On shield mitigation and focus firing....

One way to maybe do something appropriate is have shield mitigation cap out much higher, and decline MUCH faster. So if it's a frigate versus a frigate, the shield mitigation would be all the way back to 15% before the next salvo impacted. However, if it's ten frigates firing on one simultaneously, the shield would be stuck at a very high mitigation percentage (say, 90%) and the ships would each only be doing a small amount of damage.

The problem with this approach is it would encourage micromanagement. Two equal fleets face off, and one of the fleets does way more dps scattered because he tells each of his ships to target individual enemies. He'll lose a few early when the other player focus fires at one or two of his, but he'll be doing way more damage per second overall.

It's a bit too late in the game design for anything but entertaining speculation, however. I don't think they'd want to patch something THIS major to the game mechanic.

-- Retro

I'm sure this debate is old news but since I missed the early days... why exactly do we 'want' to do this? Why was this mechanic included in the first place? What's wrong with focus-firing?

Either way, the player who micromanages a fight is going to be better off than a player who doesn't so I'm not really sure what the purpose of the mitigation system was supposed to be.

Mitigation is a ridiculous concept in regards to shields. (I'm not even talking about Sins here, I'm talking about in general.)

Most games take shields, and use them to reduce the amount of damage that "gets through". That's insane- a shield STOPS damage. It makes you NOT TAKE damage. If someone swings a sword at you, and you block it with the shield, you've taken NO damage. A Shieldmaster in the most superior form of fighter, because he blocks 3/4 of all attacks in his way. A single Shieldmaster should be able to take on 3 opponents and wear them all out, as they will rarely get a blow in, while he is constantly causing damage to them. Sadly, this is often not the way it works.

The way I would like to see shields work in Sins is how they would really work in such a situation (space battles, that is)... If you have a huge Capital ship, and a single ship comes up against it firing, it would cause a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of damage to the shield and the Capital would easily be able to regenerate the shielding quickly enough. It would be a bug poking at an impossible to hurt force.

Yet, you take enough small ships come up and launch simultaneous attacks against the Capital ship, and suddenly there is strain on the shield- it couldn't regenerate fast enough to compensate for the sustained attack, and eventually the shield would weaken and allow attacks through.

That's the way shields should work- no damage until they are greatly weakened, then once "holes" or "gaps" in the shield appeared, damage would begin to seep in. Also, regeneration of the shields would slow the more damage done in concentration.

That's why the way I understand mitigation to work, it's completely backwards in my eyes. What should be there instead of mitigation is "structural cohesiveness", and as enough damage to the shield is done, that weakens and allows more damage in as it lowers.

This would be the most realistic to how shields would truly work.

That is, if they weren't a fictional concept. =P

Realism and space games do not mix, go play orbiter!

Why to discourage micromanagement. Explain the intelligence required in force firing on single targets to destroy them faster. Where are the tactics in such? Micro whores will defend it to their dying breath, but there is nothing strategic in force firing.

Mitigation doesn't really do much, it's a broken concept. The concept I like, but reality is 1500 shields really means 4500 shields because the ship is going to be at 67% mitigation the entire time It was stated that it was supposed to discourage force firing, but when you're increasing it from 40% to 60% by having everyone fire at something instead of just one unit, there's not a lot of discouragement going on.

To work as was supposedly intended, one would need to have a more reasonable system first of all. Damage totals only work if all ships do the same damage. It would need to be ratio based, damage compared to shield strength. Higher shields, more damage to get a certain percentage of mitigation. It would need to start out at zero, and move towards 100%. I wouldn't actually go for a 1/1 ratio, 2-1 would be nice though. Just aim for that maximum ratio of damage with a nice penalizing curve that progressively screws you the more you focus fire. After that, all you need to do is prioritize targeting to avoid units all shooting the same one.

It would solve the lack of strategic depth created by having a real time environment.

If you have to reach a minimum amount of damage before you can hurt a ship, then you won't kill ANYTHING without using focus fire! In fact, if you spread your fire out you will only maximize the protective buffer of shields, which could ultimately cost you the battle.

The current mitigation system is not bad. It effectively lets you do 12.5 DPS before increasing and taking hold. IMO, I think that both the climb and decline of mitigation could use a look at. By working off of fixed rates, mitigation is harsh against low HP ships, who can not afford to lose health to get their mitigation up. But at the same time, they get the biggest relative benefit from health upgrades, as every new HP is coming into max mitigation territory. The high recovery rate of capital ships means that you will NOT be able to deal harmful damage and keep mitigation low at the same time, it just doesn't happen. The moment you add in restore/repair effects, you can't do any damage without readily hitting max mitigation.

The mitigation curve on frigates works fine across them. However, capital ships are such a different league that I don't think they should follow the same mitigation curve.

I understand that this was the intent but I don't see how focusing fire is any less 'intelligent' than the alternative. Letting the ships do their own thing requires no intelligence on the part of the player at all. If the system actually worked as intended, having to micro your ships to ensure that they 'don't' focus fire (which, in my experience, they have a tendency to do in many cases anyway) would strike me as being just as bad.

