What is the ideal shield capacitor/shield recharger ratio?

[hakkarin]

At the moment I have had it as a general rule of thumb to have as many shield capacitors and shield rechargers on my shields. I wonder though if this is the smartest thing to do or perhaps there is a more logical ratio?

What ratio of SC and SR do you typically use on your designs?

 

[Criss]

I don't really think there is one. I would guess most players go 50/50. Once shields go out it's hard to get them back up in combat and you usually don't last much longer, at least against missiles. Capacity is more important when you take that into account.

 

[Panpiper]

I tend to go for a one to one ratio myself most of the time if going in blind, leaning somewhat in favor of recharge. To some degree though it depends on what you do most with your ship, what the threat is in your game. If you are concerned about PvP attack, you probably want enough shield capacity to absorb the most typical alpha strike of the PvPers you expect you might meet. Generally that will mean favoring capacity over regeneration. On the other hand if you are mostly dealing with pirates and the like, the requirements could be very different.

For instance, on my server the pirates will regularly pot shot you for 250K from extreme range. Their reload time is 45 seconds, so your ship there would need at the bare minimum, 250K of shields and enough regen to get that back before 45 seconds have passed, and that will be enough 'only' if you ever meet such pirates as singletons. (Actually that is not really enough, as that same pirate will then charge you with it's coring gun that does 7K per second.) However, I often will 'farm' a pirate station, taking a pot shot at it so as to 'summon' defenders, kill off those responding pirate ships, salvage them, then take another pot shot. The defenders that can show up can be as many as seven or eight of those 250K shooting pirates. Worse is that if I don't kill them fast enough, often enough more will show up before I am done. I have been in battles where over 100 have shown up over the course of fights that last 20 to 30 minutes. If your game winds up playing that way, you want regeneration up the wazoo. The ship I fly there has five times as many regenerators as it does capacitors.

 

[hakkarin]

I see. What are common total shield ability for most fighters and small ships?

 

[Panpiper]

I see. What are common total shield ability for most fighters and small ships?

The best way for you to have that question answered is for you to look through the Community Content link on this site. What you mean by fighters and small ships could be very different than what I might construe that to mean. For instance, I fly a permacloak ship with no shields until I can afford a proper miner, which I still consider a 'small' ship being roughly 50 blocks in dimension, but it will have a million shields and have enough armament to take out a couple of those pirates at once.

 

[TheFloorMatt]

I personally like to have my regeneration rate be about 1/10 the total capacity. So if I have 10,000 shields I'd want about 1,000/s recharge. There is no optimal shield setup. However... the smaller you get, the more shield regeneration helps. The larger you get, the less it helps.

 

[Drakkart]

How much energy regen does your ship provide? What does it need to keep all systems firing? if you add 30k shieldregen to your ship then those will pull 300k energy/s from your Energy regen as soon as the shield requires recharging Meaning even the most mean battlecruisers won't have very high regen because there is this energy regen softcap that won't allow for infinite energy consumption. So if you want to build it for combat make sure you have more than enough energy regen to also power the shield regeneration.other wise your ship runs out of power once it was hit.

 

[aceface]

i use mostly usually 10:1 or 10:2 ratio for shieldcapacitors:shield-rechargers. most ships (especially combat capable ships) use similar setups too.

 

[Xavori]

Okay. I'm gonna just hafta say it.

There is no spoon. Err...

There is no ratio. Do not consider these two blocks to have much of anything to do with each other when placing them.

Shield Capacitor: How big of a hit you can take with some consideration for covering DPS if and only if you lack shield rechargers.

Shield Recharger: How much DPS you can withstand. Keep in mind your in-combat recharge rate will be 5-10% of the reported rate so remember to add a decimal place and then divide in half for worst case.

If you look at your shield blocks like that, instead of some pointless ratio, you'll get the defense you are looking for.

For example, if all you're going to fight are the default pirate isanths, you need only enough shield capacitors to take a hit from a Mb variant (or more likely, you'll want to be able to take the alpha station nuke missile, but that's not an isanth. Doesn't even look like an isanth. Looks more like a 50's era b-movie death ray, but who am I to judge?) For regen, somewhere around 20-30k makes you invincible (which is why the default pirates are so easily outgrown).

On the other hand, if you're playing on a server against people who've spent almost a year building their titan when you've barely played a month and a half, you'll want 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of regen and at least a brazillion times as much capacity. Or maybe I'm exaggerating. Perhaps a smidge.

 

[hakkarin]

Anybody know where I can find technical details about the pirate ship and stations?

