theories theories guesses ideas theories

I know a starbase can pew pew 4 or 5 targets simultaneously regardless of in which direction they happen to be, all front, all rear, all left or all right.
And I know I sure as hell have never seen any Starbase, Orky, Lamp or transy, shoot at 10 targets at one time, even if they were swarming it from everywhere.

the 'shooting' you see is just the particle effects. It's quite possible that is was APPLYING damage and just not effects.

No, I don't look at particle effects. By shooting I mean ships losing their health.
I hold my stupid ALT key and see 4 or 5 ships getting raped regardless of how many directions they're coming from.
I'm not an idiot.

sorry if it came off that I thought you were an idiot N3rull. I didn't mean it that way. It's just that I thought that most people just watched the particle effects and what those hit.

Ok, no problem.

Whenever I zoom onto any battles in progress I never see any effects anyway (2GB of RAM not too plentiful?). The SB usually starts 'shooting' after 30 seconds. I am bound to watch the unit life bars if I am to learn anything of what's going on.

Thanks for not letting me start another unintended flamewar  

no problem. I guess I get to see effects with my 4 GB total/3 GB employed (the failings of 32-bit) RAM.

I got 64 bit, 4 GB ram, 1 GB BFx, and quad core, play everything on high and adopted the tactic of attacking from multiple angles based on what I see coming off the starbase.

(BTW, sins is one of the OMFG prettiest games ever).....

BTW, IF, SB do not have different sides, why does one SB have a forward shield?

Forward shield is a part of what the devs were referring to when they said Vasari starbase is anti-starbase.

I may be mistaken, but I believe the Vasari starbase has more of its guns facing forward. The frontal shield is basically designed to help when you actually are attacking the enemy starbase. Negates damage on the one side of the starbase that an enemy starbase can shoot.

correct amish.

I'm not a fan of frontal deflectors. The tech is what, level 5?
And the total damage reduction is 25% from the front only* for the price of one upgrade.
If you do the maths, you will see that getting 3000hit points , 3 armor, 1500 shields AND increased hull and shield regeneration is always preferable to having 50% frontal-only damage reduction active every second minute.
The idea is very good, but it is simply not worth it.

If the shield deflector could protect the starbase from one target only, but instead would keep 50-60% of the damage away over the whole fight, now THAT would be good. Anti-starbase - ownage. Anti fleet - shit.
OR the deflectors could be replaced with an ability that would cause the enemy target do 25-40% less damage globally. That way, a 1-defense Orkulus with this ability would be a perfect soft counter for a starbase, because it would protect its fleet as well. Having no torpedo cruisers, the Vasari player would field an Orkulus and give this ability to it in order to protect its supporting fleet and let them do the assault role without being annihilated too fast.

Anyway - rite now, it sawx.

Of course, once you get all 4 armor upgrades, you might get the deflectors for even more damage reduction. But then, your starbase is doing nothing. So you have to buy assault system upgrades.
Bam, there go your 30k creds, 25 minutes and all that for a brick that is now finally capable of killing that enemy brick over the next 20 minutes.
Awesome.

* - a red 100% damage reduction in game mechanics means that the damage is divided by (1 + 100%) = 2 , which results in the damage getting halved. However, deflectors are active only for one minute and then inactive for another. The effect is 50% damage taken 50% of the time and 100% the other 50% of the time => simple maths tell it sums up to 25% damage reduction.