First Battlestar

[misanthropope]

i mean, you've already given yourself two outs against lances, even if they *were* common.  youve paid out the nose for speed, and your offense is missile-based.  it would take a much more modest tech disadvantage to get you killed by a missile strike, and leaning heavily into shields magnifies your vulnerability there. 

[Jorgen_CAB]

i mean, you've already given yourself two outs against lances, even if they *were* common.  youve paid out the nose for speed, and your offense is missile-based.  it would take a much more modest tech disadvantage to get you killed by a missile strike, and leaning heavily into shields magnifies your vulnerability there.

Shields are a pretty strong defences against missiles though, so I don't see why that would be a problem, especially box launched salvos as you will have time to recharge shields between strikes. Shields in general is extremely powerful on large ships and you should use them if you have them. Most ships of this size can have both powerful shields and a decent armour belt.

[misanthropope]

the dangerous missile attack modes are the alpha-strike ones, and shields are strongly contraindicated.  the quantity of hit points you surrender when you replace armor with shields is immense.  looking at Mercury, even granting size 20 shield generators instead of the existing size 10, right off the top you'd be losing _half_ the total durability.  some fraction of armor never gets used tis true, but with 12 levels of armor the fraction that outlives the ship is going to be pretty small.

even looking at AMM spam,  a conspicuously shield-friendly use case, if just 25 missiles per increment are incident upon shields, the hypothetical all-shield variant would succumb before the incumbent design be likely to take any internal damage.  the number of volleys involved is also significantly less than those accursed all-magazine ground bases will spit out.

[Jorgen_CAB]

the dangerous missile attack modes are the alpha-strike ones, and shields are strongly contraindicated.  the quantity of hit points you surrender when you replace armor with shields is immense.  looking at Mercury, even granting size 20 shield generators instead of the existing size 10, right off the top you'd be losing _half_ the total durability.  some fraction of armor never gets used tis true, but with 12 levels of armor the fraction that outlives the ship is going to be pretty small.

even looking at AMM spam,  a conspicuously shield-friendly use case, if just 25 missiles per increment are incident upon shields, the hypothetical all-shield variant would succumb before the incumbent design be likely to take any internal damage.  the number of volleys involved is also significantly less than those accursed all-magazine ground bases will spit out.

That is only in some very niche situations where the shields are not better. In most scenarios there will be more than one strike such as fighters, FAC or missile boats of all kinds. They will reload and come back.

The idea with the shields is that you can survive multiple larger strikes not just one strike. In my opinion if you are that close to collapsing you will not survive a second strike anyway so it does not matter if you barely survive the first. You have to assume that you are able to blunt the strike enough so you take some of the force on the shields, this saves allot of resources in so many situations as you don't need to destroy every missile coming in... armour don't regenerate.

In the cases that the shields and whatever armour you have don't hold, most of those cases you are likely not going to survive the battle anyway. In terms of AMM you either deal with it some other way or you retreat so you can regenerate the shields.

In general I find that surviving multiple strikes are way more important than surviving any individual strike seen to the whole. The other thing is missile yields... when missiles get to nine or more in yields shields actually start to become quite valuable even from a pure damage perspective. A ship will be destroyed long before it's armour are gone and certainly damaged even earlier.

[nuclearslurpee]

the dangerous missile attack modes are the alpha-strike ones, and shields are strongly contraindicated.  the quantity of hit points you surrender when you replace armor with shields is immense.  looking at Mercury, even granting size 20 shield generators instead of the existing size 10, right off the top you'd be losing _half_ the total durability.  some fraction of armor never gets used tis true, but with 12 levels of armor the fraction that outlives the ship is going to be pretty small.

even looking at AMM spam,  a conspicuously shield-friendly use case, if just 25 missiles per increment are incident upon shields, the hypothetical all-shield variant would succumb before the incumbent design be likely to take any internal damage.  the number of volleys involved is also significantly less than those accursed all-magazine ground bases will spit out.

That is only in some very niche situations where the shields are not better. In most scenarios there will be more than one strike such as fighters, FAC or missile boats of all kinds. They will reload and come back.

The idea with the shields is that you can survive multiple larger strikes not just one strike. In my opinion if you are that close to collapsing you will not survive a second strike anyway so it does not matter if you barely survive the first. You have to assume that you are able to blunt the strike enough so you take some of the force on the shields, this saves allot of resources in so many situations as you don't need to destroy every missile coming in... armour don't regenerate.

