What do you think is better on an Imperial ship? Multiphasic shields or fast recharge shields?
I’ve been trying for a while to make the Imperial ships workable - they seem the hardest to do anything with.
I did have some fun loading up on heavy armor and ditching shields altogether - with fighter cover, these worked great as missile platforms that could take a beating.
As to which shield - I prefer fast recharge, but don’t have numbers to defend why. Try some of each! 
on any cruiser i get refelxtive, so those pesky figates and fighters cant damage it from the outside.
My suggestion is to go all out: fast recharge. The reason being they recharge at a speed of 8 units/sec, and have a resistance of 24 (only shield breaking weapons and proton beams can hurt it). And at 4x of them you get 191 points per module, which means they’ll recharge to full strength in less than 24 seconds.
A multiphasic shield has 200 points, and takes 29 seconds to recharge to full; not to mention gets damage by nearly every weapon in the game. However, if you’re after budget and a large number of ships, then they’re great.
considering that a single reflective shield will raise the resistance of all shields to 27, its pointless
Untrue, shields have been changed so that the hardness is that of the shield which was hit. So, if you use 2 multiphasic and 1 reflective then beam lasers will destroy the first two and start dealing hull damage.
wrong, check yourself.
Cliff, could you break the deadlock for us?
Problem is, sometimes stuff isn’t working as cliff expected. For example, he intended radguns only to do damage if they passed both shields and armour, but they still sometimes do damage even to a shielded ship. I think the best way is if someone tests it and posts up results.
My apologies, you are correct. I thought Cliff said he had, or wanted to (is more like it), set shields have the hardness of the individual module hit. No wonder I have had some more expensive craft that work no better than the cheap ones (that mixed shield types).
I sent myself a challenge with 5 cruisers that use pulse lasers, and attacked it with an Imperial ship that had 2x multiphasic shields and 1x reflective shield. The one Imperial cruiser was never damaged once by the pulse lasers.
It seems that cliff changed something.
from 1.32 changelog:
but nothing important.