Imperium Galactic War Shields Introduction

Imperium Galactic War Shields Introduction by Option Verbose

Shields are a relatively straight forward defense, and their value is pretty easy to understand. The basic idea is that while your shields are up they reduce the damage you take from attacks by some percentage. They reduce incoming damage more than armor of the same level would, but of course, they don’t stay up forever. Your shields can withstand a particular amount of damage before they fail, after which it will take some time for your engineering teams to get them back on line.

How much do shields reduce damage?

Shields don’t stop all the damage from an attack, but they can reduce it significantly. The amount of damage your shields mitigate is based on the sum of your Shielding ratings that apply against the attack in question. Every attack has a Damage Type – either Force, Explosive, or Energy – and the Shielding ratings of all your shield modules which match the type of an incoming attack are added together to determine how much of that attack’s damage is mitigated. Consider for example:

Energy Shield I provides a Shielding rating of +198 against weapons with the Energy Damage Type.

Phase Shield I provides a Shielding rating of +86 against weapons with any Damage Type.

Combined, these provide a Shielding rating of 284 against Energy weapons, and a Shielding rating of 86 against attacks of the other two Damage Types. These ratings are then converted to actual mitigation values, using our standard rating system, resulting in about a 28% damage reduction against Energy weapons, or about 10% damage reduction against attacks of other types. You’ll notice a bit of diminishing returns at play here as well of course – the Energy Shield I on its own, with it’s 198 Shielding rating, would provide about 20% mitigation of Energy damage, but stacking it with the Phase Shield I (10% mitigation on its own) provides a total of only 28%, 2% less than you might expect.

How long do shields work for?

There are two key stats to consider when you want to understand how long your shields will stay up for, and each of them resides on your ship’s hull. Your ship’s Shield Reset Time is the time it will take your crew to bring your shields back on line after they fail. That’s pretty straight forward. The more complex stat is your ship’s Shield Threshold, which determines how much damage your shield can withstand before it goes down. At this time, all ships have the same values for these stats – we want to keep things relatively simple on the basic hulls – but you can expect them to vary in the future.

Shield Threshold and Shield Reset Time control when your shields are up and when they’re down.

Your ship’s shields can withstand an amount of damage equal to your ship’s (Hit Points x Shield Threshold) before they fail. This damage is accumulated before anymitigation is applied from shields or armor, but attacks which are evaded or intercepted by active defenses don’t count towards it, since they’re eliminated before they hit your shields. Attacks that your shields don’t provide any protection from also don’t count, but how much protection your shields provide against an attack doesn’t matter when it comes to your Shield Threshold.

Note that your ship only has one shield, and while every ship has the basic shield related stats, if you don’t have any shield modules installed, you don’t have any shields at all. When your shields go down, you loose protection against all types of damage at the same time, and it all comes back together.

How do I get the most out of shields?

Shields provide strong protection for your ships against particular types of damage. If you know what you’re up against – or what kind of Damage Types you’re running into most often – you can outfit your ships accordingly. Compared to armor, which also provides Damage Type based protection, the amount of damage per hit that shields prevent is big, but the long term damage reduction is (usually) a little bit lower because they go off line. They’re ideal for fleets that will kill their target’s quickly, before the enemy can knock their shields down (for example, when hunting fleets composed mostly of lighter hull types), and for protecting ships with naturally high Armor ratings, where diminishing returns on armor protection apply.