Dragar, I was talking about relative damage reduction, you are talking about absolute damage reduction. You can't just directly compare those and say one of them is wrong.

Yes, the absolute damage reduction depends on the raw damage output of the weapon, and can be a useful value to look at.

But I was talking about Relative Damage reduction since that is what you need to calculate your effective mitigation and use that against the enemy damage output, like SteveRaptor did in his post about beams.

SteveRaptor wrote:

aerothgow wrote:

problem is there is no real rock paper scisors it's just beams and hp for defense. the rest is only for role-play.

A fleet of pure beam ships (what the AI sometimes like to do) can be countered by missiles.

A fleet of beam ships with some slugs to stop missiles (what players like to do) can be countered with evasive manuvers + yellow lasers on the co-ordinators to de-buff hunters.

This resullts in-50% Accuracy for any enemy hunter using beams/lasers at long range.

This is assuming your opponents is using shield penetration stuff like "Red zone overkill" or the EMP thing.

At medium range beams are inferior to every other weapon.

i've not compared numbers in a vacuum. I builded thouse fleets and made them fight in my pits. Energy beats kinnetics 10 out of 10. Missiles take so long to reach their target that their

fleet is allready dead and if  you ships dies the missiles scatter in space.

Hulls with HP were the only thing to survive long range phase.

One of the big problems is also that you can make obscene offensive power on a ship that it negates any kind of defense hull or shield. Too much firepower compared to what defense you can build

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Dragar, I was talking about relative damage reduction, you are talking about absolute damage reduction. You can't just directly compare those and say one of them is wrong.

Yes, the absolute damage reduction depends on the raw damage output of the weapon, and can be a useful value to look at.

But I was talking about Relative Damage reduction since that is what you need to calculate your effective mitigation and use that against the enemy damage output, like SteveRaptor did in his post about beams.

Why would you prefer relative damage reduction over absolute damage reduction, ever? I am not trying to be awkward; I am genuinely interested. When looking at how much damage reduction I'm interested in, it's the absolute changes that kills ships, not fractional ones. 

For ease of calculation. When you know your total relative damage reduction (from evasion, defenses, or whatever other source there might be), it's easy to apply that value to any amount of incoming damage. Or if you prefer, invert that value and multiply it by your ship HP to get the maximum amount of damage your ship can withstand, which is a value that has been discussed in this thread quite a bit.

Or in other words: The relative damage reduction is a step to easily calculate the absolute damage required to kill your ship, as opposed to calculating a series of absolute reductions for the different defenses. Both are valid and will in the end give you an absolute absolute value for how much your ship can withstand, but I prefer using the relative value as an intermediate step.

Allow me to explain why I think your point about defensive modules being 'imbalanced' is just NOT true.

I will try to argue against your two main points: you said i) it is much easier to defend against projectile weapons than energy and ii) hull plating should always be equipped instead of shields

First of all, you cannot only say that it is 'imbalanced' by only looking at the defensive module: you also need to look at the weapons themselves and their DPS. Here I've taken every module used from the first tier, so it will be 'fair'.

Equipping a medium ship with basic missiles (2 slots) give the ship 111 DPS, while equipping it with lasers give 53 (less than half the DPS of missiles). Now you may say that this doesn't take into account of the range accuracy. However, I'll show you why projectile weapons definitely deal more DPS than energy weapons overall by multiplying them by sum of ranges.

Basic tier 1 module DPS:  

Missile 28 : Range 100/50/25 = 28 x (100+50+25) = 4900

Kinetic 25 : Range   10/50/85 = 25 x (10+50+85) = 3625

Laser 13   :  Range 50/100/50 = 13 x (50+100+50) = 2600

Beam 11   : Range 100/100/100 = 11 x (100+100+100) = 3300

Now you might say that the beam overall effective DPS is not far below projectiles. However, if you take a look at the next unlocked module in tier 3 (non-strategic), Missile DPS becomes 61 and Beam 19. This gives overall missile 61 x (100+50+25) = 10675 while beam 19 x(100+100+100) = 5700

The point is that projectile weapons, especially missiles typically deal far more DPS than energy ones, and so it is quite obvious that in order to make this 'balanced', projectile weapons should be easier to counter, and ships defensive modules should be better against projectiles than energy weapons considering the amount of DPS projectiles can deal.

