Combat Mechanics

[antillies]

Can anyone detail the exact mechanics of naval combat? If a ship is hit, do its shields/hull take the full damage of the fire arc it was hit with or is it more complex/variable than that? Also, what determines system damage and does the rate of system decay vary from ship to ship?

[DarthTex]

Can anyone detail the exact mechanics of naval combat? If a ship is hit, do its shields/hull take the full damage of the fire arc it was hit with or is it more complex/variable than that? Also, what determines system damage and does the rate of system decay vary from ship to ship?

I'm just guessing here but, shields always have to go down first. After that I thinks it's a weighted percentage chance of what happens within. More than likely the largest percentage is the hull, but eventually the internal systems get hit also. I don't know if that answers your question(s)

[Master_Xan]

This is a bit old, but I'll answer anyway...

 

Shields take damage before hull. Always. I don't know what the ratio is to hull/systems once the shields drop. But systems CAN be damaged before shields are breached. An easy way to prove this is to watch a capital ship in combat against a few fighter squads for awhile. Something like an ISD against x-wings. The fighters don't do enough damage to penetrate the shields; you can watch the ISD's shields blip down for a fraction of a second before they regenerate. But because the ISD is terrible at killing fighters, the fighters have a chance to live long enough that, somehow, the shield generator is damaged. You can also see this when a ship gets hit with a lot of power all at once- the shields might go from full to 50%, and the shield generators are suddenly at reduced effectiveness as well.

 

Much more rarely, I've seen a ship with shields up take damage to systems other than shields. Weapons, engines, anything. This is much more likely to happen when the ship is being pounded by lots of incoming fire than by small amounts of sustained damage, but I have seen weapons damaged in situations like the earlier one, with an ISD and x-wings.

 

On this note, the game has separate firing arcs for weapons, but shields and hull value are not assigned to portions of a ship. Easy way to test this is watch a large group of x-wings take out an ISD; they don't fire torpedoes until the shields are completely down, even if they are only ever hitting two sides of the ISD with lasers (which should only drop the shields on those two sides, if the shields were sectioned off like that).

 

I think it may be possible to use tractor beams on ships with shields up (which takes out or slows down its sublight engines), but I'd have to do more testing to prove it.

 

Also, every ship (except fighters) have a damage control value assigned to it. You can see it in RebEd. This has something to do with how well a ship repairs, and thus a ship with a higher value here will have more robust systems than a ship with a lower value. I don't think it affects how difficult it is to damage the system, but I'm pretty sure higher values will greatly increase the chances of a system being repaired mid-battle. I don't know if this changes repairs made outside of combat.

 

I *believe* ships never miss once they fire; if fire, the shot hits. Also, I *believe* it always does full damage from that arc (so if an ISD shoots a Mon Cal cruiser with its rear arc, the Mon Cal will be hit, and will be hit with the full value of the ISD's rear turbolasers). The only way I can think to test this would be to remove all but forward firing arc from a ship, remember its damage value, and remove the shields from another ship. Put the two in combat with each other, let the shield-less ship get hit (and count exactly how many times it is hit). Then retreat and see the hull damage of the shield-less ship. That might give you insight into whether its possible to miss (even though the laser graphics don't ever show misses), whether it is always the full damage, and/or what possible percentage goes to systems vs hull.

 

Somehow, the game changes things based on turbolasers vs normal lasers vs ion cannons. Ion cannons seem to get a bonus against shields, but I'm not sure if they help disable systems after the shields are down or not. Lasers do much more damage against fighters than turbolasers do. I'm not sure if the game allows turbolasers to miss fighters, or if they just have reduced damage against them. Whether ion cannons are as effective as lasers against fighters, I don't know, nor do I know if they are as bad against fighters as turbolasers are.

 

I'm interested in the results of any testing you do.

[Slocket]

Indeed the shield generators can be damaged while the shields are still up. ASFAIK that is the only internal system that can be damaged while the shields are still up. The hits are always hits and with *full* damage, there are no misses.

Ion cannons only do damage to shields, the manual claims it can disable internal systems (do not know about that). *Turbolasers hit capital ships much harder for full damage but hardly hit much against fighters, vice verse for lasers*. That would mean there is a percentage damage reduction for each type against what target. I thought to recall it was about 80% reduction. That was to simulate a turbo laser missing the small agile fighter target. Torpedoes only hit against bare hull (not shields), those fighter torpedoes are very good at destroying hulls to zero. Tractor beams slow down (and stop if strong enough or multiple beams) any vessel regardless of the state of the shields.

 

There seems to be a random hit to either a system box or the hull box on a weighted percentage. A heavy hull ship takes more damage to hull and less chance to a system health bar.