap) * 20% (amount that makes it through shield mitigation) * 60% (amount that makes it through hull mitigation) = 6% of base damage

[quote]20 damage every 3 seconds, that would allow a single unupgraded planetary bomber to kill a 1000hp asteroid in less than 3 minutes. That's 6 bombers to kill a 6000hp planet in the same time frame. If you want to prove that planetary bomber frigates does more damage to you, than it does for others, then replay or it didn't happen.[/quote] Uhh, why did you quote that? He already corrected himself in a later post.