Subtleties and Balanced Fleets

Shield Mitigation is a shield trait which completely nullifies a percentage of damage taken. It constantly decreases at a steady rate, but if the ship is taking damage fast enough, mitigation will increase. It will max out for frigates at 57%, capital ships depending on their level (65% at level 1, +1.11% for each level, up to 75% at level 10). For Advent ships, they have the potential to be the given figures +10% (+4% from mitigation research, +6% from maxed culture research - in theory, a level 10 Advent capital in friendly culture can have 85% mitigation). Structures do not have any form of mitigation.

This means that ships being focus fired have their mitigations reach maximum a lot quicker, cancelling a lot of damage taken. However, focus fire is still the quickest way to kill a ship. In your scenario, only 30 DPS of your fleet's total DPS is doing actual damage - the rest is cancelled by mitigation, armor (when damage begins to affect hull), and any defensive abilities active on the target.

As for group jump, ships wait for 90ish% of the ships ordered to jump to enter formation before the actual jump is executed. This is meant to prevent the one or two ships that get hung up on a turn from delaying the remainder of the fleet, though if more than 10% of your ships are milling about trying to get into their formation spot, then you have a problem. Lowering the percentage means fewer ships jump at once, increasing it means it takes even longer for jumps to be executed.

The whole shield mitigation and focus fire can get a little complicated. There are many forums on this though the search engine is a joke. The 30 dps is from an ability of a cap ship not what the rest of the ships are firing. As for understanding counters that is more armor vs. attack base (example anti-heavy attack of a LF is good against a heavy armored light carrier)

As far as the spamming is concerned I find this normal in all RTS games though Sins tries very hard to limit this. That being said a very good opponent can stop any spam but the current spam is light carriers especially the Advent which you seem to use.

The group jump thing can get out of hand especially with huge fleets but I have never had that big of a problem.

shield mitigation will scale up as targets take damage at a rate proportional to incoming damage. mitigation drops off at a strictly linear rate, which is independent of incoming damage and constant. i won't get into the exact math of this, i probably don't have my figure totally correct so i don't want to say something that isn't mathematically accurate. you'll have to forgive the vagueness and just believe that this is the general outlay of how it works. 

the way the system is implemented it is by far preferable to focus fire. you might think that because of the linear constant drop off of shield mitigation you would gain more from spreading your fire around but this is incorrect conclusion. the net gain from increased mitigation drop off doesn't even come close to the net loss of having to face down the additional hull and shield regen rates of extra targets. do focus fire. its the best. 

try a Hard AI and see how well you do with just a single ship type. probably won't work very well. 

all fleets need a backbone so you'll generally have more of 1 type of ship than any other, but support ships are vitally important at higher levels of play. there are generally three ships that are viable as backbones. the first is the Long Range Frigate. it does good damage against almost everything and is easy to build in large numbers early in the game. the second is the Carrier Cruiser. its expensive but very versatile and very hard to kill. fighter squadrons in particular are incredibly powerful, as i'm sure you've started to see. the third is the Heavy Cruiser. its a flying brick shithouse with guns strapped to the side. they're very hard to kill and do reasonably good damage to pretty much everything, although they have short range and can be outmaneuevered pretty easily. 

in addition the backbone ships of your fleet you'll need support to enhance your abilities and protection to cover your weaknesses. Long Range Frigates are weak to fighter squadrons so benefit greatly from accompaniment by Flak Frigates, which are very good at killing fighters. Carriers are weak to Light Frigates so benefit greatly from accompaniment by some Long Range Frigates which are good at killing Lights. Heavy Cruisers are weak to bombers so they benefit greatly from escort by fighter squadrons which are good at killing bombers. 

support cruisers like the Hoshiko Robotics and Cielo Command cruiser are very good additions to the fleet. even a small number of them will add a huge amount of capability. try it out and see. a small investment goes a long way. these are support ships so there's no point in massing dozens and dozens of them like you would with a backbone type ship, but adding a handful in with your main fleet will benefit you greatly. 

yeah, kind of a pain in the butt. taking off group move can get things moving along faster but it can also break up your fleet cohesion and risk taking losses as you jump into a hostile grav well. generally you'll have to manually go find the ships that are having pathfinding AI problems and give them new orders or else they'll keep ramming into another ship or some obstacle thats preventing them from forming up properly for the jump. 

best piece of advice i can give to prevent the pathing AI from borking is to set your fleet group cohesion to loose. this will space the ships farther apart which reduces the chance they'll bump into each other. you may want to bring the cohesion back to normal or tight during combat though if you've got some reason to ball up (and there are lots of reasons to fight in a tight ball formation, depends on whats in your fleet). 

Whoops, I think I messed up the quote thing. Let's see if it works...

So, if you just leave a ship sitting (under attack), its mitigation will decrease, but when you reach a certain point of enemies attacking you, it increases? And it is more effective to have a bigger fleet w/ high mitigation on target than smaller fleet w/ low mitagation?

Wow, that would be a lot of cancellation. I had probably 23ish Destras, 10ish Aeria Drone Hosts, and 3ish capital ships.

It would be, but it isn't.

this is not the real formula for shield mitigation, its just an algebraic expression that demonstrates the idea

Mitigation per second = 10*d - 2

where d is damage incoming. that formula (which is not the real formula) says that for every second a ship is under fire its mitigation increases at a rate proportional to 10 times the amount of damage it takes and mitigation decreases at a linear constant rate of 2 per second.

get it? 

the real mitigation formula is much more complex and i don't know what it is exactly, but the equation i have given is a simplified version of it that behaves in a similar way. Mitigation is a function of damage incoming and time. 

Yes, I do, thanks for explaining

Is that referring to an enemy cap ship reducing damage, or my own doing 30 more damage? (Sorry, I'm kinda slow at these things)

I thought mitigation was a simple calculation based on how badly the shields were damaged.  Pretty sure I read somewhere that it didn't matter if 1000 ships or 1 ship was firing at a single ship.  As long as a certain amount of damage had been dealt to the target, mitigation would rise.

That's half true. It doesn't technically matter how many ships are firing, but the more ships that are firing, the more damage it's taking, and thus the higher its mitigation. Since mitigation decreases over time, it's not accurate to describe it as merely a function of its shield level, though as a first order approximation, it's fine to think of it that way for new ships starting at 0% mitigation and full shields. However, for ships coming out of a battle, you really need to think of it the way transitive has described.

You need to pay attention to the color. If it is green the it is good. The advent, which I assume you are playing, can repair at 30 dps, I know it gets confusing. But if it is red then that is bad. Several caps have the ability to inflict 30 dps ON TOP OF the damage they do with standard weapons. What is interesting is the ability damage is usually not effected by mitigation or armor.