I’m learning to love ECM and Disruptor missiles, but I’m confused about how often they work. Even when my disruptor missiles hit, they don’t always (or even usually) drop the enemy’s shields (which is fine, because if they worked everytime, they’d be seriously OP). But I would like to know how often they will work, so that I can gauge their effectiveness and choose how much to invest in them. Likewise, the ECM weapons and defenses both list powers, but it’s not clear how those powers relate to each other, especially since a single ECM shield has a lower resistance than the ECM power of any ECM weapon (so is it useless or does it just not provide absolute protection?).
The ECM shield seems to only shorten duration. I believe a disruptor hit has a chance of knocking down only one shield generator.
Shield Disruptor weapons “damage” to the stability value of the targeted ship’s shields. Shield stability gradually recovers over time, so you need to hit the same ship with several missiles in a relatively short period to be effective. I don’t believe the max stability has anything to do with how strong the ship’s shields are, but I don’t know the exact details. When the ship’s shield stability reaches zero, the shields all go down until it the stability fills back up to 100%, at which point they turn back on instantly. One of the best ways to understand this is to play against a fleet with disruptor weapons and observe their effects on your own fleet. When you have one of your own ships selected, its shield stability is shown on a white bar next to the shield strength:
Also, as of the last few patches, disruptors work for multi-shielded ships. An effective counter to heavy shield cruisers
I’ve fiddled with ECM shield’s stats, and it doesn’t matter whether the strength is set to 1 or 9000, there isn’t any difference. In fact, the ECM shield doesn’t do anything at all. Anyone else have this problem?
I haven’t done many tests, but I do try to use ECM shields. So far, I haven’t noticed them helping any. Perhaps we should test this more? Seems like a bug that we just might not be noticing.
I checked…ECM shields have no effect on duration frozen of likelihood of being frozen, regardless of how many ECM shields were being used.
They have no tangible effect on battle, which makes it a bug…
Huh. That means I can put something more useful in that slot ECM shield spot. Maybe a camouflage shield or something. I started deploying the counter-ECM to keep my ships flying and thought it was working but maybe it’s just that I have a better ship formation setups such that the enemy ships just die sooner.
I was 100% sure this was working, but lots of code digging today has proved to me it was not, although it is now, so expect these until-now-useless piles of metal to actually do something in future 