Which shields to choose on which design? (Full Version)

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zebanovich -> Which shields to choose on which design? (12/9/2018 7:29:13 AM)

weaker shields with fast recharge rate and stronger shields with slower recharge rate, which ones you put where?

I'm currently puting strong shields with low recharge on everything except spaceports. and fast recharge shields on spaceports.

I'm not sure if should I put fast recharge shields on military ships too.

what's your strategy per design and why?



Aeson -> RE: Which shields to choose on which design? (12/9/2018 11:43:24 AM)

Note - I use [component name] I to indicate the initial version of a component, [component name] II to indicate the first upgrade of that component, etc.

Deucalios Shields take about seven to seven and a half minutes (450 seconds for Deucalios I, 430 seconds for Deucalios II, and ~433 seconds for Deucalios III, to be exact) at normal game speed to fully recharge; Talassos Shields, while having a lower maximum strength, only take a bit over two and a half minutes (more specifically, ~163 seconds for Talassos I, 155 seconds for Talassos II, and ~154 seconds for Talassos III) for the same. If you're expecting a ship or station to be seriously engaged more than about once every ten minutes at normal game speed (1 in-game year), Talassos Shields are probably better than Deucalios Shields. If your ship or station is engaged heavily enough and has sufficient power generation capacity to make full use of its shield regeneration rate during the battle, Talassos Shields are probably also better than Deucalios Shields for engagements which last longer than about two minutes (125 seconds with Deucalios/Talassos I, 120 seconds with Deucalios/Talassos II, 125 seconds with Deucalios/Talassos III) at normal game speed even if the ship would enter combat with full-strength shields regardless of which shield generator it used - albeit with the caveat that equipping a ship or station with Talassos Shields rather than Deucalios Shields runs the risk of the ship or station taking hits on the armor/hull earlier in the engagement if the ship would have gone into battle with a higher initial shield strength using Deucalios Shields.

I think that the Talassos Shields are probably better for combatants overall, though usually I just choose between Talassos and Deucalios Shields more or less at random and don't develop the other until I'm ready to go for Meridian Shields. There are too many good things in the Energy and Construction tree for me to want to prioritize developing a secondary line of shield generators if I'm not going to be making much use of them or immediately pushing on to Meridian Shields.

I will add that the unique Zenox shield generator - the Megatron Z4 - is, like many other species-restricted technologies, incredibly good. The initial version is basically a Talassos II with a higher recharge rate (and thus a higher maximum power consumption while charging shields, since the power requirement of a shield generator is the same as its shield regeneration rate) in a smaller package, so if you can get it through tech trading, salvage, or espionage early enough you're pretty well set for shield generators at least through the middle of the tech tree.



zebanovich -> RE: Which shields to choose on which design? (12/9/2018 2:57:45 PM)

Thank you for detailed information on recharge time..
I see your point and it makes sense to put talasos/fast recharge shields on military ships ex. for big wars where one expects his ships to constantly attack in enemy teritory, especially if enemy has lots of ships reday for fight.

One thing I noticed while attacking oponent spaceport (or any other ship/station for that matter, but is most obvious on spaceports) is that spaceports recharge their shields during combat thus prologing the time it takes to knock shields completely down, resulting in more overral shields strength the opponent needs to damage (initial shield strength + recharge amount gained during combat). I didn't calculate but for spaceports it worth noting down what result in more overal shield strength, talasos or deucalios.

I just guess that fast recharge can't generate anough amount of shield strenght which deucalios gives us right away with slower recharge.



Aeson -> RE: Which shields to choose on which design? (12/9/2018 5:31:53 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: zebanovich

One thing I noticed while attacking oponent spaceport (or any other ship/station for that matter, but is most obvious on spaceports) is that spaceports recharge their shields during combat thus prologing the time it takes to knock shields completely down, resulting in more overral shields strength the opponent needs to damage (initial shield strength + recharge amount gained during combat). I didn't calculate but for spaceports it worth noting down what result in more overal shield strength, talasos or deucalios.

The more shield generators something has, the more likely a shield generator with a high recharge rate and low maximum strength is to be better than a shield generator with a high maximum strength and a low recharge rate, because the more shield generators it has, the less likely it is that the shields can be penetrated before shield regeneration becomes the more significant factor in effective shield strength. It's actually the smaller ships and stations which are more likely to benefit from Deucalios Shields, assuming that enough time passes between engagements for the shield to reach full strength, because they're the ships which won't have enough resilience to last long enough for shield regeneration to matter in big engagements ... but the Deucalios Shield takes a lot of time to reach full strength, and if you cannot ensure that enough time will pass between engagements for your ships to more or less fully regenerate their shields, then it is entirely plausible for ships equipped with Talassos Shields to go into engagements with stronger shields than ships with Deucalios Shields even before taking mid-battle shield regeneration into account.

Also, for most designs, you're going to be able to mount more or less exactly as many Talassos Shields as Deucalios Shields. The difference in maximum power consumption between even 100 Deucalios Shields and 100 Talassos Shields is only 60 energy/s while the shields are regenerating at full rate, and an unupgraded Fission Reactor would cover that. Even if you have to give up three shield generators to fit the Fission Reactor, you're looking at trading 1 Deucalios Shield for 0.97 Talassos Shields - and I'd be more than a little surprised if you could not find space on something that's investing 1000 size into shield generators for a size 22 reactor without giving up shield generators, because a thousand size invested in shield generators is the kind of thing you don't see outside of enormous space stations.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to use Deucalios Shields on big things, mind you - you can do it, and it'll work well enough. It also wouldn't be wrong to mix Deucalios and Talassos Shields on the same design - you'd get a bit more maximum shield strength at the cost of a bit of regeneration rate or a bit more regeneration rate at some cost to maximum shield strength, depending on how you want to look at it. It's just that the more shield generators you have on a design, the more right using the shield with the highest regeneration rate becomes, because, well, even if it's "only" 130 shields per generator instead of 180, if you've got ten or twenty shield generators that's still 1300 or 2600 maximum shield strength that the enemy may have to beat through before they start hitting hull and armor, even before accounting for in-combat shield regeneration.



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