The amount of countered missiles is based on the time it takes for the flak cannon to fire and not a static number on how many missiles it will always destroy, each missile has its own healthpoint which must be eliminated as well. The top weapons are easily noticed as them are the weapons who only fires a single missile animiation while the rears of the ship weapons fire two missile animations, however the actual amount of missiles fired is only one. Each of the these two different slots have its own settings and a top missile will have 2x as much health on a medium or larger ship and fires the missile in a wider area than the rear weapons, in which case the rear flak cannon's allowed response zone can be out of reach for the missile's striking angle.  Each side can only reach 180° while the top can reach 270° and has to take into account the time and distance to the target. If a weapon who can only fire at the sides shifts sideweapon it need to restart the firing sequence. If a fleet is flanked by many fleets , each fleet is having a different distance and time of arrival for their own missiles.

i like to make my toughest / biggest protector ship my flak ship. it will be the prefered target.   i load that puppy with all flak and use it to shoot down the in coming.  works like a charm.

Smitty2k1 wrote:

I would nerd out so hard if more information was given/availble during battles. Would love for it to feel more "turn-by-turn" once you hit the "fight" button

Not much nerding, I mean given all the information all you have to do is put it down in solver and come out with an optimized setup and then get rick'n'rng rolled.

I will do my best to answer this question as it seems the verdict was never clearly established as to why the OPs flak defenses seemed to fail. There are several factors to consider when facing an enemy armed exclusively with missiles that will determine your success. 

• #1 What tier is his weaponry?
• #2 how many weapon moduals does he have (make sure you appropriately account for med and carrier class ships mods counting as x2 and x4 per slot respectively)
• #3 how does his flotilla composition and frequent/recently used tactics stack up to your own?

If you have a good understanding of these three things you can very accurately predict the outcome of most engagements.

First lest look at slug modules and how they function in the game. Each slug module you equip will provide your fleet with two things. First an offensive, high rate of fire, projectile weapon with terrible accuracy/damage at long range; but devestating close range accuracy/damage. To maximize your ships success with these modules you absolutely must run the ships using them with a battle tactic that sends them into close range. Due to the high rate of fire, and moderate damage per hit relative to missiles, these guns will whittle away enemy health at a predicatble rate which increases as you close distance to your target. This is in contrast to missiles, which have a very slow rate of fire but absolutely devestating damage upon a single hit. 

This burst damage effect is likely why you feel you are winning as the battle begins, but dont do as well as you feel you should.  As your rapid fire slugs begin to whittle the enemy health away steadily you take the lead, but then boom...a missile bypasses your defenses and you are down an entire ship just like that.  Choosing anything but a short range battle tactic will only exacerbate this problem as you never reach peak damage output, and missiles are more effective at both long and med range baring flak defense.  

So lets now talk about how those flak defenses work. Each slug module also adds a flak defense cannon. These cannons have a very short range that form a defensive bubble around the ship. The offensive capabiliteis of these mods clearly require a line of site, so direction engagement matters to some degree. It is not clear to me if flak are the same in this regaurd. What is clear is that it is often the case that flak defenses from other ships will rarely overlpa with others in such a way that for most cases, only the ships own flak defenses will be used against missile attacks against it. 

Speaking of missiles, whenever an enemy projectile like a missile, or boarding pod, enters the defensive bubble the flak guns create around a ship, that gun will fire upon them and try to destroy them. In most cases a single flak cannon can get two shots off before any projectile like a missile makes contact with the hull, but rarely more. That means at best each flak cannon can only stop two missiles from any salvo that is fired at your ship. 

However, this is best case. There is always a chance a flak cannon will miss its target. Further more, depending on your level of tech, some higher tier missiles may have enough health that they require two hits from a flak cannon in order to fell them, making flak even less effective when the enemy outclasses you in tech. Finally, it is also the case that different classes of ships will primarily target different things. The Tier 1 attacker class of ship for example will almost always target protector and coordinator class ships above other targets, and they will also focus fire as a flotilla on that single target. This means that a potentially large amount of missiles can target a single ship, overhwleming its flak defenses in the process.

Other classes of ship have differing preferd targets, and will sometimes semi-randomly assign targets.  This can have a dramatically different effect on how battles go depsite most other things being equal. For example, United Empire's scout class ships have two weapon slots and makes for a good early game aggression option. But despite it having similar numbers of weapon slots for say slugs, they will fail to be as effective damage wise as their attacker class ships with the same number of slugs due to the attack class ships focused fire ability. Focus fire means that any enemy ships will fall faster than if damage was spread out evenly, and as a result their flotillas ships will take less return fire as more of the enemies weapons will be destroyed lowering their dps as the fight goes on.

Hopefully this is all beginning to shape a very clear picture if why you may be losing your battles despite putting flak cannons on all your ships when facing a dedicated missile fleet. My advice when dealing with this kind of enemy who is using 100% missile strategy would be to get a handful of protector or even coordinator class ships armed to the teeth with flak and hull plating. These will be your shield and they will likely fall in battle, but they buy you time for the rest of your fleet to deal damage. I would then equip several of my own attack class ships with a combination of missiles and flak. Only use flak if you expect your sheild wall will fail before the enemy...or if they are using scout ships which randomly target everything in your fleet realtively evenly instead of focusing fire on protectors. The end result should be that due to them focused on ships specialized to survive missile vollies as long as possible, but with them lacking any missile defense of their own; they will fall very fast to your own missile barrage while you take minimal casualties.  This is because they will almost certainly open at long range. If you choose a short range tactic you will destroy some of their ships during the long range phase due to their lack of flak, but you yourself will mostly eat the missile damage to your shield wall. Then as you close your guns will open up with more damage than missiles and eventaully mop up the surviviros. 

This gets more complicated when dealing with multiple flotillas, but you get the gist by now i hope. Maybe somebody reading this will find it helpful. If so come check out my youtube channel at TheNosePlays for more insights into the game. I recenrtly started a new series using the new Umbral Chior faction.