Matter Disintegrator Question

[The Shadow Rose]

Are they really the best in the game? Ive seen many say this many times but no matter how i look at it they really dont seem better. Sure 50% armor pen is nice but 50% shield pen just means shields go down half as fast which makes it take longer to kil anything. Gauss cannons give 33% to shield damage which lets them melt shields on my corvettes and kenetic artillery has 20 longer range and more damage and the 33% shield bonus increase which lets them melt through shields at a long range to.

Am i missing something here?

I mean i suppse i can see corvettes having them being a bit more useful since then they can eat through the high armored stuff quickly but anything above a small slot makes matter disintegrators look worse then the normal techs especially on large slots.

Also on a slightly related note what is better flak cannons or normal point defense?

[Summon3r]

flak cannons are great, matter disintegrators seem to work bloody awesome in conjunction with shield killing weps. my fleets have corvettes with neutron torps and disruptors and battleships are mixed between kinetic and matter disintegrators. they easily roll AE fleets that are up to 50k stronger on paper

[Azunai]

i never found the matter disintegrators particularly good. if the target has strong armor (fallen empire ships for example), plasma and lances are just plain better. toss in a few heavy gauss cannons, kinetic batteries, phase disruptors or energy torpedoes (on corvettes) to get rid of the shields. if the target has little/no armor (for example unbidden), good old kinetics are probably the best weapon. their dps is on par with disintegrators, but their shield bonus damage actually does something useful.

50% shield penetration is just about the most useless bonus in the game, imo. you'll still remove the whole shields before the bull reaches 0, so that bonus doesn't really do anything.

in my experience, flak is better than PD. flak has much longer range and will kill most strikecraft before they even get a shot off. and flak is still semi useful when there are no strikecraft or missiles to shoot down. their dps isn't great for a medium slot, but still better than a super short range PD that won't even shoot at other ships until the fleets are practically entangled in a melee brawl. plus you can put flak on cruisers and battleships, so you can phase out the wimpy destroyers.

[Jetoilio]

If it says 50% shield penetration, that actually means that 50% of damage will bypass the shield and hit the ship directly, meaning you will cause actual damage to the ship regardless of whether it's shields are still up or not.

Penetration ignores shields.

[Azunai]

umm yeah, that's what it means. and that's also the reason why it is useless. the *other* half of the damage will still be absorbed by the shields. in practice, there are no ships that have more shields than hull. the part of the damage that doesn't bypass the shields is always going to burn the whole shield down before the ship is destroyed.

[adobo]

50% goes past the shield. the other 50% will do damage and ignore 50% armor. When the shield goes down, then 100% will hit the hull and ignore 50% armor.

All things considered. pretty awesome all rounder weapon. Usually use them in corvettes so they have some bite to them.

[Summon3r]

Originally posted by majikero:

50% goes past the shield. the other 50% will do damage and ignore 50% armor. When the shield goes down, then 100% will hit the hull and ignore 50% armor.

All things considered. pretty awesome all rounder weapon. Usually use them in corvettes so they have some bite to them.

this

[Azunai]

the only case where the 50% shield penetration has the potential to actually speed up the killing process is an extremely shield heavy build that uses the tier 6 shields & armor (from enigmatic fortress).

with that OP stuff, you can actually design battlehips and cruiser that have more shield points then hull hit points if you fill all utility slots with powerplants and shield generators and no armor slots.

even in that extreme case, it's still borderline useless.

a battleship with that configuration has 3000 shields, 2400 hull and 55% armor (baseline, no additional armor slots). 50% armor penetration means that the armor will actually only absorb half of the normal damage, so that battleship has about 3060 effective hull points vs. 50% armor penetration.

by the time the shields go down, the part of the damage that bypassed the shield will have the ship down to almost 0 HP. if we factor in some shield regeneration, the ship will actually explode before the shields are depleted.


but that's a very extreme build and i've never seen an AI using such a ship configuration. they'll usually have something like 1200 shields on battleships (or less) in the endgame, so the shield will be gone long before the hull is down. which means the shield penetration didn't speed up the killing process at all.

imo, they are highly overrated. i can't think of a scenario where matter disitegrators are better than a more specialized combination of other weapons.

