Is that Indian?  Arabic?  Hawaiian?

Well, the main thing about phase missiles is that they ignore shield mitigation. With Advent ships, especially if there is a progenitor restoring shields, you may kill it before its shields are depleted, which is an even bigger bonus.

The amount of damage phase missiles doto the hull on successfully ignoring shields/mitigation should be the same regardless if the shields are up or down.

When did they start bybassing mitigation?  The lore behind the kol's shield ability was that it was specifically designed to combat phase missiles.  (Forget where I read this, was a while ago)  and that ability boosts shield mitigation.  What the hell happened to this game while I wasn't playing???

-Twi

Kol's Adaptive Shield doesn't give shield mitigation.  it gives % reduced incoming damage and phase missile blocking.  The point about it's shield being designed to combat phase missiles refers to the Phase-missile-block bonus it gets.

One thing you'll learn about me sosoner is later is I don't screw around when numbers are involved.  If I've run some numbers or otherwise use math or game formulas to argue the point you can generally assume I'm not trolling- Us math majors take our formalized logic seriously 

That said, I'm honestly surprised you've never heard of backup generators.   They are the reason in general hull is better per-point then shields(hull damage is mitigated by both armor & shield mitigation, shield damage only is mitigated by shield mitigation).

The only exception being shieldpiercing damage & phase missiles which ignore shield mitigation when the shields are still up. 

If you don't believe me check the sins manual entry for shield mitigation- It refers to backup generators as "emergency generators".  But the point is after main shields fail shield mitigation starts reinforcing the hull instead of the shields, resulting in it being applied in full to shieldpiercing damage such as phase missiles.

I didn't really intend it as proof.  you said you'd never heard of emergency generators before so I gave you the easiest to find neutral party using the term(digging up old phase missile discussion threads would have taken much more effort).  It's not proof, but it's evidence, which is frankly more then you presented in counterargument(which was largely a mix of skepticism and rehtoric).

That said, just to settle this I just designed a quick test by messing with some Entity Files:

Modifications:

-Change Phase missiles on Kortul to fire every 30 seconds dealing 10,000 damage

-Increase Kortul's frontal wave weapon DPS to 75(to more efficiently build and maintain enemy shield mitigation)

-Reduced Kortul's PM attack range to 2,000

-Changed first Phase missile upgrade tech to grant 100% Bypass chance rather then 5%

-Changed TEC LF to have 0 armor, 20,000  hull & 5,000 shields(since planet militia are based on TEC ship stats)

-Changed TEC Siege frigate to have 20,000 hull & 50 shields(since planet militia are based on TEC ship stats)

Procedure:

1). Start game as either Vasari Faction, build kortul, research 1 rank of first Phase missile tech.

2). [CONTROL]  Find a moon.  Attack LF from outside the 2000 PM range to build up shield mitigation, then move into PM range, keeping the LF targeted to see how much hull it loses roughly from the Phase missile Volley.  Make sure measurements are taken before the other non-PM frontal weapons manage to wear down the 5000 shields/

3). [EXPERIMENT].  Repeat the steps of step 2 for the siege frigate present, observe rough amount of hull lost.  Of course the initial long range bombardment will remove the 50 shield, resulting in the situation I believe backup generators activate

Note: all subject frigates were planet militia so upgrades on the enemy aren't a factor.

Result:

I ran the test several times on different planets.  THe LF consistantly took 9999 damage(slight rounding error but about expected) from each phase missile volley.

Depending on the actual shield mitigation of the target at the time phase misssiles were fired I observed the Siege frigate took 6200-8000 damage from each phase missile Barrage.  Generally on phase missile fire shield mitigation was over 40%.  it seemed that higher mitigation did correspond to less damage as I generally got lower damage on siege frigates if less time was spent bombarding the frigate prior to launching phase missiles.

Conclusion: once shields were down, phase missile barrages were observed dealing 20-40% less damage against targets with 0 armor then phase missiles that penetrated the active shields.  This confirms my hypothesis.

 [EDIT: Repeated testing didn't seem to continue to demonstrate the damage discrepancy I had previously experienced(which was previously discussed in conclusion 2).  This is fortunate as seeking the source of the divergence was driving me crazy.]

Secondary Conclusion:  This one came as a complete surprised, but it looks like shield mitigation may not be calculated the way we think it is.  With the shield mitigations of 30-57% common during the test, if shield mitigation were a straight reduction as we've always assumed we would have expected  a 30-57% reduction in the shields-down damage rather then a 20-40% reduction as was observed.  Perhaps Shield mitigation actually does work like other sins percentiles(ie 100% shield mitigation results in half damage)?  Or perhaps something wonky is happening.  This could use some further testing in cases where phase missiles aren't involved.

