+1

Now someone copy paste it into the game plz?`:)

It is incorrect to say flotillas from different lines are alway at long range: if you watch a battle from the overview, flotillas can get close to other lanes than their own and engage in medium and short range. Depend on the cards chosen and how the fleet is distributed between the lanes. 

I think I've even seen how you put ships into sidelane flotillas, that don't have opposite enemy fleet in advanced screen, and game calculated range effectiveness for that fleet as a long-range, even when range intention from battle tactics was close range. Kinda buffled me at the beggining until I figured it out.

I believe I figured out why sometimes ships won't fire back at foes shooting at them; firing arcs. Noticed ships don't have rear facing guns so of a flotillas gets behind them, they can't shoot back or few of their guns can. On my current game I play kinetic heavy (because got both advanced guns and support modules early) and my short range fleets tend to get shot on the back a lot while it's less of an issue for the medium and long range ones.

Great information. How does increasing shield absorption (by hero skills or battle cards) effect damage? I've seen in some places the claim that increased absorption currently depletes the shields more quickly, then leaves your ships to take full damage (minus any mitigated by hull plating). Is this true?

Foraven wrote:

I believe I figured out why sometimes ships won't fire back at foes shooting at them; firing arcs. Noticed ships don't have rear facing guns so of a flotillas gets behind them, they can't shoot back or few of their guns can. On my current game I play kinetic heavy (because got both advanced guns and support modules early) and my short range fleets tend to get shot on the back a lot while it's less of an issue for the medium and long range ones.

The lanes that ships fly trogh still aren't perfect and there are reported situations when a flotilla doesn't fire or cross lane firing doesn't happen.

Developers are working on that as this should not be happening.

eruanion wrote:

Great information. How does increasing shield absorption (by hero skills or battle cards) effect damage? I've seen in some places the claim that increased absorption currently depletes the shields more quickly, then leaves your ships to take full damage (minus any mitigated by hull plating). Is this true?

Increase in shield absorbsion means a larger portion of the damage goes to shields then normally would. It does mean that shields will get depleated faster but at the same time it means your hull gets less damage while your shields still have HP. In the end it doesn't change the total amount of damage that is sent your way. It just changes how it is distributed, more damage is absorbed by shields but that also means you run out of shields faster.

It has some logic as shield HP is renewed for each battle while hull HP isn't but it doesn't make much of a difference as either way you will quickly run out of shields.

Added some information about flak on heavy mounts. Content is being updated regulary.

I am working on boarding pods but observer numerous errors with them so need to investigate that first.

Thanks for this great resource!  A shame you aren't working developing UI / tooltips for the official game so that some of this stuff would be more obvious in-game :P

Just to clarify, I've heard that for combat between flotillas in different lanes, a lane can only engage the lanes directly adjacent to it.  E.G. the top lane can only engage the top or middle lane, the bottom lane can only engage the bottom or middle lane, and the middle lane can engage all lanes.  Is this true?

Also, I was wondering about how the "-50% Critical hit damage" shield modules work & whether they stack, and some people suggested that two of them on a ship would negate not only the additional critical damage, but also the "regular" damage, resulting in no damage taken whatsoever on a critical hit.

Just to clarify, you're saying the "-50% Critical hit damage" effect only blocks the additional damage that would have happened due to a critical hit?  I.E., having two of those modules just causes critical hits to calculate defenses normally, and having one of those modules just mean that critical hits ignore half of your defenses instead of all of them.  

Also, I had some trouble understanding what the mechanics are regarding "Damage enhnacers" and "Damage enhance modules" not working properly, at the bottom of your post.  Is this related to why the Missile salvo health doesn't increase when placed in a Heavy weapon mount?  Or something to do with the Support modules which increase Projectile / Energy damage?

Damage enhancers don't work correctly for Heavy weapon mounts. You will see just a slight increase in damage from them on those mounts.

Damage enhance modules don't apply damage correctly to regular weapon slots also and mounting it on bigger hulls doesn't mean you get a double bonus from them.

I have been doing some statistical analysis of the T1 basic weapons to see if there are any clear tactics that should generally be employed. 

From what I can tell there are some interesting winners and losers depending on your Weapon type and your battle tactic/flotilla range. 

I will be making a new "The Nose Knows" Youtube video this weekend discussing my hypothesis on what the optimal battle module types and tactics are, and will post a link to it here. 

Thanks again for this resource. It has been most helpful. 

Speaking of the balance of the early weapons, has there been a change to how Flak works in the past few months?  I remember last year the consensus was that it was far too effective, with on average a single Flak module able to completely neutralize 2 Missile modules, even if the Missile modules are 1 tier higher than the Flak.  However, in my game today I was seeing some strange results.  I'm assuming the Flak mechanics in the original post are still supposed to be accurate?  

