Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: August 08, 2020, 05:22:35 PM »Shields are bad on ground support fighters, because all the damage they take will happen in a single increment. Sure, one light AA won't do much damage, but your fighters might take 30 hits from them every ground combat round. And those hits are not spread out evenly over 8 hours, they all happen simultaneously. So your fighters will go from fine to dead in a single round. They will have no time to recharge shields.
Shields may make sense on bombardment ships against STO's. You could fly in, fight a few turns, do a little damage, and retreat out of range before the STO's can bring your shields down. You then recharge your shields and try again. Any damage you do is permanent, any damage they do is meaningless.
In my experience that is not likely to happen as you have many platforms so the damage are spread out among them, that is my experience. In my latest ground fighting I had lots of small fighters and they did have extra armour and they almost never died but was mainly wounded so I withdrew them to their hangars for repair. The trick is to have many of them so you don't get all damage on one fighter.