i, personally think that shield mitigation, while was designed to sort of punish focus fire... doesnt do it very well... and instead of bute-forcing an + in the midigation cap... a more logerithmic sort of mitigation would be much better.
Right now, it doesnt matter if 5 or 50 ships are focusing fire on another ship, hte shield midigation jumps straight up to the max and stays there till the doomed ship goes boom (or, if the player is paying attention, runs away).
I dont know, but that seems kinda mean.
When i think of a space battle, everyone almost never gangs up on one of the other guys, normally lasers and slugs are flying everywhere, with chaos, and booms, and everything... in sins, its like... fire on that guy, boom, aim at the next guy, boom, next... almost all the ships the survive the battle have full health at the end of it cause they never even too a shot...
I would much perfer (and this shouldnt be too hard, just little adjustment in the AI and in the shield midigation function) that, while, yes... if you want to kill a single ship, focus fire on it, but if you want to destroy an entire fleet... you need to spread the damage around a bit. This will also help with the capital ship thing.
I would suggest that it go something like this, and for simplicity... well ill try to keep it simple...
What i imagine is this, in a battle, lets say a ship is taking fire from a... comparable ship, so a cobalt is attacking a cobalt. our light frig is taking the damage of a factor of "1" if 2 cobalts are attacking our light frig, its taking a dmg of a factor of "x2" (I am obviously not taking into effect armor, research, the damage table, w/e, but these things should be factored in, but k.i.s.s. rule for now)
as our ship starts getting ganged up, from 1 ship against him, to around 4 ships against him, his shield midigation should barely go up, in other words, the more damage a ship is taking per second, the higher the midigation cap should be... so maybe from 15% to 25%, but at the 5th, 6th and 7th, it should really start to climb, as 1. the poor ships redirects all power to the shields, and the other ships around him, who are not taking damage are in contact, and doing thier best to sort of "share the load" by transfering their extra enegry, and helping to fine tune that resonate frequency to help midigate more damage. so by the 8th ship, (twice the 4 ships focusing before) the midigation should reach a point where attacking ships 5,6,7, and 8 are doing, say half of what ships were doing on thier own... so instead of 4 *(1-25% midigation)=damage factor of 3, at 8 ships attacking one, the shield midigation should be something like 8*(1-44% midigation)= damage factor of about 4.5, at 16 ships all fireing on 1 ship, midigation should be reaching 58% percent so the we get 16*(1-58%)=6.75 (4.5*1.5), if a ship is unlucky to be focused on by 32 ships, well you can be certain that the ships surrounding that ship are going to be doing their darnist to try to project thier own shields over the ailing ship, and the the midigation should be enough to give a damage factor of 10.125, or a midigation of 68%, and if the entire freaking fleet of 64 ships really really really wants that other guy gone, they should be dealing the "pure" damage of only about 15 ships, (a damage factor of 15.19ish), or the ship getting ownt should have a midigation of around 76% (64*(1-.76269)=15.19
In other words, those 64 ships are not doing nearly as much as they could be doing if they spread out their fire a bit, and attacked 16 ships at the same time. ( a damage factor of 15.19 vs a damage factor of 3 *(64/4)=48.
In other words, the ship in question is prolly going to end up ownt, but the attacking fleet is only doing 1/3 of the damage it could be doing if it just spread out thier fire a bit.
questions? comments? perhaps i should make my own thread about this idea?
and btw, all the numbers were completly spur-of-the moment, with no reguards to balancing or anything slightly smart like that.
And the whole thing about other ships "helping" was jsut sort of a visual... but that might not actually be a bad alternative idea... herm... (goes off to ponder a bit)