Matrix Games Forums

I seem to have found an achilles heel, particulary with the asher class destroyer. If you target fusion and hit the ship with the laser at nearly the same moment that your torpedos (or someone elses torpedo ) impact, it seems that you can destroy said ship even when it has 100% shields and 100% hull. I first observed this in an MP game, then I tried it out on my own. has anyone else noticed this?

Even a slight drop in shield power renders a ship extremely vulnerable to torpedoes. The solution being to keep your fusion reactor away from the enemy....

hmmm.
so even if a ship has 100% shielding then a hit from lasers will occupy enough of the shields' ability to absorb damage that basically all of the torpedo damage gets through? I envision a chain reaction (1) the laser targetting the fusion reactor occupies the shields blocking ability (2) the torpedo goes through unblocked and hits the fusion reactor (3) the fusion reactor gets severely damaged, and since the shield is powered by fusion, shield power is reduced (4) as shield power goes down more laser energy and pdb energy is let through to hit...you guessed it...the fusion reactor, resulting in a cascade effect. Which is why it takes about 3 seconds to destroy a ship in this circumstance and to see others in the game say "What happened to your ship?".

Since this ship's heavy weapons are all facing forward, and so is the fusion reactor, I feel this makes it a very weak combat vessel.

Well sorta. Stock SS shields block a % of damage. I don't think you should be able to damage the Asher's fusion reactor from the front. IMHO, the game wasn't updating the Asher's hull and it in fact had very little hull strength when you hit it.

Testing shows that you cannot damage the Asher's fusion reactor from the front, nor can the Asher class be destroyed by two torps+ an X-Laser blast without zero shielding. Even minimal shielding suffices against one volley.

I think it is the cumulative, cascading situation described above. Perhaps, as you say, the game wasn't updating the hull strength acurately. In each case it was from dead ahead, fusion targeted. Don't know if you should be able to do this, but I have seen it happen more than once. It probably was just a lucky shot each time - hopefully I will have such luck in MP

There's no such ghing. You can't overload shields from multiple hits...SS Shields just dont work that way!

It sounds more like your targets didnt have their shields up *at all*. Even running shields off the aux reac should be able to take more hits than that.

Shields sometimes seem to drop for no particular reason from the perspective of everyone but the person flying the ship. I thought it might be related to the strange subsystem damage handling I posted about in the support forum.