In the cases that the shields and whatever armour you have don't hold, most of those cases you are likely not going to survive the battle anyway. In terms of AMM you either deal with it some other way or you retreat so you can regenerate the shields.

In general I find that surviving multiple strikes are way more important than surviving any individual strike seen to the whole. The other thing is missile yields... when missiles get to nine or more in yields shields actually start to become quite valuable even from a pure damage perspective. A ship will be destroyed long before it's armour are gone and certainly damaged even earlier.

It is probably worth being explicit about the type of combat under discussion. I get the sense that some are talking principally of vs. NPR combat while others are speaking to Player vs. Player combat. These are two very different cases and it will be helpful to specify which is being discussed.

For example NPRs (e.g. Precursors) do not tend to launch multiple large strikes as from box launcher fighters or reduced-size launcher missile cruisers, rather they tend to launch continuous strikes with full-size launchers until their magazines are exhausted. In this latter case the recharge time of shields is significantly less impactful as shields do not recharge appreciably in the typical 10-20 seconds between missile waves. Similarly, AMM spam is a tactic somewhat unique to, certainly a signature of, NPRs, and for players who principally play against NPRs it is certainly not a "niche situation" which can be easily dismissed as it will come up against nearly any NPR which uses missiles in some capacity. While it is true that these tactics are not particularly clever or indeed difficult to beat on even footing, often in combat vs. NPRs the game is more about finding ways to beat an NPR which is ahead in tech, whether a spoiler race or an NPR that rolled high on the starting conditions, without having to wait around camping a JP until the tech gap is closed.

On the other hand in Player vs. Player games the situation is very different as player races will use more diverse tactics and will tend to avoid the most straightforward or spammy approaches that NPRs are reliant on, thus a wider variety of use cases arise many of which are not seen against NPRs. Notably player tactics tend to be based on using speed and alpha strikes rather than continuous fire, under such circumstances shields for example are far more efficient. Similarly, player races will tend to be very even in tech (by design, otherwise the game wouldn't be that much fun) so the problems of e.g. AMM spam are not nearly as drastic as they are against NPRs with a tech lead even if a player does choose to use such a tactic.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I probably speak of both fights against NPR and player controlled multi-faction scenarios.

Against full size launched attacks you generally want shields to catch leaking missiles so you don't need to repair armour as often.

There is nothing wrong with mostly using armour, it has different pros and cons, but in general I think a combination of shields and armour are the best strategy overall for many different reasons.

My general advice is that the larger the ship is the more you gain by giving the ship really strong shields rather than allot of armour if you have good shield technology, you still can have a decent armour belt you don't need a paper thin armour.

I think there is too much focus on what is best in any one particular instance (especially roughly equal ones that rarely exists in practice) rather than what saves you resources in the long run or even in most situations. In most situations you should stack the deck as much in your favour as possible and that is why shields are so effective, they reduce the overall cost in resources you need to expend to defend so you can put those resources elsewhere.

You should already know what the capabilities of an NPR are before you commit huge forces to engage them, that is just sound military strategy. You can just build a fleet and blindly sail it toward the enemy in the hopes it is big enough. Though, the smarter thing is to probe the enemy first so you know their capability and you can bring the right weapon to deal with it.

Sure... in the one situation where you are surprised and overwhelmed by an enemy then armour "might" be a better protection, depends on the missile yield and your armour thickness. With proper scouting that should be rare to happen against the NPR unless you are really unlucky, in multi-faction games with several faction under human control things get way more complicated in general.

Another thing that can also be important in the choice of any component or combination of component is resources... shields will cost Corbomite rather than mostly Duranium. Can be important in the long run too.

[Squigles]

There is one thing no one really seems to touch upon in this dichotomy of shields vs armor which I find to be particularly relevant in this new C# era of reduced research rates.

That being, of course, the actual research cost aspect. You will essentially always research armor. Every ship in existence benefits from it, your ground forces are heavily dependent on it. Meanwhile, this massively important technology consists of a single technology line, and requires no additional research to deploy a new application of the technology.

Shields, on the opposite side of the equation require two technology lines to be at all effective, and are greatly enhanced by a third. They also require a new investment in RP every time you wish to deploy a new level of acquired tech to the field.

While there are certainly many situations in which shielding is superior to armor, you can not simply wave away these costs in a game with a 10 or 20% modifier, especially if a certain spoiler is active which gives zero poo’s about tech speed modifiers.

