OK Guys listen up: We did a lab and the results are in:

With phase missiles researched the ships actually take longer to destroy something that has shields.
As suspected missiles that pass the shields don´t damage them, effectively splitting up the damage between hull and shields.
The longer time comes from the fact that the ship can use both its repair factors (hull and shield) from the beginning of the battle.
Even with lower shield mitigation through passing missiles this repair stack effect outwheights the benefit from lower shield mitigation by quite a bit.

So these 6 upgrades you can sink about 4000 creds and 1000 metal/minerals into actually make your ships worse.
Fix pls!

What exactly was the test, and what were the times you got? Or better yet, can you just post the replay?

Yeah, did you test against two dunov's and a kol pretending to have infinite shields?

The kol has buffed shielding, dunovs restore shields, command cruisers restore shields, they have higher shield regeneration to start with and more upgrades to it than hull regen. I'm not saying they work great and everyone should run out and spam them, but you're not going to drop dunov supported units faster by skipping that research. Command cruisers should be a loss there since it will give them hull damage before the shields are down, but chewing through the shielding on well managed capital ships can be a chore.

We didn´t have that much time and just simply pitted Kols against a fleet of torpedo frigs.
As we were in this exercise only testing how the phase tech influences the damage done we didn´t use any of the Kols abilities (as it would add more random factors to the thing).

With the 6 phase techs researched (30% pass through) when the Kols shields broke down its HP was down by about 15% (numarically it should´ve been down by 20%, the 5% were repaired by the regen rate of the hull (The kol had no upgrades at all).
That means that every upgrade lowers the effective damage per time of your ships by 3% (18% after all 6 upgrades)
That means almost 1/5 of your shots are negated, and that even with the lowered shield mitigation rate.

This means in your example with unlimited shields, that means you need about 6,5 times the damage you normally would need to destroy the capship (Kol), meaning also 6 times longer.
Of course this is only a calculated number and does not take into account that the kol or anything else destroys your precious frigates or caps.
Personally i wouldn´t bother so much, because if you have 6 times the power to destroy the enemy you shouldn´t really bother with phase missiles either.

Torpedo Frigates are excellent capship killers, though with just 60 cap of them and about 1.5 the cost of a capship you can kill a lvl1 Kol with only one loss.

agh pithlit! do you ahve some sort of disease or do you do this JUST to bug me?
thats what I was talking about!

you know, until your language becomes compatable with mine I'M not talking to you.

Which means its not really all that useful a test.

Yes, I'd like to see how they perform against a well formed self sustaining TEC fleet dipping heavily into the restorative abilities. Which means multiplayer since the ai doesn't even build, let alone use them...

If we had a replay, we could actually judge it But from the description, it doesn't sound like it was a controlled experiment keeping outside variables minimal/nonexistent...



Logically, considering that phase missiles have a major research path in the military tree, it would make sense that researching it benefits you in all situations, not penalizes you in most but allows you to handle the Dunov shield restore easier.

If it makes everything else take longer to kill, but allows you to deal with the Dunov easier I wouldn't say that's a very balanced research line

Which is why it needs tested. Dunovs aren't the only factor. Kols have massive regenerative power at high levels, even without outside support. Command cruisers should actually make them worse by allowing damage to pass through before the shields are down, meaning they can use their abilities on near full strength units. On the other hand, autocast is a bitch. If your repair cruisers are repairing 5 points of damage here and there before the shields are down, once they are down you've already burned your antimatter. It might be a horrible ability numerically, but cause severe irritation through negating enemy repair abilities by burning them off fast.

A good TEC fleet can take on comparable size fleets without a single casualty because of those restoration abilities. They should not be considered a minor part of the enemy that is wasted on everything else.

To me it sounds like the abilities are a probable waste, 30% fully upgraded seems a paltry damage rate, and command cruisers really should screw with it something awful. 30% unmitigated though, it's not to be ignored I think. 60% shield mitigation can be quite irritating.

actually it was...

it was 10 ships vs one kol each time, the only difference being that the second time, the ships had phase missiles fully upgraded

in the first run, the kol was able to kill EXACTLY one ship, in the second run through, the kol killed one ship and was able to get a salvo off at another one. at the very least, it should have done LESS damage, not more