Seeing as the purpose of focus-firing is removing DPS from the opposing team as fast as possible (and this is still the case, even with the current mitigation values), the mitigation penalty would have to be a 'lot' steeper than it is right now if it were going to have the intended effect. Especially considering that each race has combat repair/shield regen abilities that actively hinder strategies that don't involve focused fire. Repair clouds, Shield regens, Guardian barriers, Robotic cruisers, etc. are all 'much' more effective if the opponent is spreading their fire around rather than focusing on single targets.

I don't know. To me, it's always seemed like an odd fix to something that wasn't really a problem in the first place. What little reading I did on this game before it released always suggested that it was going to reward but not 'require' micromanagement and really, unless combat is taken almost completely out of the hands of the player, the person who jumps in and micromanages is always going to have an advantage.

Instead of shield mitigation what about this? Each side gets a new capital ship type, this would be called the shield ship. On its own it would be weaker than any capital ship, perhaps the strength of a heavy cruiser. This shield ship would be a support ship; the capital ship would project a shield around itself that protects all friendly ships within it. Ideally this shield would be nearly invisible when nothing is being fired; however when the enemy commences fire on a fleet a shield ship is with it would block most of the damage. The shield ship would only be able to give its massive protection to 2-3 ships at a time, so if several ships are focus firing on another ship it gains a massive amount of mitigation, 95% perhaps, if the enemy is firing at two ships it could only provide 80% mitigation to each. (These are random numbers I pulled up, not quite sure if it should work quite like that). However in small fleet engagements it would not be able to provide a massive mitigation bonus to any ship, because it would draw on its own fleets antimatter, the ship would have a supply of its own that could last it a little while (the shield instead of having a timer would could be switched on and off at will and its only limiting factor is how long the antimatter lasts). To do this however I think all units, aside from strike craft, should have at least a small antimatter pool (I think there are some ships that don’t have antimatter).

As an example, imagine that Two fleets one with 80 ships without a shield ship and one with 60 ships with a shield ship are fighting. The 60 ship fleet would normally lose this fight but with the addition of the shield ship it would be able to defeat the larger fleet. However I don’t think the shield ships abilities should stack because you could then end up with a nearly invincible fleet. Depending on the antimatter of the fleet the shield ship could make itself nearly invulnerable at the cost of sacrificing mitigation for the rest of the fleet.

You mean, like that ship the Advent have? The Iconus Guardian?

there should not be something to try and eliminate focused fire. It takes away from one of the few actual strategies for when in combat

Because the unit AI currently does something nonsensical, we should keep focus firing in and useful.

Focus firing is the downfall of real time strategy, period. You cannot replicate real tactical defense when it works. A fortified position simply doesn't exist.

In real life, when people are shooting at each other, they shoot back at the people shooting at them, ignoring someone to focus your fire on one guy would get you massacred. Realism of course isn't a justification for something, but game play is. In a turn based game such as civ, 1/1 casualties are the norm when assaulting a defensive position, regardless of relative army sizes. If you attack 5 defenders with 10, you'll generally take even casualties. Attacking with just 5 would get you nowhere. They'd kick the crap out of you with their defense boosts, and you'd accomplish nothing. Attacking with double their numbers would be a minimalist attack. Something that will usually work, but not always. If, instead, you attack with a thousand troops, you're still going to lose those first five. It's the absolute loss of those first five units that creates balance and tactics. You're going to lose troops, more in one place wont help you after a very finite point. This allows people to use partial forces to deal equivalent damage to a larger attacking force, and also makes the use in a single steamroller attack significantly less so than a multi-pronged invasion of reasonable sized forces.

In sins, this will never exist outside of harassment. A 2-1 battle leaves one side dead, and one side nearly or completely unharmed. You can attempt to outplay someone by not engaging superior forces and just harassing them, but you will never be able to take a small force up against a large force, and do anything resembling real damage.

Then there are the decisions one makes in what kind of fleet to use, and what sorts of things one can actually do with a game. A command cruiser? Poof, 20 lrm frigates shoot it first, bye bye command cruiser. Ok, so you bring a dozen of them to support 50 ships, and they stick around long enough to be more than amusement for your opponent. What kind of a command cruiser is that? You need one command cruiser to use the targeting ability, just one. You need 20 to actually get to use it after the first few seconds. If there were no benefit from focus firing, that wouldn't be true. The repair cloud ability, completely worthless. If there were no focus fire, that wouldn't be true. The balance between longer range and shorter range units that is impossible to actually manage due to force firing resulting in the destruction of shorter ranged units before they even get in range, that too wouldn't be a problem.

Focus fire limits the game. It does not give you something to do in combat, it takes away options. It's been the crutch holding the genre back since inception, the fatal flaw that keeps rts from replacing tbs as a thinking game instead of a reacting game.