Outright ignoring shield tech, or deliberately leaving it multiple generations behind and only deploying it in paltry amounts to blunt niche cases like Lances is a legitimate decision to take.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I agree, the biggest downside to Shields are the cost in research points.

[QuakeIV]

I still think ships themselves should have an RP cost to bring a new design to production.  At least for making airplanes and modern warships and stuff, there is a lot of work that goes into figuring out the design of the platform itself, even if it is made out of otherwise known components.

[Michael Sandy]

The decision to have ships be able to operate independently is an RP decision.  I went with specialist ships which evolved into a doctrine of ships NOT being able to operate independently.  The theory was that one ship might go rogue, but the ship with weapons did not have active sensors, and even if they did, they did not have independent jump capability, and the jump ships had neither active sensors nor weapons.

The Fleet had certain doctrines:
No ship enters a new system alone.  No matter how high tech an enemy is that destroys one of our ships, we will know when, and we will know where, and that news will make it home.  That security depends on distance, so there may be no rescue possible to get this certainty.

The exploration corps had a certain level of fatalism, tempered by the policy that if they died heroes, their families received compensation.  Money, social status, position in the promising new colonies, and their stories were made into holodramas to be seen by millions.

And sometimes they risked, discovered enemies, and made it home alive, with valuable sensor data.

The romance stories largely revolved about the exploration ships, eliding out the fact that the vast majority of their deployments were utterly boring.  The deployment of naval vessels to missions were far less spontaneous.  They would typically be short, supported by logistics and scouts, against an enemy whose capacities had been discovered by the sacrifice and daring of scouts and explorations ships.  But those deployments were not independent commands by any stretch.

RP wise, they would have a profound distrust of a completely independent warship, as that would not be tied to responsible civil authorities.

Of course, that RP developed to support how I enjoyed the game, how I wished to play.  If you wish to have independent ships or squadrons, say a Space Cruiser Yamato type story of a battlecruiser with a small carrier component for scouts and fighters for stealthy approaches, where battles are fought by the fleets in sector, rather than calling all the ships of the civilization to fight, then have fun with that.

What can often happen in a game, especially one that starts from a conventional start, is that you have a shipyard that has been continually expanded but not tooled, and then when you suddenly have the need to build a fleet, well, you only have one super large shipyard that you can put all the latest tech on.  And that ship has to be able to do a lot right off the bat, because retooling will take so long.  So you can have that super ship, but it will just be the first in a series.  Perhaps it gets rushed out a bit, built with industry produced components for the first one.  But you inevitably get a series of those ships, and instead of the Yamato you just have a cruiser with a number on it for the most part.  And you have invested an awful lot into that big ship philosophy and it can be hard to switch from it.  Like if you have a huge amount of ordnance factories, you get a bit of fleet inertia, where your investment in the infrastructure and the tech forces you to stay focused in a particular weapon doctrine, a particular ship size and fleet speed.

[Michael Sandy]

On the subject of shields vs armor:

If you have the ability to control the range, and the ability to outrange the enemy, shields can be MUCH better because you can simply withdraw a damaged ship before it gets too pounded on.  If you have two beam ships with equivalent ranged weapons and fire control, and one with shields and the other armor, if the shielded ship can fight at max range, the reduced accuracy results in dps on both sides lower than the shield regeneration.  With a missile engagement, a lone damaged ship wouldn't be able to clear a missile envelope in time to get away, but if it had enough repair capability, it could get its shield back online before a followup volley.

Which means an enemy couldn't afford to be efficient with their missiles.  They would have to go with overkill, or their entire volley would be largely wasted.  Vs armor, you could spread your shots and simply wear your enemy down, maybe getting some lucky chain magazine hits.

Shields magnify a tech/mass advantage.  A fleet with shields has more options that result in them taking no or negligible damage from an inferior foe.  An armored fleet is counting on superior attrition in every fight.  You get a different RP, a different fleet philosophy that way.

[Barkhorn]

Even if a shielded beam fleet doesn't outrange its foe, as long as it can outrun them it still can withdraw and recharge its shields.  Obviously the range advantage is nice, but even a shorter range can benefit from shields.

[Jorgen_CAB]

You can even retreat if you have slower speed as long as you have powerful enough beam weapons so that the opponent don't want to close with you. If the opponent tries to follow a ship or ships that retreat to try and recharge shields that will also get them closer and more damage from the rest of your fleet.

So... as long as you are more powerful or better in some category then shields will help you with attrition.