But the second conclusion aside, the first conclusion seems to confirm my description of how Phase missiles interact with downed shields.   I'll run another test in a bit with the same format coupled with shield piercing ability damage to see if the same is true for abilities like Nano Dissembler.

Modified Entity Files are here if you care and are too lazy to set it up yourself:

https://hotfile.com/dl/170524229/8bea803/PMtest.rar.html

If this holds out to further testing, this does actually mean that as Advent VS Vasari you are not only wasting money researching shield upgrades, but instead you are making it easier for the enemy to kill you.

This would no doubt explain why Advent suffer so hard against a Vasari Fleet of similar size in late game.

That was my mistake, I always thought the Kol's Damage reduction applied to shield mitigation.

-Twi

[EDIT: just ran a second set of tests in the same format using a modifier Gauss Railgun that did shield piercing damage.  Damage was not affected by shield mitigation even when shields were down.  This means that this behavior is unique to Phase Missiles and likely is just causes by Phase missiles losing their bypass chance as soon as shields drop(so when shields are down they don't even get a chance of bypassing shield mitigation)]

Aye that is indeed the case.  My point was merely that shield piercing effects(or at least phase missiles stop ignoring shield mitigation once shields are down.  While shields are up, for example that 30% of the time when phase missiles bypass shields they ignore shield mitigation.  Once shields go down, shield mitigation gets applied to phase missile damage 100% of the time regardless of bypass chance.

As I said in my previous post I haven't yet tested if this applies to all shield-piercing damage or just phase missiles.  But this result demonstrates that fully teched phase missiles actually kill ships with shield points left faster then ships without.

Nothing I didn't know here.  And honestly this list doesn't cover the whole topic of my post.

The topic is that fully teched phase missiles kill ships faster while thier targets have shield points left  then when their targets have 0 shields left due to shield mitigation only being applied to shield-piercing damage once shields hit 0.

Honestly, I'm no really in the mood to get into a long-winded all-inclusive balance argument at present.  At this point I'm chiefly here to discuss this rather irritating Caveat of Phase Missiles.

What part of the thing you quoted has anything to do with the assailant Illum matchup?

Besides which you're making the comparison between beams & phase missiles entirely based on one class of ships, LRM, which becomes obsolete late game once titans start gettting leveled up regardless.

I don't know why RiddleKing is bothering to post anything right now.  Phase missiles>everything else is an obvious conclusion since when fully-upgraded they bypass shield mitigation 30% of the time.  Ilum vs. Assailant wasn't part of the discussion until he posted it as part of some "Advent are the best race" agenda he has going on.

There you go again, Attributing an Advantage unique to a single unit(illum) to all beam weapons.  IF you are comparing beams vs phase missiles it's 30% bypass+10% damage vs 30% damage and 12% range.

An advantage specific to the illuminator and only the illuminator is not part of the advantages of beams vs phase missiles in general.

And frankly from the start phase missile bombers are more the issue the illuminators.

Again that's a trait of the Illum specifically, not beams.

And frankly in general Phase missiles do do more damage over time as their tech uprades improve DPS more.

How do you figure?  I see what you mean for Illuminators but that's it.

Once a ship fires, the attack hits regardless of enemy movement.  Illuminators do have an easier time firing on fast targets due to their 3 beams giving them an effectively wider firing Arc.

 But for all other units bearing phase missiles, turn speed & firing arc is a constant between them and their TEC?advent equivalents. So for bombers, starbases, & titans phase missiles are just as superior against slow targets as they are against fast ones.

Hes confused: 

Mitigation increases the more damage a ship recieves regardless of the shield points.

Hes point about a ship that has more shields is more affected by phase missiles is wrong. The only thing he could say is a ships design that sacrifices hull points for shields will die faster from phase missiles. 

Having more shield points has no relation to shield mitigation because the emergency generators story is just a backbone trying to put shield mitigation in a realistic context. 

Shield mitigation does not kick in when shields are depleted. In the story the generators kick in once the primary shields have failed but if you read it carefully else where you would see shield mitigation was always on during the first dps recieved.

What he's saying is if a unit has 2000 shields and 2000 hull points then shield mitigation when shields are assaulted is 15% and shields are eaten away receiving more damage up to the point emergency generators kick in when there 0 shield points where mitigation is around 65%+. 

The truth is the first shot from an assailant for example is mitigated at 15% , the second is mitigated at 50+.. because of the dps a ship receives. Massed phase missiles will have ships using the highest possible mitigation value like any other assault. Hes shield story is false. Hes trying to tell us a ship recieves more damage when theres shields as it waits for shields to drop to get higher mitigation values.

Shield mitigation is never just 15% and then 65%. It rises depending on the attack by a percentage so at some times you could see it at 30%+. It varies by the incoming damage.