Here is my strange situation:

The enemy is 2 United Empire Small Attackers, each wielding 3 Missile modules, so each salvo contains 6 missiles.  Since the missiles appear blue, I am assuming they are using the T3 Titanium missiles, which have a missile health of 90.  My fleet is 4 Small ships only using Flak weapons.  An Attacker with 2 Flak modules, an Explorer with 2 Flak modules, then another Explorer and a Support with 1 Flak module each.  They are all using the T2 Flak modules, which have 180 Flak damage vs. missiles.  According to this post, this means each Flak module should take 2 shots at incoming missiles for 90 damage each, at 80% accuracy.  Thus I should expect, in general, that each Flak module on my ships should be shooting down at least roughly ~1.5 incoming missiles per salvo.  

However, in practice, the incoming missiles salvos only ever had 1, or 0 missiles shot down.  Even when targeting my ships with 2 Flak modules, some salvos got through without any missiles being shot down.  This seems a little too much to chalk up to the 20% Flak miss rate, as it would require 4 shots at 80% accuracy to all miss, and for this to happen multiple times.  Needless to say, my fleet got completely obliterated despite using 6x T2 Flak vs 6x T3 missiles.  

Now, I'm totally happy with this result, since I think Flak was vastly overpowered in the past.  However, am I misunderstanding something about how Flak works, or have the hidden numbers been changed recently?  Do we need to update our understanding on how Flak works, or am I missing something here?

Save with battle pending for checking: vault Flaktest.sav

Not sure but it may be that the UE are using one of the quest/curiosity related versions of the Titanium missles which perhaps have more health than the standard tech tree ones? I habe yet to find a good exaustive list of weaponry online and dont know how likely it is that the AI engage in quest/curiosity seeking activities. 

Ah yes, hadn't considered whether they were using non-research modules.  

However, if it were just the case that the missiles had more health than expected, it wouldn't really explain why my ships with just 1 Flak module would always shoot down at least 1 missile, while my Attacker ship with 2 Flak modules would sometimes shoot down none, assuming 80% accuracy on Flak.  If the Flak's accuracy had been lowered, it would be more believable that my Attacker ships just got unlucky.  Perhaps I need to repeat a few similar tests to make sure this wasn't just a fluke...

Speaking of cross-flotilla shenanigans, allow me to shamelessly plug a reddit post I wrote after observing battles a bit: On the Influence of Tactics on Cross-Flotilla firing (+some info on bombers)

In Endless Space 2, when can a flotilla target another flotilla? 

 

The widely known

A flotilla can target adjacent flotillas if there are no enemy ships in its opposing lane, and it will work as if the attacking ships fired from long range.

That fact is widely known. It mainly means that the Topmost Flotilla (Lane 1) will never be able to target the Bottommost Flotilla (Lane 3) and vice versa. (except if squadrons are involved)

 

If that were the only condition behind cross-flotilla firing, then that would mean the Middle Flotilla (Lane 2) should be able to target all Lanes in all circumstances right? Unfortunately,  that is not the case. 

Some of you may have noticed it during gameplay, but there are cases when a flotilla will be unable to target an adjacent flotilla.

 

Flight Paths, Range, Attacker and Defender...

The two culprits behind this apparent inconsistency are flight paths and firing arcs. Ships can't fire in their back, so a bad flight path can lead a flotilla to be unable to fire back at another flotilla.

Flight paths are determined by Tactic Ranges, and starting positions determined by who is the Attacker and who is the Defender. The Defender is "on top", and the Attacker is "under".

 

There are 6 possible opposing range combinations. In the following examples, the Defender's range is left and the Attacker's range is right. You only need to mirror the paths to get the symmetric combination.

 

Defender's Range - Attacker's Range

• Short vs Short (SS):

See Lane 2

The Defending Lane 2 (Short) can only target Lane 1 and 2. 

The Attacking Lane 2 (Short) can target Lane 1 and 2 at all phases, and Lane 3 during phase 1 and 2.

• Short vs Medium (SM)

See Lane 1 and 3

The Defending Lane 1 (Short) can only target Lane 1 and 2. 

The Attacking Lane 1 (Medium) can target Lane 1 and 2.

• Long vs Short (LS)

See Lane 2

The Defending Lane 2 (Long) can only target Lane 1 and 2. 

The Attacking Lane 2 (Short can target Lane 3 during phase 1 and 2.

• Medium vs Medium (MM)

See Lane 1

The Defending Lane 1 (Medium) can only target Lane 1. 

