I don't think anyone knows for sure, and the devs haven't said.

That's too bad that they haven't said. They've been pretty open about how the rest of the game works so it's not a "magic blackbox" type of thing so maybe they'll tell us if they see this post.

If the relationship is as simple as that then armour seems a little redundant doesn't it? If it just corresponds to an increase in effective HP, why not just give the ship more HP instead of more armour? The "increase armour" techs might as well be "increase HP" techs, ships with high base armour could just have higher base HP and so on.

If armor worked this way, then HP upgrades should be more useful than armor upgrades because (Base HP + HP upgrades) would act before (Base Armor + Armor Upgrades), making armor upgrades less worthwhile. It would be more effective if armor was a form of mitigation. For every 'x' amount of damage the hull takes, 1 point of armor reduces it by 5%. Of course, the heaviest armored ship would never reach 20 armor unless someone modded it. Another strange thing is that the level of armor doesn't really scale with the kind of ship it's on. The Vasari's Skarovas Enforcer heavy cruiser has a base armor of 4.5, while Vasari bombers have a base armor of 5! Similarly, a Javelis LRM and a TEC fighter both have 1 armor. And, on a side note, what the hell does "Mass Reduction" do? The last Vasari armor tech, "Atomic Lattice Armor" gives an armor increase of 4.5 over the base and a Mass Reduction bonus of 4%. Does this reduce resource cost, build time, etc., or increase speed or some other weird thing. ----For some reason, line breaks(Enter) aren't working here. Not even the br tag is working----

From the description, I would assumed that 'mass reduction' does exactly what it says - reduces the mass of the ship, thus increasing its acceleration (and possibly top speed and/or turning rate).

But in this way, armor regeneration is for free, from the % of hull. I.e. if you have hull 1000 and let's say armor == 25% of hull (too keep it more realistic), then you will regen 25% of effective hull for free. Or looking at in from different perspective - reduce the damage done to the real hull by 20%.



researchModifier
modifierType "ArmorBaseAdjustment"
baseValue 0.000000
perLevelValue 0.500000
researchModifier
modifierType "MassReduction"
baseValue 0.000000
perLevelValue 0.040000

File in question is RESEARCHSUBJECT_SPEEDBOOSTARMOR

Well, Advent capitals don't have 80% shield mitigation. But yeah.

The vasari have several abilities to punch through mitigation, though.

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.

So how does shield mitigation go up? Is it the number of ships firing on the target or is it the damage per second the target is receiving? If maximum mitigation value is reached to soon/easily it kind of defeats the purpose of spreading your targets out.

If that is true then it seems as though the purpose of mitigation is not working the way the dev's envisioned it. As I believe they wanted to reduce the amount of focus firing going on.

For mitigation to make more of an impact it needs to go up with the more ships or DPS hiting the target in a non-linear fashion. That way there would be a sweet spot or optimal firing solution. You don't want people thinking "oh well, those two light cruisers caused the shield mitigation to go up to 65% on that cap ship. Might as well focus fire it".

I believe the original intention was to get ships to spread their targeting out more to make for a more climatic and visually interesting battle. Right now it seems almost pointless/redundant in most situations. It should take more directed fire to cause mitigation to go up. That would encourage more target diversity.

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)

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 mitigation, Vasari phase missiles would effectively deal 3 times as much damage, on average, as any other ship with the same attack power, killing the ship 3 times as fast.

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.



I ran some tests on this (which is hard in this game because you can't attack your own units for some reason), and found that the phase missiles ignore mitigation completely when they phase.

I didn't even take into account the fact that with 85% mitigation, the hull missiles would kill the hull while they still had shields left, so actually, on average, against a level 10 radiance battleship with 85% mitigation, the phase missiles as they are now would kill the ship 11 times as fast as the same ship without the phase missiles upgrade. That is not an exaggeration, that is right around the real number.