Missiles have very high DPS, but also can be countered by FLAK and ships have better defense against projectiles

Lasers and Beams have much lower DPS (about half), but have no counter and ships have worse defense against energy

So it really depends what you/ your opponents choose.

Secondly, I also want to compare the defensive modules, as I also don't think the shields are as 'bad' as you said. Again I'm using the same level plates and shields for fairness.

Now let's see how effective it is against different weapons.

ALL PLATES CASE: you see here that equipping the ship with all plates gives you 65% absorption and 12124 HP

MISSILES: Hull penetration 10%, so overall hull plating will give 55% absorption, so the ship will only 45% of damage of missiles, which means it can take 12124 x 100/45 = 26942 missiles damage before ship gets destroyed

KINETIC: Hull penetration 20% so overall hull plating will give 45% absorption, so the ship will take 55% damage meaning 12124 x 100/55 = 22043 Kinetic damage before destroyed

LASERS: Hull penetration 80% so overall hull plating will give 0% absorption, so ship takes 100% damage meaning  12124 Laser Damage before destroyed

BEAMS: Hull penetration 90% so overall hull plating will give 0% absorption, so ship takes 100% damage meaning 12124 Beam Damage before destroyed

ALL SHIELDS CASE: The ship's current HP is 9980 with shields 5944 and shield absorption 87%

MISSILES: Shield penetration 60% so overall shields take 27% of the damage with 73% going straight to ship's HP. Now 5944/27 = 220 and 9980/73 = 137, so shields capacity will NOT get used up before HP goes to 0, so here ship can take 9980 x 100/73 = 13671 Missiles Damage before destroyed

KINETIC: Shield penetration 50% so overal shields take 45x 0.5 = 37% damage with 63% to ship's HP. Now 5944/37 = 161 and 9980/63 = 158 so shields will be used up before HP goes to 0, so here ship can take 9980 + 5944 = 15924 Kinetic Damage before destroyed

LASERS&BEAMS: Shield penetration 10% so overall shields take 77% of damage, so again shield capacity used up before HP so can take 15924 Energy Damage before destroyed.

So clearly here, shields are better against energy weapons than plating, and I would actually argue that it is better to equip your defensive ships with shields and Kinetic, as although plates are much better against missiles than shields, missiles can be easily countered using Kinetic's FLAK. Also, providing your ships dont get destroyed, equipping with shields will actually typically give you more HP% at the end of the battle, as the damage gets absorbed by shields first.

Here is the data when equipped on smaller (protector) ships

Now on Carriers:

I hope I have convinced you that shields and hull platings have their pros and cons... just keep in mind that missiles are easily countered by FLAK, and energy weapons have much lower DPS than projectiles.

FINALLY, my suggestion is to obviously equip your defensive modules according to your opponent's weapons, although it can prove to be more efficient with a mixture of the two. If your ships are typically long range, then equip your defense with FLAK and shields to counter missiles and energy weapons. However, if short-range, then you might need more hull plating as it is much more effective against Kinetic. Keep in mind though when in short-range, that your opponents might have railguns. My conclusion is that I think Amplitude has done a FANTASTIC job in balancing the projectile/energy weapons/defensive modules out already, and after reading this I hope you can also agree.

Flotilla shields and reshield modules do not add any survability on their own anyway past a certain point, you always need repair modules to go with them (whereas repair modules will always help kinetic defenses regardless of how much you have equiped).

Kuma wrote:

I fail to see how my message contradicts what you said or why you felt the need to say it doesn't work in practice, I was just adding an argument to your point about shield recharges and fleet shields being totally pointless.

In theory AND practice, too much shield becomes useless as soon as you get past the point of too much damage passing your shields, because the rest of the damage is tanked by your hull HP, and once those reach 0 your shields are useless since your ship is dead.

The point at which shields become overkill is as follow :

shipHP x shieldAbsorption / ( 1 - shieldAbsorption)

with shield absorption accounting shield penetration from the opponent. Against any competent player, they'll go for red zone overkill, and by that point the basic shield HP your shields give will be way overkill compared to what you actually need and the only way to add survability will be to add repair modules, which is just plain unlogical.

I misinterpretated your comment, so its my bad.

Other than that I agree with what you wrote.