The tests I've done are on the Paragon, Brawler, Lasher, Onslaught, Eagle, Hammerhead, Dominator, Medusa, Tempest, with a smattering of Conquest.
I'm going to go try going up against an Aurora again just to be sure. I'll report back below.
Due to Forlorn Hope, the Paragon tests are absolutely conclusive, as I can repeat the experiment exactly. The shield cripples the Paragon. This shouldn't be surprising - its shield upkeep is 60% of its flux dissipation. Not using it means you're doing nearly four times as much damage. (40%-50% as compared to 150%) Literally, a non-shielded Paragon is worth about three shielded Paragons. And there's no risk of overload. And you don't have to stop firing to vent. This is partly due to its massive armour, to be sure. The Paragon takes 60% damage on the shield, but will take less than 15% of a 200-power shot, typical of a medium mount, until it loses some of the armour. Which happens slow because those shots are doing less than 30 damage.
The Apogee is even worse. Upkeep is still 60%, but it isn't omni so it
has to be kept up most of the time, and its armour is kind of lame.
With the Medusa, yeah it outrun quite a few things - I specifically excluded that scenario. For things it can't outrun, you can overload their shields with antimatter blasters and kinetics in the universal slots. Either you cripple their damage output or they overload and just die.
Lets take that Paragon example again. Paragon versus two faster ships with assault guns. So they're doing 150% damage to me, less their shield upkeep.
(This turned out to be a great idea. I approximated how many second of fire each second of shield is worth, when the shield is being hit. Fighting two Eagles, a Paragon has to survive for optimistically an extra 1.3 seconds for each second its shield is on, just to break even on damage caused. It gets worse if the Eagles fire their sabots, for example.)No, lets do real ships. Say a couple assault Eagles. Six grav beams at 50 dps each or so on armour. Six assault chainguns at 399 dps each on armour. Total MAX dps is 2700, but their shield upkeep is 40%, so they're doing roughly 1620 dps...before armour. If I have the formula correct, those chainguns will actually be doing
15 dps to start with. (And don't forget that when my armour is breached the damage will suddenly go down, too, as the +50 per grav is countered by the -133 on the chainguns, and then they have to work through the entire hull.)
Meanwhile, the Paragon has a choice between doing 40-50% of its damage, or 150%. Can three Paragons kill an Eagle before the two Eagles do significant damage to one Paragon's armour? Yeah. Yeah they can.
Yes, some weapons will be shut off. It doesn't matter because you can't fire all your weapons at max flux anyway.
The Paragon can continuously fire the Autopulse lasers plus one and a bit Heavy Blasters, total dps 921. 1380 after the high flux bonus. I'm assuming the Eagles are smart enough to stay away from the Tachyon Lance, or it gets worse.
If the Eagles raise their shields, the Paragon will rip them off with the Heavy Needlers. They will then be at their lowered DPS, or try to vent. If they vent, the Paragon will go through their armour and half their hull, while not being shot at. One more cycle and now it is 1v1, the fight is over, victory Paragon. If they don't vent they either have to stop shooting to regenerate shield flux (yay!) or they just let the Paragon kill one.
Or the Paragon can raise the shield. Every second it is up the Paragon forgoes about 800 damage in flux it could have spent on weapons. One-tenth of the hull of an Eagle. Moreover, the Eagles' gravs are doing total 360 flux per sec (600*60%) plus whatever spare chaingun flux per sec they can dissipate flux for, works out to about 160. (Chainguns do damage at 1:1 flux, half damage on shield, 60% damage as flux.) Each second the Eagles are preventing the Paragon for using flux to cause about 1000 damage. So roughly each second of shield is worth about 1800 damage. And that's not even counting sabots. (Or Piranha bombs, or etc...)
Or, for each second the Paragon has the shield up, it must somehow manage to shoot for an extra 1.3 seconds just to break even.
More importantly, with the shield down it can be delivered as a burst, and kill the Eagle sooner so that it can't keep doing damage. Also, it can be delivered as a burst so that the Eagle doesn't have time to run out of range.
This was a fair amount of work, but I can do similar calculations for other ships. Based on my tests they all need to shoot for more than a second extra for every second they have a shield up.
This is why shooting a shield with your shield down is always a net win. (If, I repeat and stress, you can't run away.) Every second of fire prevents more than a second of return fire, and doing so with the shield down lets me burst out more shield damage sooner, preventing more damage sooner.