The Attacking Lane 1 (Medium) can target Lane 1 and 2 at all phases.

• Long vs Medium (LM)

See Lane 1

The Defending Lane 1 (Long) can target Lane 2 during phases 1 and 2. 

The Attacking Lane 1 (Medium) can target Lane 2 at all phases.

• Long vs Long (LL)

See Lane 2

The Defending Lane 2 (Long) can target Lane 3 at all phases and Lane 2 during phases 1 and 2.

The Attacking Lane 2 (Long) can target Lane 1 at all phases and Lane 3 during phases 1 and 2. 

 

Things to keep in mind:

-Lanes can almost always (99% of battles) target the Lane above them.

As an Attacker:

-Medium range will enable Support toward the lower lane, except if the Defender chooses Short range. But Medium will also prevent support toward the upper lane after Phase 2 if the Defender chooses Long range.

-Long range will enable Support toward lower lanes for phase 1 and 2, except if the Defender chooses Short range.

As a Defender:

-Short range will prevent opposing Support toward lower lanes, except if the Attacker chooses Short range. 

-Long range can prevent an Attacking Medium range from targeting the upper lane after Phase 2.

 

The above gives an important tactical value to ranges. For example, let's imagine two fighting fleets. Fleet A (Attacker) is evenly spread across lanes, and is going for full long range. Let's say fleet B has less ships, and would lose if it evenly spread its lanes like A.

Well, if B put a single ship in Lane 2, and the rest of its fleet in Lane 3, it could be possible to use Short range on Lane 2 to prevent Attacking Lane 2 from targeting Defending Lane 3. That way, Defender would lose 1 ship to then earn two third of the enemy's fleet despite the initial disadvantage.

 

The special case of Bombers

It is widely known that Squadrons are above the cross-flotilla limitations, as they can attack all lanes given enough time.

What is not so widely known though, is that Squadrons will always target one lane at once, altogether. And from my own experience, this lane is almost always the Lane 1. Only once, in a 2 lanes versus 2 lanes battle did my Bombers chose to target the Lane 2 instead of the usual.

With that knowledge in mind, Ships carrying Bombers, and anti-Bombers countermeasures should be placed in Lane 1 for maximum efficiency. 

---

Summary: 

-Lanes can target adjacent lanes if firing arcs allow to.

-Ranges of both fleets affect flight paths, and thus support toward other lanes.

-Squadrons target one lane before moving on to the others. 99% of the time will be flying toward Lane 1.

samsonazs wrote:

eruanion wrote:

Great information. How does increasing shield absorption (by hero skills or battle cards) effect damage? I've seen in some places the claim that increased absorption currently depletes the shields more quickly, then leaves your ships to take full damage (minus any mitigated by hull plating). Is this true?

Increase in shield absorbsion means a larger portion of the damage goes to shields then normally would. It does mean that shields will get depleated faster but at the same time it means your hull gets less damage while your shields still have HP. In the end it doesn't change the total amount of damage that is sent your way. It just changes how it is distributed, more damage is absorbed by shields but that also means you run out of shields faster.

It has some logic as shield HP is renewed for each battle while hull HP isn't but it doesn't make much of a difference as either way you will quickly run out of shields.

Increasing shield absorbtion makes the shield soak more of that damage and deplete faster. It may not seem that useful at first glance, but if you have added shield recharge modules to your ships it might mean next to no damage gets through. The are fleet modules that increase shield recharge for the whole fleet, with enough of them stacked your fleet might get almost immune to energy damage. Kinetics have a high shield penetration so it's unlikely their damage gets completely blocked.

Can someone explain what is the difference between projectile and energy fighters/bombers? Does damage that would have been dealt by fighters/bombers to ships are reduced by shields or armor?

sweetjp wrote:

Can someone explain what is the difference between projectile and energy fighters/bombers? Does damage that would have been dealt by fighters/bombers to ships are reduced by shields or armor?

The "Damage calculation" section in this thread explains how damage is applied.

Efficiency of energy or projectile fighters/bombers depends on the defence of your target. We will have to see what changes with the new beta as I expect/hope that space battles ware a major part of that.

samsonazs wrote:

sweetjp wrote:

Can someone explain what is the difference between projectile and energy fighters/bombers? Does damage that would have been dealt by fighters/bombers to ships are reduced by shields or armor?

The "Damage calculation" section in this thread explains how damage is applied.

Efficiency of energy or projectile fighters/bombers depends on the defence of your target. We will have to see what changes with the new beta as I expect/hope that space battles ware a major part of that.

Thanks, i appreciate You answered so quickly. I have read Your post many times, it was realy helpful.