How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets

[Zanthis]

Since I don't have Gold yet, I only did some small bit of testing on the matter of how fighters in particular accumulate damage. My tests were quite interesting however, and in hindsight the way it works is not surprising. The quick answer is shield-depleting weapons work just fine against fighters...sometimes.

Ok, the way a stack of fighters takes damage with respect to shields is only the top fighter is available to take damage. So if each fighter has 60 shields, once you've killed 60 points of shields, until the stack has at least one fighter killed, no more shields can be lost by any fighters in the stack. As soon as one or more fighters in the stack dies, a new fighter is on "top" and his shields are set to maximum.

Damage past shields works differently. The entire stack has one set of "hit points." Damage past shields is accumulated against this total. So, suppose a fighter has 60 shields and 28 structure. Hit by PDC V for 65, all 60 shields gone and the stack takes 5 damage. No fighter dead yet, because it takes 28 to kill one. Now the second PDC V hits doing 65 damage, and since the shields are down all 65 is structual. So the stack has taken 70 structual damage total, two fighters are destroyed by this hit and the shield value is rest to 60. Notice how damage was able to slip past the second fighter's shields and kill it as if it didn't have any shields at all!

As long as you can only kill 1 fighter per weapon shot, shields on fighters work fine. But shield depleting weapons cannot kill and so they can only ever drop the top fighter's shields to zero.

Again, I do not have Gold (although it shipped today!!! *cheer*) and I will rerun a more extensive set of tests once I get it to make sure everything still works in the same fashion.