Errr.... no. Just no. Yes you can kill it faster, but its going to kill you MUCH MUCH faster.
Err, no. Also, no. I burn all its flux in damage so it can't do any damage to me. See above!
Add to that the fact that if you get flanked and have to withdraw for a minute, it can vent and will come back fresh!
I specifically mentioned slow ships. Slow ships cannot withdraw. Fast ships can back off and vent, yes, which is why I mentioned the tactic of chasing it down and missiling it. This is all relative.
And many ships also have excellent PD! You try doing this on an aurora and you'll find yourself very very dead unless you are in an Onslaught or something similar!
Worked just fine when I tried it. Let's do this again.
If they don't back off, you can just keep hitting them. If they try to keep the shield up, it will overload. If they back off to vent, their PD is off. If they back off but don't vent...well, I'm happy because they're essentially taking themselves out of the fight.
If they back off and don't vent, it is simply a matter of firing more missiles than the PD can handle, if for some reason I still want to kill them.
Try and missile an Enforcer and the flak will laugh at you.
I'm talking about hi-tech ships.
This is pure fallacy. The middle sentence STARTS with the assumption that shields are weak little things that drop at a moments notice, thus your conclusion that you must so heavily outclass the opponent.
No. Just no. Also, you're breaching their shields if you're winning. Unless the shields are your sole defence, if they're not breaching yours, the forces aren't balanced, they're heavily in your favour. By definition, they're doing significantly less damage than you are - you're going through their shields AND armour AND hull. Damage = (S+A+H) Their damage is, at most, just shields. Damage = S. You're outclassing them by roughly (A+H)/(S+A+H) percent. Do you want me to walk you through an example?
Yes, and so are ballistics and energy weapons, whats your point?
No, ballistics and energy weapons do not scale with fleet size. See my examples in my previous post, or the further examples below. The more missiles you have, the more don't get shot down. The more you have, the more you can afford to waste. Neither of these matter for either other type.
By contrast, the larger fleet has relatively more PD, which means even more missiles get shot down.
If fighting a same size fleet, lets say half your missiles get shot down, and the rest do a total of 100 damage per shot. Simultaneously, your beams and guns are doing 100 each.
Fighting a smaller fleet, less than half your missiles get shot down, because there's relatively fewer PD escorts and because you're concentrating fire from relatively more missile mounts. You do 150 or more damage. Your beams and guns are still doing 100.
Fighting a bigger fleet, more of your missiles get shot down - sometimes all of them. Your missiles are doing 50 damage a shot down to completely worthless, depending on how powerful PD is in general. Your guns and beams are still doing 100 damage a shot.
If you want to have more missiles on your side, field more missile ships. A Vigilance destroyer will pack 21 MRM and a medium energy weapon for what, 5-6 fleet points?
I'm considering doing exactly this. What happens if I form a fleet of almost nothing but Harpoons and Sabot SRMs? Maybe a couple Atropos for spice? It should suck. I suspect it will be easy mode.
What I predict is that all my burst will overwhelm PD, and almost instantly smash several ships, so that after a volley or two their fleet ends up tiny compared to mine, say 2/3 or 1/2, so the fact that most of my ships have few weapons shouldn't matter.
In fact I've sort of tried this just now. I made a fleet of a solo Onslaught. Since it loses autobattles, the AI thinks it can win against me, and saves me the trouble of chasing it. It's wrong, which means I get to test what four Pilums will do to nominally well-defended ships like Ventures, Hounds, Lashers, and Condors. Turns out the Pilums alone can kill Lashers and Hounds. Hounds run out of places to dodge, then a Pilum takes out their engine and suddenly a couple thousand damage blooms. Lashers try to shoot them down but they simply overwhelm the Vulcans, then their shield overloads, then they die. With Ventures and Condors you can overwhelm the shield
through their PD with four Pilums shooting at them. Either they lower the shield and take the hits or they keep it up and overload and take the hits anyway. Also with all the Pilums that end up flying around, a Venture losing its shield from damage or to vent often means between 50% hull damage and instant death.
By contrast, one Pilum is a complete waste of OP against these fleets. Two can sometimes ruin a Hound's day because they let the swarm build up over time, but it's not reliable. Five Pilums would be a total massacre.