[The Shadow Rose]

Originally posted by Azunai:

imo, they are highly overrated. i can't think of a scenario where matter disitegrators are better than a more specialized combination of other weapons.

Or any kenetic weapon in the entire game.

[Jetoilio]

In my game the enemy cannot damage my ships because my shields regenerate too quickly for them to be taken down. If they had a weapon that could damage my hull despite my shields being up they'd actually have a chance. There are uses for weapons that bypass shields.

[The Shadow Rose]

Originally posted by Jetoilio:

In my game the enemy cannot damage my ships because my shields regenerate too quickly for them to be taken down. If they had a weapon that could damage my hull despite my shields being up they'd actually have a chance. There are uses for weapons that bypass shields.

How do you manage to have shields like that without cheating because that is impossible unless you have hyper shields and they are still at the starting weapon level.

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Originally posted by TheShadowRose:

How do you manage to have shields like that without cheating because that is impossible unless you have hyper shields and they are still at the starting weapon level.

Well, it was the case for smaller ships before they swapped flat 15 regen bonus for 50% on capacitors. Kinda fun to watch your fleet taking on enemy twice as strong and taking next to no losses, but if I wanted to use something that broken I wouln't play on insane in the first place.

Right now, you can realistically have 60-75 regen on battleship, but that's about it. Still not enough to negate damage of one enemy battleship... or even a couple trop corvettes.

Ad for desintegrators in general: they mostly save you time and hassle of re-fitting your fleet to counter the enemy. Good as they might be, kinetics will struggle with heavily-armored bettleships.

[Jetoilio]

You're forgetting one thing: I don't have to stop them from damaging my ships forever, I just have to stop them from damaging my ships long enough to kill enough of them that they cannot damage my ships even if the fight lasts forever. It doesn't require cheating; just some good designing, and some advanced technology.

[NixBoxDone]

You're missing the shield regeneration.

Hulls don't regenerate anywhere near as fast as the hull, even with stacking an admiral with emergency repair, living metal and regenerative hull tissues on a battleship.

So while you are right that the shield goes down slower, that doesn't really matter because you don't have to deplete the shields when half of the damage destroys the hull.

Half your damage will bypass the rapidly regenerating shield and destroy the hull instead, and the armor pen means it's going to pack a whallop doing so.

They may not be the most effective weapon to go all in on (due to, as mentioned, half damage being wasted on the shield still) but it is one of the more effective anti armor weapons that can shred ships that rely on shields only. If a ship is 80 % shield health/shield regen and 20 % hull, having 50 % of your damage directly bypass the shields and ignore 50 % of the armor on those 20 % left over defenses, you're going to be very effective.

Now: the shield regeneration doesn't mean your ships won't take losses, but against any enemy that has to go through your shields first, the further in the fight you are, the less ships you will lose to the enemy. In the initial volleys and for quite some time after, the enemy fleet will simply overpower shields almost immediately, but as both sides take losses, ships with shield regen will absorb more and more damage before going down as less of the enemy ships remain to damage your ships, but each ship still has the same substantial shield regen they did at the start, regardless of how much hull damage they may have sustained.

So the farther the battle progresses, the less any weapons that need to overpower shields will actually help you. This is where disintegrators come in - they are pretty useful at the beginning when massed volleys kill ships outright, and only get more effective as the ship numbers sink and shields start to become more important.

That doesn't mean there aren't better combinations for various types of enemies, but none of them are as effective against everything. Disintegrators are equally effective against armored and shielded targets - or fleets comprised of mixes of both.

It is a one stop drops all choice for a weapon that allows you to be reasonably effective against everything, and you can STILL combine them with ships that are more specialised.

That's just my impression, though, I haven't done any experiments with my fleets to confirm it. (I just reasoned it out ^^)