The way the system is set up, it is not against focus firing though. A single ship can sometimes put an enemy ship to max mitigation. If you outnumber the enemy, he will get bonus mitigation and you might end up doing about the same damage to second as a fleet to him as you would with only a 1 to 1 ratio, because the 2 to 1 pushes his mitigation much higher. You essentially gain very little from having a fleet that is twice as large.

In some cases (i.e. teched out advent), or with repair vessels, you can actually get to a point where your 10 would have drawn against his 10, but when you send in 15, you actually lose the battle (all 15 of your ships die). I don't know about you, but I prefer when the side with a more powerful force has the advantage. Being able to add 5 ships to one of your fleets and turn their victory or draw into a defeat seems horribly counter-intuitive.

I'm checking your numbers, and they look good. When you factor in the base shield mitigation of 15%, each ship in SG hits its 60% mitigation cap after only 12 seconds of focused fire, and after it has taken 476 damage.

. . . but I have a question that turns this entire issue around. Does shield mitigation increase based on the raw damage (i.e. 50), or the damage that actually hits the ship (affected by shield mitigation?)

In the latter case, my calculations are suggesting that with the shield mitigation increasing more slowly (due to less damage getting through each second), it takes 28 seconds of focus fire to reach the 60% cap, and in that time FG will have done 807 damage to the target ship.

Can anyone check my numbers on that?

I'm on it. (I wish this game had an easier way to test though)

ARGH! Make that 386 damage after 12 seconds. Sorry, Excel formula booch.

Yes it does, because we're looking at damage per second, not just damage done overall.

shieldData
shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage 0.001
shieldAbsorbDecayRate 0.0125
shieldAbsorbBaseMin 0.15
shieldColor ff8FD81D

Assuming that 'shieldAbsorbDecayRate' is per second, that means if you do less than 12.5 damage per second, the mitigation will fall. If you do more than 12.5 damage per second, the mitigation will rise.

Focus firing massively increases the DPS you do against a ship, and thus maximises mitigation almost immediately.

Splitting fire, on the other hand, causes mitigation to rise much more slowly, or not at all, depending on the DPS of the ships involved.

Fair enough.

Aside from the fact that mysoltyspl's calculations ignored the effects of hull/shield regeneration, I agree with his conclusions; the SG group destroys the FG group after losing only two ships; a third is nearly killed. If people want me to infodump my numbers I can do so.

. . . does anyone have any numbers on hull/shield regeneration? Does it depend on the ship / faction, or are there hard-coded values like the growth/decay values for shield regeneration? About what magnitude of hit-point change are we talking about?

Durikkan, I think you're right. I adjusted my spreadsheet to assume that each ship heals 2.75 HPs a second (is that what you meant by 2.75 of hull regen?) when actively attacked; this adds about a dozen seconds to the life of the ship being focus-fired, which in turn gives the entire SG fleet more time doing damage. Even so, when every FG ship is healing 2.75 HPs a second, they benefit from health regen a lot more than the SG ships do.

. . . the end result is that all four SG ships die, leaving the FG ships at 1/4 health.

Interestingly enough, before adding health regen, when I generalized my calculations for more than 4 ships (8, 10, 16), the SG group always won with only 2 ships remaining. Now, after adding in health regen as a factor, the presence of more ships in the battle just means that the FG ships each survive with a greater percentage of their original health.

I'm curious to see how tweaking the other inputs affects this mock battle: the health and DPS of each ship, the expected health regen, the shield mitigation cap. DPS is the trickiest because the model breaks down when each ship does more than 12.5 DPS--you'd have to start factoring in more than the base 15% shield mitigation when calculating the damage output of the SG fleet.

Are there other factors that affect health and damage that we're not considering? Because right now I'd have to agree that focus-firing, at least on paper, looks like a good idea.

Brilliant work, Alacer!

To check your results against my much-less-sexy Excel spreadsheet, I set your program to 4 ships v 4 ships, 1600 health, 2.75 damage regen. All the numbers checked out completely, up to the moment the first SG ship was destroyed; to the second, with the same amount of health remaining on all the FG ships.

. . . at which point, looking at the rest of your spreadsheet, I realize why the model I've been using is flawed: rather than wear away evenly at the health of the FG ships, the SG ships are now only attacking 3 of the FG ships! So their damage output is split 3 ways, not 4.

So, eventually, shortly after the second SG dies, the first two FG die; then it's 2v2 . . . then 2v1 . . . then eventually 2v0. SG wins.

. . . now, FG still wins in a 16v16 match @ 1600 health and 2.75 damage regen; but if players are attacking each other with nothing but heavy cruiser spam, something very weird is happening.

Not disputing that targetting appropriate armor types DOES make a difference. However, this does nothing to change the fact that focus fire is still the way to go here.



Makes no difference: Even one-on-one, shooting at a crappy frigate, will max out shield mitigation on it well before it dies. If you're dealing so little damage that the extremely slow decay even has an effect, natural regeneration is going to overcome the puny excuse for damage you're doing anyway.

I actually ran a test of this. 8v8, L1 Kols, no fighters, Team A engaging one-on-one, B engaging by focus fire. Result: 8-0 for focus fire, although team B almost lost a ship. The equation gets even more lopsided if you throw in regenerators of any kind or larger numbers on both sides. Fighting against Advent's shield regenerators, focus fire will wipe out your entire fleet while you do zip. Not a single point of actual damage.

Heavier units also get a huge advantage by focusing fire, in 6 kodiaks vs 6 kodiaks, the focusing fire group doesn't even lose a single ship, and ends the fight with more than 50% of its total hit points remaining. I'm just going to continue using focus fire as a general rule, espesically since I have never managed to get my units to spread evenly, they always cluster no matter what I try.

Oh, and Alacer: You're awesome.

Are you sure that HP regeneration continues at the maximum rate while a ship is in combat?

Also, wouldn't the best tactic be to spread fire with all your ships at first, then focus fire with some of them to pick off the now damaged enemy ships, so that their mitigation only has a chance to increase moderately before they are destroyed?

Well, If you have the repair units around, that gives you a regen of 20 to 40 points a second, and I think most fleets would probably have them after a certain point (I haven't really built them much, but I haven't really played against people and the AI generally lets me fight on top of my repair depots.

Even with no health regen, 4 focusing kodiaks still wipe the floor with 4 spread kodiaks (not a single loss)

Every single upgrade both sides get also tips the scales in the favor of the focusing side, with the advent shield mitigation upgrades as a possible exception.