 

[TrainDodger]

Your actual regen during combat is something like 8-ish percent of what it says in build mode. So if you have 20k regen, it's actually closer to 1.6k during combat, etc. With this in mind, if you're going for high combat regen, you're going to need LOTS of regenerators. It is more useful to have high capacity, however, because of how slow combat regen is. Some extremely high-efficiency PvP builds have lots of regeneration, however, and this can make them quite effective in a protracted fight, especially if you aren't chipping away at them constantly because their weapons are keeping you at bay.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the ideal ratio of regenerators to capacitor blocks is different depending on the mass of your ship. The smaller your ship is, the more capacity you will want, because the regenerators are going to be so weak that you're only going to need them to top off your shields between fights anyway. If you're in a very large ship, you're going to want lots of regenerators to tank damage from middleweight ships. If you have, say, 2m regen, you can, for example, completely brush off 100k DPS like it was nothing.

 

[Winterhome]

Most of the big factions use something like 10:1 or so, or 5:1. It's a pretty big deal for your shields to go down in combat, so delaying that is really important.

Stations seem to have really high regen values, though, to make them immune to smaller ships attacking them out of nowhere.

 

[Panpiper]

Most of the big factions use something like 10:1 or so, or 5:1. It's a pretty big deal for your shields to go down in combat, so delaying that is really important.

Are you referring to blocks or capacity?

 

[Lecic]

All depends on what you're fighting. For general ship mass, though, go with shields dedicated to somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of your blocks.

 

[Panpiper]

All depends on what you're fighting. For general ship mass, though, go with shields dedicated to somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of your blocks.

Are you referring to solely shield capacitors, or the total of shield capacitors and regenerators combined?

 

[Lecic]

total of shield capacitors and regenerators combined

That one.

 

[Mered4]

There's been a lot of speculation on this subject, but from experience, I can say that you need to pick your poison. If you go for a ton of shield caps, you'll be very vulnerable to close-range alpha and DPS attacks. If you choose to overload on rechargers, you'll be incredibly vulnerable to lock-on swarms(5-20 sets of beam missiles arrayed for maximum penetration on impact). If you really don't like either of these choices, you can go for 1:1, which gives you 10% passive non-combat recharge (.006% in combat). It's a good balance that leaves you with both problems, but to a lesser degree.

Many folks on the MFleet server like to swear by their oversized shield capacities. Once they go down, though, you're pretty much dead in a world of the AI turret gods. Personally, I find it hilarious to carry less shields, but have them almost instantly pop back to 100% after losing them all to a missile. You'll take surface damage, sure, but you won't be cored if you built your ship well (and the enemy didnt bring AP sniper AI turrets). It also makes you incredibly annoying to finally kill.

This is actually the principle I use on the Executor's combat version - Sure, I could carry 50mil shields on it, but i'd only have 500k recharge. By dropping it down to around half that, I can carry almost 3mil recharge - which amounts to around 90k a second in combat. Small ships literally cannot damage the vessel due to this recharge, and because the ship is so damn huge, it's more than likely that you'll have to drop the shields two-three times before finally coring it.

That's titan class though. Cruiser and below is a tough choice - you really need to chose a role for your vessel.

 

[beeez]

How much energy regen does your ship provide? What does it need to keep all systems firing? if you add 30k shieldregen to your ship then those will pull 300k energy/s from your Energy regen as soon as the shield requires recharging Meaning even the most mean battlecruisers won't have very high regen because there is this energy regen softcap that won't allow for infinite energy consumption. So if you want to build it for combat make sure you have more than enough energy regen to also power the shield regeneration.other wise your ship runs out of power once it was hit.

I think this is the correct answer. Sorry if it's bad form to bump an old thread, but this was high on a google search when looking for info on shield recharge rates.

Instead of thinking of regen and capacity as related to each other, think of regen instead as tied to energy production. Keeping in mind that regen costs 10x as much as upkeep, you should only add enough to (worst case) run thrusters and regen at the same time, if you only need time to run away. If you're planning to fight with a ship, you need to be able to use weapons while regen is active, likely with thrusters going too.

I think shield capacity is probably one of the last things to focus on, as (imo) the answer to "how much" is "as much as you have room for." Just fill all the cracks and crevices with shield capacitors. You may want to leave some under-hull space for them intentionally, as they do make good filler when taking hits, but i wouldn't design with a set ratio in mind. If you want more on a ship, just make the ship bigger. After adding more thrust to compensate for size, fill the additional space with shield capacitors

 

[Brokengauge]

This may very well change after the systems update.

For now I focus on capacity, since the ships I typically fight overpower mine substantially, their there to buy me time to unload, maneuver into a blind spot, or run away. Once my shields go down they stay down, and I have found that if I instead focus on regen, my shields go down even faster. So I focus on shield regen as being something I do once combat is ended. I usually have either a 3:2 or 4:1 ratio in favor of capacity.

Of course, I also try to avoid being hit in the first place! Lol