ya focus fire can be bad due to more damage being nuetralized but you take out the first ship faster, so its a trade off.

Focus fire still has its use, in almost every battle. If they have repair ships, you can basically make them very inefficient by focus firing on their LRFs or attack frigs, then taking out assault cruisers. They're left with Caps and support ships who have no choice but to retreat or die, and take their awful fighters/bombers with them.

Or you may want to knock out some of the more powerful support cruisers first, so their specials stop screwing you up (think AOE shield, pushback). Those situations all need tactical awareness to overcome, and that means focus-fire.

As for the whole "space battles look cooler when different ships are firing in different directions" philosophy, admiral ackbar disagrees:

FOCUS ALL FIREPOWER ON THAT SUPER STAR DESTROYER!

Followed shortly by one of the coolest movie sequences of all-time.

I miss playing that game, I had a 2 year gap at one time between finding a group to play and ended up still quoting the rules exactly when they had questions. I was enlisted in the Marines and these were officers I went to play with. Thier eyes got big, uneducated mofo comes in and whoops on em. To bad rules didnt allow me to continue to play since I was enlisted.

Good thing I read this thread.

Seems like sins wants to detract away from the zerg mentality a little bit.

A smaller but better micromanaged fleet can subdue a large wall o' death if organized correctly, which makes it true to form as in real life.

Also it looks like Sins wants you to use fleet mixes rather then a few ship types that are really good so you micro targets with ship types.

This I think will seperate the good players from the best players.

Regardless of mitigation the age old RTS style of focus fire is still better than the alternative, you might get more dps by not focus firing but you'll still knock their dps down faster by doing it.. Unless they boosted the mitigation to ridiculous levels that would make the game highly unrealistic focus fire will still be largely the best option.

Edit : obviously i don't just mean an "omg all ships fire at one target" strategy.

I think what you mean is "controlled" focus firing.


Noone wants to man up ship to ship on a one on one basis and play paper rock scissors because that is stupid and pointless.

But you have to diversify your targets once diminish returns set in.

So for instance you have 30 frigates. deminishing returns set in when you have 20 frigates attacking. Thusly those leftover 10 frigates would be best focus firing on relatively the same type of target but not the exact same target. And that would increase your dps of the total battle more then having 30 ships attacking 1.

Right but the thing is that once fleets reach a certain size, it's really hard to split a third of your LRMs to one target, a third to another and so on. My point is that eventually, especially in big battles, the mitigation cap will hit very early, and then the person that focus fires will be wiping out the enemy's fleet faster, thereby reducing their firepower much faster. If you can micro your units such that they're firing at several targets until shield mitigation cap hits, then all focus firing on one target, and repeating the process for each enemy ship, then congrats, you are a god at this game. If not, it's much easier to just focus fire on one or two targets.

YOU FOOOOLS!

Shield Mitigation is no magical anti focus fire fairy.

Shield Mitigation doesn't increase if a ship is focus fired.
Shield Mitigation ONLY increases when a ship takes damage.

1000 point of damage will always increase Shield Mitigation by the same amount (which varies from ship to ship).
It doesn't matter if that 1000 point of damage was dealt by a single ship or a whole armada.
It doesn't matter if that 1000 point of damage was dealt in a second or an hour.
It doesn't matter if that 1000 point of damage was dealt by ships doing 0.25 DPS or Death Stars(tm).
1000 point of damage will always increase shield mitigation by the same amount.

There are THREE factors that affect the raw effectiveness of focus fire:
1. Shield Mitigation always decays at the same flat rate over time. A flat rate equivalent to the Shield Mitigation generated by 1.5 unupgraded Light Frigates.
2. All ships regerate Shield and Hull points... even when under fire.
3. The minimum damage mitigation is 15%, which means will ships deal at most 85% damage. The maximum damage mitigation is 57% (on most ships), which means ships will deal at worst 43%. 43% is 50.6% of 85%.

Taking those facts into account, we have these result scenarios:

---

All 1 On 1: Less effective than Focus Fire
Due to the combined effects of Shield and Hull regens, the initial mitigation free focus fire damage and the minimum of 50.6% damage at max mitigation. Focus fire will only do ~25% less damage than what minimum mitigation 1 on 1s are effectively doing. Meaning that by the time 1 on 1s will be able to kill their targets, a focus fire fleet will already have destroyed 75% of the enemy ships, losing themselves only 25% of their ships with the remaining ships having an average of over 60% health due to ships being able to continue regenerate their Shields and Hulls even after the enemy ship attacking them has been destroyed.
The focus fire fleet will win.
Advantages:
- Immune to anti focus fire abilities and tricks.
Disadvantage:
- Requires intensive micro management.
- Extremely vulnerable to area of effect shield or hull regeneration abilities.
- Focus firing fleets can retreat after taking heavy damage, resulting in no casualities for the focus firing fleet, but many casualities for the 1 on 1 fleet.

---

All 2 on 1: Less effective than 1 On 1
2 on 1 will be affected by more than minimum shield mitigation, resulting in less effective DPS. 2 on 1 also requires more micro management than 1 on 1s.

