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Author Topic: How does shield damage work?  (Read 4075 times)

Smig

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How does shield damage work?
« on: August 17, 2019, 04:24:58 PM »

When a weapon does shield damage, but no hard flux, what is it doing exactly? Usually I shoot KE weapons to overload flux and open them up for other kinds of damage, and I usually stay away from beam weapons, but now I'm trying shooting graviton beams on enemy shields hoping I'm doing something useful, but it's hard to tell. Do shields have hit points? How many? Is there a way to check? What happens after they get depleted? What I'm noticing is enemy ships dropping their shields after a while and raising them up right after, giving a small window to shoot something else at them.
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pedro1_1

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #1 on: August 17, 2019, 04:45:37 PM »

each shild has a way it takes damage, like let's say a onslaght has a 1.0 shield while a paragon has a 0.6 and a comquest hs a 1.4 shield, what this means is that for each point of damage the shield recives it will generate X number of flux, shields have no hitpoints per say, they send all damage to flux, and they also generate flux while active, but they do not work if the target got overloaded, which is generaly what happens if you leave shields up and taking damage forever, because shields disable the ablility of the ship for dealing whith hard flux, which is basicaly the non-beam damage your shields take during a fight, graviton beans generate soft flux on shields, they are more eficients against shields than some beans but as all beans the damage they do is not big enought to bring the shilds of a destroyer dawn on it's on, it's a supression weapon of all things, if you are using it try pairing it whith oter stuff that do shield damage so they can keep the presure if your ship is geting high on flux
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ANGRYABOUTELVES

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #2 on: August 17, 2019, 04:58:18 PM »

Shields convert damage taken into flux buildup. Projectile guns deal "hard" flux that cannot be dissipated while shields are active. Beams deal "soft" flux damage to shields. Soft-flux is the same sort of flux that builds up when you fire guns; it can be dissipated while shields are active. The Graviton Beam deals 100 kinetic DPS, so 200 soft flux per second to shields and basically nothing to armor, for 75 of your soft flux per second. What makes this useful is that most ships don't have enough dissipation to completely get rid of the soft flux from their guns; they can't fire and dissipate soft flux at the same time. So the Graviton Beam makes them run out of flux capacity for firing their guns faster, which means that when in active combat they stop firing some of their weapons earlier or drop shields and start taking damage to armor earlier. It's very efficient at this, especially vs ships that have bad shield efficiencies.
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Flare

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #3 on: August 17, 2019, 06:05:23 PM »

When a weapon does shield damage, but no hard flux, what is it doing exactly?

As you've noticed, beam weapons do soft flux damage, IE. flux that an opposing ship can vent passively.

Weapons that don't do hard flux, like all beam weapons, have two strategies on being useful as far as I can tell.

1. Having so many that the opposing ship can't passively vent it fast enough. This causes them to lower shields or overload, vent or overload, or just overload. If they choose to lower their shields, then your beams will do real damage.

2. Because beam weapons have a great deal of range, you can back outside of enemy range (if they don't have beam weapons), lower your shield and vent passively all while keeping up pressure on the enemy ship via the beam weapon (making them keep their shields up not venting their hard flux).
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Smig

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #4 on: August 17, 2019, 07:06:27 PM »

Gotcha. I thought that not causing hard flux meant not doing flux damage at all, so I was looking for some other shield damage stat.
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Serenitis

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #5 on: August 18, 2019, 12:44:10 AM »

Do shields have hit points?
How many?
Directly themselves as in some other games, no.
The flux itself does roughly the same job though. The more flux a ship can 'hold', the longer it can keep its shields up.
Effectively, a shields hit points is the ships flux pool.
Adding capacitors, a hullmod or taking one particular skill can increase this.

Shields also have an efficiency rating which will be a decimal value somewhere near 1.
Where 1 means every 1 point of damage gets turned into 1 point of flux.
Lower numbers mean more efficiency and higher means less.
0.7 means every 1 point of damage gets turned into 0.7 points of flux.
Adding a hullmod or taking a specific skill can increase the efficiency.

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Is there a way to check?
For your own fleet you can access the refit screen,  or use the information infocard on the fleet buy/sell to pull data for each ship individually.
Improvements over the baseline for that hull type will be appended with a green number telling you how much better it is.
Conversely, areas below baseline will be appended with red numbers.

For both your own fleet and enemies in battle, if you hold your cursor over a ship a mini-display will pop up just above them and show you two bars.
The bottom bar is hull integrity. Basically the health bar, when it hits zero the ship is disabled.
The top bar is the current flux level. Watching this will allow you to press an attack while an enemy can't fight back effectively.
When this bar is full a ship will try to pull away from battle to vent the flux, and will be forced to fire weapons sparingly and lower shields.

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What happens after they get depleted?
This:
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What I'm noticing is enemy ships dropping their shields after a while and raising them up right after, giving a small window to shoot something else at them.
Or they don't drop the shields fast enough and overload.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #6 on: August 18, 2019, 10:58:31 AM »

Is there a guide to flux and the shield battle anywhere? If not I might try to write one up. It seems like a lot of new players are asking questions or not understanding stuff about it, and it really informs how you design ship load outs which is a huge part of the game.
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Flare

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #7 on: August 18, 2019, 08:07:43 PM »

I don't think there are any guides around. Most people I think were waiting until the final release before doing that since the game changes quite frequently. Although now I think that it's close enough to the final phase of development that a guide would be survive any of the final changes.
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The battle station is not completely operational, shall we say.

"Now witness the firepower of this thoroughly buggy and unoperational batt... Oh, hell, you know what? Just ignore the battle station, okay?"

Midnight Kitsune

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #8 on: August 21, 2019, 03:47:29 PM »

Is there a guide to flux and the shield battle anywhere? If not I might try to write one up. It seems like a lot of new players are asking questions or not understanding stuff about it, and it really informs how you design ship load outs which is a huge part of the game.
Sadly many new players skip the main menu tutorials and missions and jump right into the game, leading them to getting their asses kicked due to mechanics they don't understand...
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Thaago

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Re: How does shield damage work?
« Reply #9 on: August 22, 2019, 06:56:00 PM »

Is there a guide to flux and the shield battle anywhere? If not I might try to write one up. It seems like a lot of new players are asking questions or not understanding stuff about it, and it really informs how you design ship load outs which is a huge part of the game.

The wiki has a pretty good write-up: https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Flux
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