Not true. Shield mitigation changes based on how many enemies are shooting at it.

That is not how armor works. Armor in this game is a +5% effective durability per point of armor, a rapidly firing gun suffers the same effective penalty as a gun that fires every 5 seconds.

actually it goes up 1% every 10 points of damage. The info is in the game files.

Taltamir thats a good explanation. Thanks for the info.

In most circumstances, however, it seems intuitively beneficial to focus fire regardless - even if it takes longer due to mitigation, it would still be faster than splitting up your fleet to engage multiple targets.

-HD

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 doesn't really work that well (unless you want to constantly suffer the 'micro focused fire penalty'.

Flak frigates allow fair deal of micro. But the way you assign targets, not sure how the computer handles it. For the most part I click on the 10 stack then turn of stack view, and queue attack with shift on each individual icon in the empire tree. But this is for fighters/frigates other than flak. Flak need to be positioned just right to do the most damage, because of their firing arcs. They are a pain to micro and they will pick fighters/bombers over LRMs, that's why you need to assign targets. One rogue squadron from enemy capital can cut your damage potential by a lot, and it makes you flak run around the map like they are crazy.

Shield mitigation does nothing to decrease the value of focus-fire. Why? Because it doesn't really matter whether a ship is hit by 30 shots fired by one weapon, or 1 shot fired by 30 weapons. The mitigation increase is the same, so the curve of damage a ship takes as you whail on it is the same. It doesn't matter whether I cause 30 damage from one ship, or 30 damage from 30 ships. Shield mitigation will ramp up at exactly the same rate, because it's not triggered by number of attacking ships, but by the amount of damage taken. The curve does not change no matter how many ships attack that one ship. If the objective is to decrease the value of focus fire, the developers should consider why this doesn't happen in real life:

1. Weapons are not equally effective at any range. Longer-ranged shots are less effective than shots fired at short range.
2. Damaged targets are not as dangerous as undamaged targets.

These two factors are what promotes the focus-fire paradigm. The shield mitigation mechanic does nothing to change this. Because a ship with only one hitpoint is as effective in dealing damage as a ship with full hitpoints, until you kill something, the amount of damage you are taking is the same. Because firing a shot at maximum range is as, or nearly so as, effective as firing a shot at point blank range, you do not deal greater damage by firing at closer targets. These two factors combined make it optimal for a force to focus all fire on a single target, in order to kill it and thus reduce the incoming damage output. If these factors were changed, focus fire would quickly become a situational move much like it is in real life.

Shield mitigation does nothing: Although on paper, your DPS will be higher because the shield mitigation values will be lower, shield mitigation REALLY just means it's harder to inflict damage on damaged target than it is to inflict damage on undamaged targets, creating a weighted curve on "hitpoints" instead of a linear one. But this changes nothing, because a ship with one hitpoint is as combat-effective as a ship with full hitpoints! All it does is inflate the "true" hitpoint figure of a ship. If after a ship has taken 300 damage, hits to it deal half as much damage, then the first 300 hitpoints it takes will require maybe 450 points of damage to do, while the remaining 2700 hitpoints would require you to deal 5400 damage or more, as that value increases. That just means the ship is capable of actually withstanding more actual "dealt" points of damage than is visibly apparent from its hitpoint display.

Since shield mitigation actually has no REAL effect on focus-fire, this is why it seems more intuitively effective to do it anyway: Because it IS. If I use focus fire and you just fire at ships randomly, I will most likely wipe out your entire fleet without you being able to kill a single ship. This is certainly the effect I've observed vs. the AI in stat graphs: The AI uses undirected fire, while I pick off and destroy by focus fire. The AI's damage dealt to me is about two orders of magnitude less than what I have done to him: He hasn't ever come CLOSE to killing even a single capital ship, and each individual AI has a fleet twice the size of mine. I have, at no point, ever felt in danger of actually losing a ship, while the AI's undirected fire tactics are getting him slaughtered in situations where he has the larger force.

Not true. While the shield mitigation goes up at constant depending on damage, it goes down based on time. So 1 ship firing 30 times will take a lot longer than 30 ships firing once, and over that longer time the shield mitigation will drop more.

Of course, if you take the slower route, the shields will have more time to repair.

So:
Focus fire:
+Less damage wasted on shields repairing.
+Lower enemy dps quicker
-More damage wasted on shield mitigation
Distributed fire:
+Less damage wasted on shield mitigation.
-More damage wasted on shields repairing.

So working out which is more effective, and where the sweetspots are, will require a fair bit of number crunching in Excel.

My guess is that focus fire is still effective for the same reason it is effective in other RTS: you reduce the enemies damage ability quicker.
Shield mitigation probably only cancels out the shield repair. Thinking about it, without shield mitigation focus fire would be ridiculously dominant. You'd only be fighting the shield repair of one ship instead of several.

It does change - don't forget it decreases itself 0.0125/s.

Consider 4 vs 4 ships - each with 1600 hull, no shields, 50dmg/4s, no hull rr to simplify things. Shield mitigation is 0.6.

Focusing group (let's call them FG) will be doing 50dmg/s, upping shield mitigation significantly. It's simple series - when you sum it you fill find, that you need: 16 seconds to cap mitigation doing ~545 damage during that time. Remaining damage will be dealt in 53 seconds, with mitigation capped at 60%.

That's total 69 seconds to kill a ship by FG. SG (spreading group) will be dealing damage at no mitigation penalty at all. That's 69 seconds before first SG ship goes down. And 4*50*69/4/4 damage total, 862 per FG ship. So we're now at:

FG: 4 ships at 738 hull
SG: 3 ships at 1600 hull

After next 69 seconds

FG: 4 ships at 216
SG: 2 ships at 1600

After next lest than 69 seconds

FG: dead
SG: 2 ships remaining

@soltyspl, how is possible to make the same amount of damage to 4 ships FG by 3 ships SG? Calculations are totaly wrong. Besides there is no hull and shield regen too. And... FG group will up mitigations to 60% too becouse this factor depends on amount of damage received not amount of ships. Make math again and You see that SG group is dead

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 would favor the FG. If every ship did more damage, or even if every ship did less damage, that would also favor the FG. Support/Repair ships would also help the FG. If both sides had more units, that would also favor the FG.

Your example happens to be the best possible conditions for the spread fire group, and they only narrowly win, changing any of the values I mentioned puts it back in favor of the focusing group.

FG will make SG up their mitigation. The other way - nope, because shieldAbsorbDecayRate will cover that, in this case.

That's the whole point behind this example. Lack of hull rr, or shd rr is a simplification for the sake of this example. Of course, it can be factored in, and depending on ship composition and their stats, will yield different outcome, or not.

Calculations are good, although I should have used sum from 0 in one place. It barely changes the numbers, or the outcome.



Yes, you're right. I forgot that, but the outcome is still the same, with a bit different numbers.

Main weak points of my approach is lack of shield and hull r.r. - both, with focused fire, will work against SG group.

I might do more complete check, including shd and hull r.r. - but a bit later.