---

3 Focus Fire fleets: Only effective if you split the fleet by damage type
Spliting a large fleet into ~3 smaller focus fire fleets will not result in a noticable increase in DPS, but will reduce the effective speed at which the overall fleet will be able to destroy enemy ships versus a full focus fire fleet.
Advantages:
- Anti focus fire abilities and tricks are less effective.
- Ships waste less time turning to shoot at straglers.
- Spliting the fleet by damage type will allow you to give each fleet a target of the armor type each fleet is most effective against resulting in a large increase in overall DPS.
Disadvantage:
- Requires a more micro management than a single focus fire fleet.
- Gives the enemy more time to counter your individual focus fire fleets with abilities or tricks.

---

"So, if focus firing is still the most efficient way of managing your fleets, what's the point of shield mitigation?" you ask?
YOU FOOOOLS!
It's not about making focus firing useless. It's about making non focus firing NOT useless.
If in a battle one of your ship starts attacking it's own target, the lack of shield mitigation just will be enough to make that ship behavior NOT waste overall battle efficiency versus joining the focus fire. If that ship has a good reason to attack a non focus fired ship, either due to armor type bonuses or travel time wasted due to distance, you'll actually gain battle efficiency by having that ship attacking a secondary target.

-
Phoebus The Greatest

I'm nitpicking here, Phoebus; you're technically right, but since (as you mentioned later) shield mitigation decreases at a constant rate, it becomes more effective the faster the damage is piled on.

So: if that 1000 damage happens in a matter of seconds, the shield mitigation will get blasted up to its cap, and most of the damage will be dealt while the shield mitigation hasn't had time to fall. So you'll probably lose about 50-60% of that 1000 damage to shield mitigation.

If that 1000 damage happens instead over the course of an hour, the shield mitigation will probably decay just as fast as it gets bumped up; so it'll be hovering around 15%, and more of the 1000 damage will affect the target.



I agree with you completely; it looks like that while focus-firing gives you a damage output advantage (and destroys your opponent's ability to do damage faster), the presence of shield mitigation in this game makes focus-firing only slightly more effective than letting your ships shoot different targets. In a close fight, focus-firing will win; but fleet composition and positioning is probably a much more important factor IMO.

For every ship that shooting and damaging the same target, that shield mitigation goes up for the target, is the easiest way to describe it.



Yes.

What he is saying, 0300Infantry, is that you can assign many targets (key word "targets"), to manually control, for effectiveness, but making ALL the ships focus fire on a single (keyword "single") target isn't a good way to go.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mitigation?r=75

How hard is it?

mitigation goes up if you focus fire on it rite? but waht does that mean? does it negate damage?

Mitigation goes up when a ship takes damage.
Mitigation acts a damage reduction buff on the ship.
57% damage mitigation means the ship takes 57% less damage; damage the ship takes is only 43% effective at damaging the shield and hull of the ship.


The problem isn't one of semantics but one of interpretation.
By explaining the mechanism plainly like I did, there is no misinterpretation.
But saying things like "Damage mitigation increases when a ship is focus fired upon" will lead to much confusion and result in many ridiculous tactics and suggestions.

Agreed; and like you said, shield mitigation isn't affected at all by the number of ships attacking the target.

I am new.

I have some questions

1) How fast does the shield mitigation go up?  Is it instaneous or would the first volley all get to count at only 15% shield mitigation?  If it takes a second to kick in then the best thing would be to focus fire one volley into one target then change to  focus fire a second volley into a second target and so on letting all focus fires hit at only 15% mitigation.

2)  If left alone what will the fleet do by itself?  Will it focus fire at all?  Say i have 10 on 10 battle going, all ships are in range and are of the same type.  Will this be 10 1 vs 1 battles?

3)  I assume the AI matches up damage and armor type to the most effiecent type if 2 mixed fleets are left alone.  Correct?

4)  How quickly does the shield mitigation go up?  I mean for smaller vessel like a frigate, can it take enough damage that it even reaches maximum shield mitigation before it is destroyed?

5)  What does this mean?

Shield Mitigation always decays at the same flat rate over time. A flat rate equivalent to the Shield Mitigation generated by 1.5 unupgraded Light Frigates.

Does it decay in battle at a worthwhile rate enough to alternate focus firing? 

6)Unrelated.  If a carrier is destroyed, do its fighters and bombers live on to fight?  What happens to them?

Mitigation increases at a rate of .1% per point of damage dealt. It decays at the rate of 1.25% per second (even if the ship is "in combat").

Yes, as default ships of the same type prefer to focus fire. This can be changed in a mod. For example, usually most/all light frigates will shoot at the same target, long range frigates will shoot at the same target (that's also usually different from the light frigates' target) so on.

Yes, and why mixed fleets focus fire on several targets at once. Ships attack ships of the armor type against which they get the most bonus damage. The table for this is in Gameplay.constants in GameInfo if you're curious.

See above, .1% per point of damage taken. Light frigates can definitely take enough damage to reach max mitigation, but it depends on how much incoming fire there is. It is possible to one shot a light frigate even through max mitigation

No idea what the quote is supposed to say, but at a 1.25% per second decrease, probably not. The other thing to consider is that all races have ships with various repairing abilities and all ships regenerate shields and hull even in combat, so waiting for mitigation to drop will give them time to get patched up with or without help.

They start taking damage and eventually get destroyed. 1% per second sounds about right I think.